Cedar Waxwing by Marjorie Verleun

Marjorie has been a professional artist for over 35 years, using her creative talents as a graphic designer, stained glass designer, scholastic illustrator, muralist and art conservationist. She has spent most of her working career as a graphic artist for the print industry and for the last 16 years as a monument designer.

Years of working as a professional designer, coupled with her fine art background,  Marjorie's artwork reflects the years of careful attention to detail, colour and form.

Present in much of her work is a reverence of nature and a love of texture and pattern. Often her art explores subject matter of religion, history, literature and the natural world. Her paintings are often filled with symbolism that is not immediately apparent and invites the viewer to investigate further. Many of her pieces illustrate a wry, sometimes dark sense of humour.

Her artistic expressions has taken the form of  sculpture, printmaking, painting, illustration and digital art. From 2015 until recently her primary medium was intricately etched and dyed goose, emu and ostrich eggs. Her eggs now can be found in collections all over Canada, the US and internationally including the pysanka museum in Kiev. She has been featured in several egging community magazines and has taught her unique self-taught techniques to  egging retreats across Canada.

In the past two years, Marjorie has been been been sharing her artistic vision through pyrography. The process of wood burning lends itself to Marjorie's illustrative style, and she is particularly interested on how pyrography is reminiscent to traditional woodcut or lino-cut prints. As with her previous work, she likes to experiment through her subject matter, illustrative style or the incorporation of found objects or colour. In one of her most recent series, she explores divine geometry by illustrating it's prevalence in nature apparent in form and function.

Marjorie received her Fine Art Diploma and Digital Media and Design Diploma at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton and her BFA at York University in Toronto. She has had her work shown through solo and group shows across Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan.