About the Artist
Kirk Sutherland is a Toronto-based Scottish-Canadian artist born in East York, Ontario. His work has been represented internationally for over three decades and is held in many private, public, and corporate collections worldwide.
Sutherland graduated with high honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) in 1991, majoring in Contemporary Art Studies within the Drawing and Painting Program (Faculty of Experiential Arts). During his time at OCAD U—then widely regarded as the premier art school in Canada—he studied under internationally recognized master-colourist, artist, and theorist François Thépot, alongside mentorship from Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, Robert Hedrick, Jim Tiley, Paul Sloggett, and Daniel Solomon.
Born with synesthesia, Sutherland experiences a blending of sensory perceptions that profoundly shapes his relationship with colour and overall creative process. This heightened perception informs his visual language, driving an intuitive and deeply immersive approach to composition, space, and energy. His practice moves fluidly between intimate studio painting and the expansive potential of public installations and interdisciplinary collaborations, including projects connected to the Hollywood film industry and the music industry.
A scholar of art, history, and philosophy, Sutherland grounds his work in modernism and non-representational abstraction—drawing inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, the Colour Field movement, Post-Painterly Abstraction, Lyrical Abstraction, and Dadaism. Influenced by spirituality, metaphysics, music, and poetry, as well as masters such as Hofmann, Matisse, Monet, and Frankenthaler, his practice remains equally defined by continuous experimentation.
Working intuitively with colour, surface, texture, layering, staining, gesture, and the physical properties of paint, Sutherland often incorporates unconventional tools and techniques. Rather than beginning with a predetermined image, he establishes an open framework, allowing materials, movement, and accumulated layers to participate in the evolution of the work. Technique becomes a dynamic dialogue between the conscious and unconscious, the material and the metaphysical.
In addition to his studio practice, Sutherland maintains an active role in academia, lecturing across Ontario on colour theory, critical inquiry, art philosophy, and aesthetics. He is also a writer, poet, art historian, and active contributor to contemporary visual arts discourse.
Artist Statement.
My creative process exists somewhere between intuitive experience and conscious awareness. I do not attempt to imitate life through painting; rather, I seek to harness the energy, essence, and presence of the unseen realities within our existence.
In life, we move forward with an awareness of the present while having no true conception of what lies ahead. My art-making process exists within this same unpredictable space. I begin with intention, but I also surrender a degree of control. This surrender does not lead to randomness; instead, it allows something less conscious to enter the work—an essence that can only emerge through the process itself.
For me, making art is a necessary and instinctive act in which the process is as vital as the finished piece. Painting becomes an immersive experience: spiritual, ethereal, and deeply intuitive. I feel as though I am channelling a higher energy or light, in which the medium, the physical gesture, and the brush serve as an umbilical connection between the material world and something beyond—the unseen and the soul.
My paintings, in many ways, are a celebration of the elements and principles as well as the materials I use. I paint the unseen realities of feelings, emotions, thoughts, energy, memory, and consciousness. The world that exists beneath the surface of our physical reality. These hidden dimensions are central to my practice. My work dwells within the metaphysical realm of energy and frequency, where the boundaries between the physical and the intangible blur.
This process is deeply connected to my synesthesia, which is the blending of sensory perceptions. I experience colour beyond the visual realm—where colours possess qualities akin to flavours, sounds take physical form, and experiences exist within a sphere of duality and interconnectedness. For me, colour is not simply something to be observed; it is a vibrating, living force,
Ultimately, my creative process navigates between the known and the unknown, the conscious and the unconscious. I am drawn to that threshold where intuition and intention meet, where control gives way to discovery, and where the unseen becomes a passage toward the visual. My work is an exploration of perception itself. It attempts to give form to the energies and realities that exist just beyond the edge of sight.