Galerie McKenzie Marcotte in Wakefield Quebec is pleased to open its 2009 season with New Found Land, an exhibition of oil paintings by Chelsea artist Shawn McNevin.

Shawn McNevin’s annual exhibition of oil paintings from the west coast of Newfoundland has become a spring tradition at the gallery. This year, the 21 framed paintings in New Found Land dramatize spectres of the sea, the minutiae of the pebbled beaches, undulating grasslands and the drama of distant shadowy mountains. An entirely new perspective this year is Newfoundland in winter. Several canvases, Winter at Western Brook Pond and the pale and misty Isle of Ice show the harsh landscape pared down to its minimal forms beneath layers of ice and snow. Shawn shows once again that her quiet and careful observation of the landscape combined with a strong emotional attachment to its rugged beauty evoke a feeling that she is seeing it for the first time, that for her, even after many years of studying it from both distant and intimate perspectives, it continues to be a new found land.