ANGELENE HUMPHREY
THE ARTIST
Angelene Humphrey is a Canadian painter whose work explores themes of motherhood, memory, spiritual renewal, and the enduring imprint of grief and love. Born in downtown Toronto in 1983, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from OCAD University in 2007. Since then, she has worked as a painter, scenic artist for film and television, and arts educator, designing and leading creative programs for youth and adults in both urban and rural communities.
​
Humphrey has taught drawing and painting in Sudbury at Cambrian College, through private instruction at Watercrow Studio, and in community settings. In 2024, she completed a Bachelor of Education from Nipissing University, and she currently teaches middle school visual arts in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
​
Her artistic practice is rooted in personal experience, particularly the loss of her firstborn daughter in infancy. Her 2020 solo exhibition, A Geography of Grief-Love, held at the McEwen School of Architecture, featured a series of striking ultramarine blue portraits that offered a raw and tender meditation on grief and the layered emotional terrain of motherhood. Humphrey’s more recent work has evolved to explore themes of healing, belonging, and connection to place, inspired by her move to the East Coast and a growing interest in ancestry and sacred traditions.
​
Her paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally in Naples, Florida and London, England. In 2020, she was a featured artist in the Up Here! Festival’s Power Up Project, transforming a city power box into a vivid, mythic seascape starring her daughters and a treasure-laden underwater world. Her 2024 contribution to Nuit Blanche marked a playful turn toward Pop Art, with repeated self-portraits evoking the longing to rediscover childhood joy amidst the pressures of adult life.
Through both figurative and abstract work, Humphrey invites viewers to reflect on the quiet power of place, memory, and lineage—how the landscapes we inhabit can stir spiritual renewal, anchor us in belonging, and reconnect us with those who came before.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My current body of work centers around talismans, the weathering of the heart, and the renewal of life. My practice is a visual mapping of the "thin spaces" between profound loss, ancestral memory, and the restorative power of the present.
For years, my work existed within a deep immersion of ultramarine, a geography of grief born from the loss of my first daughter. Those blue works were a necessary, quiet processing of the silent architecture of mourning. Today, that foundation has evolved into a sacred joy rooted in the vibrant, tactile experience of motherhood and the living presence of my two daughters.I am fascinated by the concept of cellular memory: the way we carry the strengths, shadows, and resilience of our mothers and grandmothers within our own bodies. In my studio, nostalgia is not a looking back, but a deliberate tool for healing trauma.
​
I physically hold and then paint the objects that anchor me: children’s toys, heirloom jewelry, and specific keepsakes. By translating these physical talismans into pigment, I capture the kinetic energy they hold and ground it to the canvas. This process allows me to retrieve beauty from the past to deepen the healing of the present.
​
My process is one of "addition and erasure." By layering thin veils of pigment and then selectively removing them, I mimic the natural weathering of the Atlantic coast and the fading of memory. In my current series, I integrate images of these nostalgic objects and the figures of my daughters over the cooler, foundational tones of my "Blue Series" portraits. This creates a visual dialogue between the different eras of my life, placing symbols of life and renewal directly over the shadows of the past.
Settling in Nova Scotia was more than a move; it was a reclamation. My ancestors arrived on these rugged shores generations ago, followed by my father’s emigration from England in the 1970s. This Atlantic landscape, with its cycles of dense fog and sudden, brilliant clarity, mirrors my own internal shift toward peace. My work is an exploration of that threshold where personal history meets the physical act of painting, tethering me to my lineage and the light of the East Coast.
