Nina Cherney is a Montreal-based artist who paints abstracted landscape and still life paintings. Whether their focus gathers beneath a tree line or atop a kitchen table, these works are less invested in resemblance than in the quality of connection—of stillness and discovery—that such vistas can produce. The pulse of morning, the humming of the trees, nature’s clever flourishing: each captures a kind of inner weather. 

In this way, hillside and horizon are not so much about the changing seasons as they are the journey that artist and viewer share. Far from the chatter of human voices, nature feeds us. Returning from a walk in the woods, we are at once energized and still. This gift of awe is what Cherney seeks in her work, the way that shape and colour can create a common language. 

Vibrant, dynamic, and joyful, Cherney’s painting revels in outrageous and unexpected combinations. The edges formed by meeting layers not only trace a topography of the self, but also mark the artist’s process, the presence of her hand at the canvas. There, loneliness dissolves as deep attention draws us close. Never wrong, the natural world absorbs us.

The essence of what I am looking for when I enter my studio is to find magic in every day life, be it on a walk in nature, time with family or friends, or my work in the studio. I try to honour and acknowledge “ordinary” moments which elevate them into a tingling sensation that hopefully finds itself into my work. Whether my paintings reveal a bold slash of colour or a small incongruous mark, a wonky shape or the unsettling interplay between two spaces, I am trying to capture the viewer’s attention and hope they can experience a magical moment of their own.