Madeline Biscaro’s abstract paintings do not have a signature style, and yet, her presence is within every painting she does.
As a young girl, Biscaro was mystified by nature around her. To this day, she always looked underneath rocks to unveil the hidden beauty — and salamanders — beneath her feet.
“[My art] has always been related to the environment — whether that’s urban or rural,” she says. “I like focusing on the little overlooked things in landscapes that have a world of their own in them.”
While the landscape is a word that seems a little bit like a solid container — a sturdy vessel for the spectacle, the scene, the entity of a view splayed before us — when Biscaro picks up a paintbrush, she doesn’t look at it the entirety of a scene being, but the unnoticed.
As a graduate of the University of Ottawa’s fine arts program, the knowledge that her classes gave her, combined with her creative view on the unseen, gives this artist her ability to put paint to the canvas.
When Biscaro first made the decision to turn her passion into her career, she was worried that the competitive nature and pressure of the art program would defer her away. While it did push her away momentarily, she said it was a necessary component in becoming a better artist.
“After I graduated, I didn’t paint for four or five months because I felt so exhausted and so done with it,” she says. “It actually scared me to the point where I remember thinking ‘Do I not like this anymore? I was just mentally exhausted. But even during that time my brain was still observing the little things and looking artistically at the world.”
Once she finished school, Biscaro found herself enjoying herself more having regained the freedom to make mistakes and see where they take her — rather than try for perfection.
With inspiration from pictures she takes throughout her days, she’ll start a new piece with the composition in mind and see where each brush stroke goes.
“Each painting evolves and develops its own personality and end up a lot different than I originally had in mind,” Biscaro says. “A lot of what I love about my paintings is that even if a line isn’t straight or I mess up a brush stroke, it just nice to know that there’s a human behind the painting.”
