Viola Ilia is a Albanina-Canadian artist based in Toronto. She always loved colour and shapes as a child and continues that curiosity through exploring colour combinations in her current paintings. Ilia has a BFA from OCAD University in Drawing and Painting. Since graduating, she has been exhibiting her paintings in various galleries across Toronto such as Artusiasm Art Gallery, Gallery 1313, Artscape Weston Commons, Etobicoke Civic Centre, Neilson Park Creative Centre, Blue Crow Gallery, and Ontario Legislative Building. Ilia aims to create beauty out of every day ordain scenery and transform them into lively colourful delights for the eye.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Viola Ilia draws inspiration from routine day-to-day scenery and transforms these seemingly ordinary passageways into treasured colourful jewels in paint. Born in Albania and now living in Canada she uses influences from both her childhood days in Tirana and her early adulthood days travelling in Ontario. Working with acrylic paint and gouache on wood panels, she captures the essence and rhythm of the fleeting countryside, a lonesome highway, or an empty gas station. Ilia explores the duality between ordinary and extraordinary, monotonous and wondrous, dull and invigorating. Her work aims to capture these everyday empty unremarkable places and give the viewer a new enlivening way of looking at the world around them through the beauty of colours.