I paint places that hold meaning.

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I’m Chris Foster, a Canadian contemporary artist working in oil, acrylic, and mixed media collage. My landscapes, cityscapes, and florals begin with real locations, but I’m not chasing strict realism. I’m drawn to light, atmosphere, and the way a place lives in your memory, the feeling that lingers after you’ve gone.

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My process starts with photographs and small sketches, then shifts into intuition. As the painting develops, the reference image often falls away, and the piece becomes its own world, built through colour choices, layered surface, and the little decisions that turn a scene into a story.

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Colour is central to my work. I’m often pulled toward cooler palettes inspired by water, sky, and stone, but I’m not shy about saturation when the composition calls for it. Red, especially, shows up often, usually when something human-made enters the landscape, a structure, a roofline, a hint of architecture.

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You’ll also see linework influenced by Chinese and Japanese art traditions. Sometimes it’s quiet and calligraphic, sometimes more defined, but it’s one of the ways I bring rhythm and clarity into a piece.

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At the heart of it all, I paint because I love the act of painting, the exploration, the layers, the experiments, and that moment when a piece feels alive and you want to stay with it a little longer.