Raised in cities including Calgary, Winnipeg, Nairobi, and Boston, Erik Olson is an artist, (Bachelor of Design Emily Carr Institute, 2005), who has cultivated a distinct visual art practice informed by his experience of design and international travel. In 2006, he traveled to Turin, Italy to work with artist Gordon Halloran on a major painting installation as part of Canada’s cultural contribution to the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. Subsequently, he moved to London, England where he worked as an illustrator. In the summer of 2006 he received a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to paint and study in Florence, Italy. In 2008 he once again worked with Gordon Halloran to complete a painting in Millennium Park, Chicago. This past June he began a motorcycle journey that took him through the backcountry roads of British Columbia, photographing and mapping the recent mountain pine beetle infestations. During the summer he was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Olson recently returned to his native city of Calgary to explore his experience of diverse urban and rural locations through painting. His work is characterized by fresh, hatched brushstrokes that weave pictorial spaces into integrated systems informed by a sense of plastic, mass produced colour.
