Only Skin Deep - Archival Print

Carol Loeb is a Signature member of the American Artists Professional League, a Senior Signature member of the Federation of Canadian Artists and an Elected Member of the Society of Canadian Artists. She earned a Fine Arts Certificate from Fanshawe College and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and Art History from McMaster University. She worked as a commercial artist in Toronto for several summers before beginning her 32-year career as an art teacher in schools across Canada, Singapore, New Zealand, Kuwait, the Philippines and the USA. She was the Senior School Visual Art instructor at Lower Canada College in Montreal until focusing on her own art full-time in 2020.

Her earliest influence was her uncle, British artist and inventor William Pugh. On an extended visit to Europe in the 1980s she was struck by the use of colour, technique and composition in the works of the impressionists and post-impressionists, and particularly of Monet and van Gogh. She is also inspired by the intent of the Group of Seven to visually describe and present the Canadian landscape to the world, and by Canadian artist Lawren Harris in particular.

Carol’s main focus is the landscape, both rural and urban. Inspired by ordinary scenes, she imbues her paintings with a life derived from the subject itself. Working in acrylics, she builds her works in layers of colour, creating luminous images conveying visual as well as emotional depth. Calm, contemplative settings dominate in her work. In the lead-up to Canada’s 150th anniversary she conceived and executed the Trans-Canada 150 art project, a cross-continental documentation of the Canadian landscape along the Trans-Canada Highway from coast to coast, culminating in a series of 52 studio paintings and a book. More recently, she has concentrated on industrial and urban subjects, and landscapes that include evidence of human habitation .

Since turning her focus more towards her own work beginning in 2009, Carol has presented numerous solo shows and taken part in group exhibitions in Canada, Italy and the USA. Her work has been awarded prizes and earned recognition in exhibitions presented by the Federation of Canadian Artists, the American Artists Professional League, the Northwest Watercolor Society, and the National Oil and Acrylic Painters’ Society, among others. Her work has been featured in Billie Magazine, The Artists’ Magazine as a winner of the Over 60 competition in 2020 and in Artist Talk magazine in 2021.