This piece is meant to convey feelings of nostalgia, childhood memory, and innocence by taking a location normally seen as dark and mundane and brightening it up and filling it with colour. I chose a gas station because the location has significance to my personal childhood memories. Some areas in the image have been simplified into shapes to symbolize the simplicity of viewing the world through the eyes of a child; the bright colour, to symbolize how children view the world in a much brighter and more colourful way. Doris McCarthy, my artist inspiration for this piece, encourages people to recreate places from their memories that have significance to them, and to emphasize the unique character of each location in an art piece. This piece connects with me personally, and I hope others can connect their childhood experiences to the feeling of this piece as well.

–Adriel Redekopp (Grade 11, Dr. Martin Leboldus Catholic High School, Regina, Saskatchewan)

Throughout her prolific career, landscape painter Doris McCarthy (1910–2010) became known for her depictions of Canadian places that featured a unique blend of naturalistic representation and abstraction.