Introducing Les Ramsay, Prairie North Artist-in-Residence

Welcome to Les Ramsay, the second of the two Prairie North Artists-in-Residence that AGGP and NWP have welcomed to Grande Prairie this summer. Les will have a solo exhibition in AGGP’s upstairs galleries this fall and we’re so thrilled to learn what he’s been working on.

Les Ramsay is a Vancouver-based artist who works in painting, textile, sculpture, and assemblage. He enters his work through the lens of intuition and a manifold of influences: folk and craft aesthetics, landscape and lived interiors, and the conviction that painting represents both physical and expanded processes, which he shapes through layering, construction, and accumulation. Les holds an MFA in Painting from Concordia University (Montreal) and a BFA from Emily Carr. He is Métis and he lives and works in Vancouver on the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh homelands. He is also working towards a solo show at Robert Kardosh Gallery in Vancouver this fall.

Here, Les reports on his first weeks at Prairie North and talks about how he’s approaching his latest solo exhibition.

During this residency I’m developing a new body of work in preparation for my solo exhibition with the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie this October. I’m working on three large paintings alongside a growing group of smaller canvases and needlepoint pieces. Although they share a common visual language, they occupy different roles in the studio.

The larger paintings are deliberate constructions. Each begins with a loose, open framework, but I’m interested in slowly building spaces that seem to hover between abstraction and landscape. Shorelines, reflections, architecture, weather or fragments of remembered places may briefly appear before dissolving back into shape and colour. Rather than illustrating a specific location, I’m interested in how a painting can hold the feeling of a place without ever fully describing it.

The smaller paintings are where I allow myself to wander. They tend to be more intuitive, meditative and poetic in their construction. A simple colour relationship, an awkward shape or an accidental brushstroke can become enough to sustain an entire painting. These works aren’t studies for the larger canvases so much as parallel conversations—places where ideas can unfold without the pressure of arriving anywhere. One of the unexpected gifts of this residency has been the time to take my needlepoint outside into Grande Prairie’s parks, where the slower pace and change of surroundings have become part of the work itself.

I’m drawn to paintings that never quite close themselves off. I want the marks to remain visible, the decisions to stay present, and the construction of the image to remain part of the experience. Rather than polishing away uncertainty, I’m interested in preserving it. A painting can feel complete without feeling finished.

For me, provisionality isn’t an aesthetic: it’s a way of keeping the work alive. The paintings don’t aim to resolve every question they raise. They rely on suggestion rather than description, allowing fragments, revisions and unfinished edges to carry as much weight as the resolved passages. That’s the point where the painting feels most alive to me.