Tamara Grand is a Port Moody–based abstract painter and mixed-media artist known for her unapologetic use of colour and richly layered compositions inspired by the natural world. Drawing from coastlines, forests, meadows, and tide pools, she creates vibrant, expressive paintings that capture the energy, movement, and emotional resonance of a place rather than its literal appearance.

Working intuitively, Grand approaches each painting as a process of discovery—an approach that echoes her former career as a research scientist, where curiosity, observation, and experimentation were central to uncovering new insights. Without predetermined compositions, she responds instinctively to colour, shape, and mark-making, allowing spontaneity, exploration, and unexpected discoveries to guide the work. Through layering, masking, scraping, and revealing, she builds surfaces that hold traces of their own history, echoing the complexity of memory, transformation, and lived experience.

Grand’s work invites viewers to pause, explore, and lose themselves in a world of colour, texture, and movement. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout British Columbia, including solo exhibitions at the East Van Cultural Centre and the Port Coquitlam Community Centre, and juried and group exhibitions at the Federation Gallery, PoMoArts, CityScape Community ArtSpace, Harmony Arts Festival, and the Silk Purse Arts Centre.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I paint to surprise myself.

As an intuitive artist, I revel in making a mark, responding to it, and discovering where it leads. I rarely know what a painting is about until it is finished. I make layered, abstract acrylic paintings, unapologetically full of colour. I add, cover, scrape and reveal, letting earlier marks resurface in unexpected ways. Nothing is entirely lost, and the painting often takes a turn I never saw coming.

I came to painting from science, and my studio is still a laboratory. I ask questions, test ideas, follow hunches and pay attention to what happens next. The West Coast feeds that curiosity. Colour, form and texture are everywhere if you look closely, and the landscape finds its way into my work without needing to be literally represented.

I paint to discover what I didn't know I was looking for.