Inter/Advanced Program Instructors

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.  

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.

It wasn’t until 21 jurors voted to award Ciel Ellis the highest level of distinction within the Federation of Canadian Artists, SFCA, that she started to truly understand the power of creating something exceptional. 

Her career was launched into a whole new trajectory when she realized that her paintings changed the way the audience thought about themselves. With well composed and masterfully rendered oil paintings, her pieces awaken the undeniable reality, in the viewer, that they are incredible. 

Her work has been featured in 38 juried exhibitions and is collected around North American and New Zealand. Recently featured in Art Avenue and International Artists magazine, her work has been called an exceptional, modern/traditional take on our centuries  old love of flowers.

Light is Dominique Walker's earliest memory and constant curiosity. Capturing the way light defines and shadows connect is her relentless muse. The quiet tread of shadows knitting together. The way light reveals and plays around the edges of form. Moving through the West Coast wilds Dominique is constantly inspired. Whether its trying to capture the cool morning light of alpine meadows, the filtered light of the deep rainforest or the last waves of warmth dancing across the Pacific. It is the place she can be still with reflected wonder.

Dominique currently teaches in the IDEA School of Design at Capilano University. She is the fourth generation of a family of female landscape painters known as the Everard Group, who’s work can be found in private collections worldwide and the national galleries of South Africa.