Artist Patti Ransom Featured at Arts On The Avenue Festival 2025

Artist Patti Ransom will be this year's featured guest artist at the 2025 Arts on the Avenue Festival along 1st Avenue in downtown Ladysmith on Sunday August 24 from 10 AM - 4 PM.

An interior designer and artist based in Nanaimo who is drawn to the endless possibilities of colour, texture, and form. As a mixed media artist, I create abstract pieces that reflect my inner landscape as much as the world around me. The architecture and atmosphere of Italy and more specifically the Amalfi Coast deeply move me—its light, structure, and rhythm often find their way into my work. Each piece is a process of feeling, layering, and discovery.

Art, for me, has always been a quiet rebellion—a gentle assertion that beauty and meaning can be crafted from the most ordinary corners of daily life. Even as a child, I was drawn to the tactile

world: rearranging rooms, threading beads into patterns, experimenting with colour

combinations that others might find odd but that felt just right to me. Over time, this instinct grew into something deeper—a lifelong curiosity about the nature of aesthetic harmony and the ways our environments reflect and shape who we are.

Creativity, I’ve learned, doesn’t reside solely in grand gestures or gallery-worthy pieces. It

breathes in the details: the arrangement of favourite books on a shelf, the shifting light on a painted wall, the subtle gleam of a handmade pendant. My hands have always been restless, seeking to transform ideas into form, to close the gap between imagination and reality. This urge to make—and remake—spaces and objects is a kind of language, a dialogue between inner vision and outward expression.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that art is less a matter of talent than of attention—a willingness to notice and respond to the world’s subtle invitations. Inspiration can be sparked by the rough grain of a weathered table, the hush of morning light pooling on a sill, or the interplay of patterns in an old, handwoven rug. These everyday moments hold the promise of transformation; it’s just a matter of learning to look closely enough.

With each new project, I find myself asking what story wants to be told, what mood is waiting to be uncovered. The process is rarely linear. There are false starts, revisions, periods of waiting and watching until something clicks—the right hue, the perfect balance, a sense of resonance that feels both surprising and inevitable. Creating, for me, is an act of tuning in, of listening deeply to both the world and to myself and allowing that conversation to guide my hands.

It was never about the finished piece, but the act itself—the slow, deliberate mix of pigment, the bristles gliding over blank white, the world falling away in favour of shapes and shades. Each stroke is an invitation to step outside the clutter and into something elemental. In those

moments, the boundaries of mind dissolve, and clarity unfolds in unexpected ways.

In this way, painting becomes my form of meditation—a practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment. Each new canvas is both a challenge and a comfort, a space where uncertainties can unfold into possibility. I am endlessly fascinated by how colour can alter a mood, how a single bold line can anchor a scene or how layers of texture reveal traces of memory beneath the surface.

Through my work, I hope to offer viewers a pause, an exhale, a sense that something familiar has been seen anew. Art, at its core, is an offering: a way to invite others into that same hush, that same attentive noticing, where the ordinary becomes luminous.

The lines I draw, whether on canvas or within a living space, echo the forms and rhythms that inspire me every day. Each project becomes a meditation, a conversation between colour, texture, and the quiet beauty of the organic world. Through this process, I have come to realize that true artistry is as much about attentive listening as it is about bold expression: hearing what a room or a canvas wants to become, and then gently guiding it there.

This harmony between inner calm and outward creation is what I strive to bring into every aspect of my work, from the smallest brushstroke to the transformation of a room.