After a long hiatus, we’re thrilled to bring back our Artists’ Showcase! We received an incredible number of submissions from talented artists across Toronto and throughout Canada, and we couldn’t be more grateful for the enthusiastic response. Selecting this month’s featured artists was no easy task, but we’re proud to present three painters whose distinctive styles and perspectives make for an inspiring showcase.
To experience these works in person, visit our brand-new Junction location at 2909 Dundas St. W. If a piece catches your eye, you can purchase it directly from the artist. Every sale goes entirely to the artist—Above Ground takes no commission, ensuring that your support goes directly to the creators behind the work.
Anya Bess
Anya Bess is a Toronto-based painter and a member of the Akin studio network. Her practice explores themes of memory, migration, and the emotional resonance of place. Working primarily in oil, she is drawn to landscape as a vehicle for subjective experience rather than faithful representation.
Rooted in the traditions of Impressionism and Fauvism, her work emphasizes texture, expressive brushwork, and the materiality of paint. For Anya, the painted surface records both gesture and perception, allowing each work to preserve the movement of thought and the immediacy of the artist’s hand.
Our showcase features four paintings from Anya Bess’ Shimmering series. All artworks were painted with Winsor & Newton and Gamblin 1980 Oil Colours on Heavy Duty Stretched Canvas.
The Shimmering series is about memory, and the way time softens it. Sun spots burned into your eyes, asphalt paths almost melting in the heat, and the strange way a place that once felt ordinary becomes, in recollection, the happiest time you’ve ever known.
Melting
Oil on Canvas, 12” x 12”
You step out on an errand in the middle of summer and feel everything around you start to melt. The only shelter is a shaded avenue, and you find yourself grateful to whoever once decided to plant trees here. You linger a little longer in the cool, before finally deciding to move on.
A Small Garden Just For Us
Oil on Canvas, 12” x 12”
Walking quiet streets with the one you love, you stumble on someone’s carefully tended garden, a cat sitting right in the middle of it. Someday, you think, we’ll have one just like this.
Stop For a Moment
Oil on Canvas, 8” x 8”
The trail climbs at a steep angle, sunset closing in, and you’ve long since cursed whoever called this route beginner-friendly. Then, suddenly, you reach the top — and the view takes your breath away, along with the exhaustion, and the happiness of being here, at this exact moment, with someone close to you. Let’s stop for a moment, you say.
White Cherry Tree
Oil on Canvas, 8” x 8”
Nature is only just waking up after spring, its prime still weeks away, come summer. But the cherry tree can’t wait. It’s already in bloom, and almost against your will, you reach for your phone to photograph it, to keep it.
To inquire about purchasing Anya Bess’ artwork, please email: anyabess.art [at] gmail [dot] com
Malik the Artist
Malik the Artist is a Toronto-based illustrator and painter whose work celebrates beauty, love, and human dignity through portraiture and floral accents. Influenced by Alphonse Mucha and J.C. Leyendecker, Malik combines classical illustration with a contemporary commitment to diverse representation. His practice prioritizes the intentional use of garment and form to tell stories that affirm the beauty in all people.
Primarily using acrylics, his work demonstrated his ability to blend technical mastery with thematic depth, rendering complexity and power through carefully observed human form.
Sinderella
Liquitex Acrylics on Above Ground Linen Canvas, 24” x 36”
Liquitex Acrylics on Above Ground Linen Canvas, 18” x 24”
Study.1
Acrylic on Canvas, 5” x 7”
Study.2
Acrylic on Canvas, 5” x 7”
Study.3
Acrylic on Canvas, 5” x 7”
To inquire about purchasing Malik’ artwork, please email: Malik.holliganlewis [at] gmail [dot] com
Emily Claire Pike
Emily Claire Pike is a Parkdale, Toronto-based artist and member of Gallery 1313. Her practice explores the tension between abstraction and representation, with images that live in both the present and the past. These four pieces were part of a recent show, Changing Lanes, a collection of urban landscapes, painted in oil, documenting scenes from the ever changing West End of Toronto. Inspired by her own photography, many were started during a recent 3-month artist’s residency at the Gladstone House.
Our showcase features four paintings of Toronto scenes created by Emily with Gamblin and Winsor & Newton oil paints, Gamblin Cold Wax Medium, on Above Ground cradled wood panels.
Gladstone Hotel
Oil on Above Ground Cradled Wood Panel, 8" x 8"
Bloor Fruit
Oil on Above Ground Cradled Wood Panel, 8" x 8"
The Neon Palm
Oil on Above Ground Cradled Wood Panel, 8" x 8"
Gallery 1313
Oil on Above Ground Cradled Wood Panel, 8" x 8"
To inquire about purchasing Emily’s artwork, please email: emilyclairepike [at] gmail [dot] com
Visit our new Junction Above Ground Art Supplies location at 2909 Dundas St. W., Toronto, ON to view all featured artworks on display until August 23, 2026. Be sure to return the following week for the next Artists’ Showcase, featuring another inspiring collection of work by local artists.