Robert Lemay

  • With my floral compositions, I capture that feeling you get when you first lean into a bouquet to inhale the scent. I’m very conscious of creating a level of realism that is poetic while still retaining the illusion for the viewer of being right in that moment. Some passages will be more brushy and poetic and others will be more detailed. Each painting contains hundreds of these types of choices so that the viewer can be immersed in this floral experience.

    I’ve been working as an artist for over 30 years and have had more than 30 solo shows and participated in multiple group shows. My work has been exhibited in Edmonton, Montréal, Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, New York, Milan, as well as London and the Cotswolds in England.

My paintings appear in collections all over the world including the Canadian Consulate in both New York City and Sydney, Australia. Shaw Communications has named a room, The Robert Lemay Room, in Shaw Court in downtown Calgary. My work is also part of the Canada Council Art Bank, and hangs at Clif Lede Wineries in Yountville, California, at Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, in Edmonton’s City Hall, and in many prestigious private and corporate collections. I was the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant early in my career, in both 1989 and 1990. I was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Graceland University in Iowa in 2014. I was honoured to be an artist in residence for the month of September, 2021 at the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland.

What I’m most proud of in my career is that I’m a self-sustaining, working artist. I have painted nearly every day for 30+ years. The act of mixing colours, putting brush to canvas, is for me a poetic experience. Art is a deep adventure and I don’t take lightly the fact that I’ve been able to spend my life immersing myself in the splendour of putting paint on canvas.