About the Artist
Gena LaCoste is a watercolour and oil painter, living in Medicine Hat Alberta, and she creates paintings filled with life and light, celebrating the living lifestyle of the Canadian west. Welcome to her web-site, where she will show you how she sees and interprets the new and vibrant, beautiful and diverse life that has evolved here on the Canadian prairies over the past 2 centuries.
Gena LaCoste was born and raised here in Southern Alberta, into a ranching family. The people, the wild places, the animals (especially horses), and the rural lifestyle have profoundly influenced who she is and the filter through which she interprets life. Gena started trying to draw and paint all these things while still a pre-schooler, and it has continued to be a compulsion throughout her life. Gena married rodeo clown /bullfighter Kelley LaCoste, and thus was immersed in the rodeo culture and lifestyle, adding much colour and drama to her body of work.
”I’m so grateful to all the fabulous artists who have mentored and instructed me and all the friends and family who have supported me and my work in every meaningful way possible.” In addition to learning from other artists, much of what she knows, Gena has learned by teaching. She teaches privately and in workshop sessions, and says many of her best ideas come through her interactions with her students.
Always fascinated with watercolour, observing that “Whatever is hardest” is what she wants to do, Gena has spent the last 30 years exploring her vision through that tricky and challenging medium. Then in 2014, she decided to try her hand at oil painting, having not done that seriously, ever. Using the same 3 colours, red, yellow and blue taught to her in watercolour by friend and mentor John Farnsworth of Taos, N. Mex., she has been producing brilliantly coloured
oil paintings featuring her favourite subject matter; horses, working cowboys, summer gardens, wildlife, rodeo and the people of today’s living west.
Gena’s hope is that her intimate and unique perspective of what she feels may be a fading lifestyle, will be a testament to the many values it offers. There’s a lot of pressure to urbanize and farms and ranches are squeezed from all directions, resulting in what Gena feels is a loss to us all. This web-site and blog gives the viewer an opportunity to view her body of work and to share in her vision of what it looks like to live in today’s “Living West”.
