For Denna Erickson, painting is both a lifelong calling and
an intimate language of color, memory, and intuition. Born in Edmonton,
Alberta, Erickson studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, where
she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She also received a Bachelor of
Education degree from the University of Victoria in 1997. For more than three
decades, she has balanced a dedicated studio practice with teaching, sharing
her deep love of painting with adult students across the West Coast of Canada.
Erickson has known she was an artist since childhood. Painting from the
age of fourteen, she developed an artistic language rooted in personal
symbolism, emotional color, and organic form. Her paintings are created with
oil and cold wax on wood, built through transparent layers of luminous color
that allow shapes, symbols, and memories to slowly come forward. Each work
begins with a vivid internal sense of color. From there, imagery emerges
through intuition, creating compositions that feel deeply personal and quietly
radiant.
Inspired by the color and dreamlike forms of Odilon Redon,
Erickson approaches painting as both a calling and a way of translating her
inner world. Her process is immersive and instinctive, guided by emotion,
memory, and the belief that each painting reveals what it needs as it unfolds.
For Erickson, painting is part of who she is. Her works carry that sense of
devotion, offering layered reflections on feeling, transformation, and the
personal meanings held within color.
Erickson spent 24 years working from a studio in Vancouver’s Parker Street
arts community, where she was an active member and participated regularly in
the Eastside Culture Crawl. She now lives and works from
her home studio in Brentwood Bay on Vancouver Island.
