Foundations Instructors

Born in Vancouver, B.C. Kit attended the University of British Columbia, graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1974. Throughout her life, Kit has always drawn and painted and although her professional career took her into the world of computers, art always remained a strong interest.

Kit moved to Ottawa, Ontario after graduating from UBC where she began to paint landscapes in oil. She was represented by the Inspiration Art Gallery in Ottawa and by the Firehall Gallery in Perth, Ontario. She took the opportunity to study at the Ottawa School of Art and exhibited her work at the BCAL Clothesline Fair in Ottawa (a juried show) for several years. 

After moving to Kelowna, BC in 1992, a busy career prevented her from pursuing art for nearly 15 years. Returning a few years ago to painting, Kit has picked up where she left off. Continuing to expand her knowledge and develop her technique and vision, she enjoys both painting on location and working in her studio. 

Lalita Hamill is a professional fine artist living in Langley, BC, Canada. She discovered her artistic abilities as a young adult during the final year of her Philosophy degree at the University of Victoria. Subsequent years of drawing led to four years of study at the Vancouver Academy of Art, where she received instruction by classically trained painters.

Lalita specializes in oils and is also skilled at acrylics, watercolours, and drawing media. Lalita is a Signature member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, and an Associate Member of Oil Painters of America.  

With over 30 years teaching experience, including facilitating monthly artist feedback sessions for twelve years, Lalita is a sought-after presenter, instructor, mentor and juror who C. Evans describes as “not only an outstanding artist, she is one of those rare people with the ability to teach.”

Lalita designed and began a contemporary atelier program in 2016, which she currently runs several days per week out of her studio in Walnut Grove, BC. The FCA Foundations Program is based on Lalita’s successful atelier program.

Lalita is an amateur musician and writer, and she has published articles in several art magazines and periodicals, including the FCA’s Art Avenue Magazine.

For over 30 years, Mark Anthony's great passion for artistic tradition complimented with his own strong European roots has lead him into a career in representational drawing based on the poetic charm of the old-world European studio. His professional history includes owning and operating a small Alberta based portrait studio/gallery, working with private, historical and municipal heritage projects, and teaching hundreds of students of all levels in the grand tradition of observational and classical drawing. Currently, Mark teaches regular classes in fundamental studies, traditional drawing and portraiture, on the North Shore.

Andrew is the past President and a senior member of the Federation of Canadian Artists. Andrew was born in Bolton, England and moved to Canada at a young age. Upon College graduation in Graphic Design and Illustration, he studied and further refined his own unique style, winning top awards in both Canada and the US. His personal favorite is the Master Circle Medallion for the International Association of Pastel Societies, presented in New Mexico in 2013. Having many published articles, included The Artist magazine 25 under 40. Andrew has also had  full feature articles in top art magazines such as International  Artist, The Artist UK, Magazin'art, and the Pastel Journal. Andrew is a popular workshop Instructor and gives demos and lessons at many educational facilities, he is a life/figure drawing Instructor for the Illustration department at Capilano University, Langara College, and for the 3D Animation department at the Vancouver Film school.  

Tatjana Mirkov-Popovicki is an award-winning Canadian landscape painter based in Port Moody, British Columbia. She emigrated from Serbia in 1994 after graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and pursued a Hi-Tech career while studying and making art. Her art education includes Emily Carr University Continuing Studies, Vancouver Art Academy, and workshops by esteemed Canadian painters.

Tatjana is presently a full-time painter with a passion for the west coast and mountains. She is a Senior Signature Artist (SFCA) at the Federation of Canadian Artists and her work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in galleries in western Canada. Tatjana’s landscape paintings are in private and corporate collections across Canada and the USA.

Gaye Adams has been painting professionally and instructing painting for over 30 years. She is passionate about painting the effects of light in a representational fashion, and the challenge of creating the illusion of light and its many presentations in the landscape and elsewhere keeps her returning to the easel. In this last decade, painting en plein air has turned into a consuming passion, as it involves painting an experience, with all the senses involved, as opposed to painting a moment frozen in time by a photograph. 

She is a believer in putting first things first when it comes to teaching students to develop their painting skills, starting with a strong foundation of basics in all aspects of art making in order to give students the tools they will need to fully express themselves as they move forward in their development as painters. Gaye is an award winning painter and shows her work locally, nationally and internationally She teaches in Canada, the United States and abroad.

Painting is a visual experience concerned with clarifying thought and to awaken in us the simplicity and unity of an impression. Liza applies traditional oil painting techniques along with investigative and innovative approaches within a modern and contemporary context. The structural and optical challenges of oil painting is at the forefront of her subject matter which ranges from site specific

landscapes to narrative based still life. Liza's interest is in documenting the ever changing natural environment by working directly in nature and from her experience of studying various landscapes and cities around the globe.

Urban Oil painter Leanne M Christie has a reputation for complex paintings that are built with powerful brushwork and the sophisticated manipulation of her medium. Christie’s paintings are at first understood by the viewer whose participation is provoked by her relentless harnessing of the communicative properties unique to oil painting. The distilled open relationship between the painter and the slow drying oil painting is the characteristic of the medium that Christie burrows into. The complexity that this investigation lends to Christie's work is the marriage of passive and active time, dependant on the triad between the artist, the viewer and the work.

Christie’s concept of complexity through the inclusion of active and passive time as a catalytic element in the paintings; finds the perfect partner in her urban subjects, which are naturally founded on the complex relationships of the urban citizen and urban politics.

Christie paints full time in her Vancouver studio and, when not accompanied by her PADS puppy in training, her 50km cycling commute from her home in Coquitlam, gives Christie an intimate kinship with the flow of the urban streets. The unrehearsed transitory moments provide the abundant source of her paintings.

Born and raised in South Africa, Christie moved to the Canadian West Coast in the late 2000’s after a period of 10 years abroad that had originated as a 2 week holiday after the completion of her Bachelor of Fine Art from Rhodes University, Makhanda in the Eastern Cape.