A Full Circle – Celebrating 80 Years

In the summer of 2024 the artist scattered a handful of sunflower seeds across the garden. By autumn the blossoms had burst open, and she gathered them onto her studio table. There, she studied their colours, forms, and the countless stages of their life cycle, translating those observations into a new series of watercolours titled “Learning from the Master.”

As the series unfolded, her imagination expanded outward—painting the Sun, the Moon, the stars, entire galaxies, and nebulae. The work came to embody a poetic loop: the beginning becomes the end, the end becomes the beginning—a full circle of creation.

During this process she also revisited two of her earliest rice‑paper weave mixed‑media pieces, originally shown as “Project Kindness” in New York in 1998. Because of inexperience with shipping delicate works, those pieces returned home severely damaged. Rebuilding them for this exhibition feels like completing another circle, bringing their message of kindness back to its source.

Creating for this show has been a joyous, prolific journey—one that celebrates, for Amy, not only the evolution of her art but also the milestone of turning eighty just after the exhibition opens.

Amy Loewan’s artistic practice foregrounds eight core values—compassion, kindness, respect, understanding, patience, tolerance, gentleness, and forgiveness—as pillars of human connection. Through layered compositions and reflective spaces, she invites audiences to witness how these principles intertwine, completing a journey that began with a single word and culminates in a holistic, retrospective celebration of shared humanity.

“I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Susan Sax‑Willock and Tom Willock, the owners of Willock & Sax Gallery, for warmly inviting me to create and present this exhibition in their beautiful space. A special, big thank you goes to my husband, Reiner Loewan, whose skillful craftsmanship built every frame for the show and whose unwavering support has meant so much throughout this journey (Amy Loewan, September 2025).”

“In this series of watercolours The Contemplations, I exemplify the unique qualities of the watercolour medium: its luminosity and transparency. I use colour, simple geometric shapes and the technique of ‘glazing’ by overlaying multiple layers (sometimes up to 10) of thin watercolours to create depth and luminosity in the work. When viewers take time to gaze into the art, they are invited into a meditative and spiritual experience. The aim is to evoke viewers into their inner sacredness.”

The focus of Amy Loewan’s work is on the promotion of peace and understanding.  She has devoted herself to this project for over thirty years.  Her universal message of peace and her aesthetic sensibility imbue her large installation works and smaller rice paper weave, mixed media works with a quiet purpose.  They are highly crafted presentations of a social and spiritual belief.  She submits that peace, within us and with others, can be attained through acts of consciousness initiated by art.

Amy’s exploration into innovative ways to use traditional art materials - rice paper and ink – foster the exploration of her considerations for a compassionate, caring world.  The impact of the greater forms and their focused text naturally lead into a closer and more detailed seeing.  The sheets of woven paper literally interweave, they allow for movement within as well as without, they offer an experience of peace.

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The beating heart of Amy Loewan’s artwork is what Gaston Bachelard (author of The Poetics of Space) memorably identified as “intimate immensity.”  The artist’s intent is for her experience in creating the work to evolve, across the space of time and with no other thread of connection than the existence of the work itself, into your own expression.  Conceivably it expresses you by making you what it communicates – a message of peace.

It is the capacity of her art, to be in the world with an independence and mobility, to be persistent, to extend beyond the artist and to acquire potent autonomy.  In other words, Amy’s art, gently yet unwaveringly, speaks volumes. 

Amy uses many languages including the following, with varying degrees, in her Peace Project works: Arabic, Croatian, Chinese, Cree, Danish, Dutch, English, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Malagasy, Malay, Norwegian, Philippine, Punjabi, Polish, Russian, Sanskrit, Swahili, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Zulu.

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In her first profession as an occupational therapist, Amy began a lifelong investment in working with people. Her artistic journey led to the completion of her Master of Fine Arts Degree in painting from the University of Alberta in 1995. Many of her works illustrate the integration of her Chinese heritage with western postmodernist art practices.

Amy has received numerous grants and awards including The Canadian Artists and Producers Professional Relations Tribunal's Award for Excellence in the Arts commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Since 1976, Amy has exhibited in major cities in Canada as well as New York, and Melbourne, Australia. Her most recent large rice paper weaving installation A Peace Project was shown in China in 2004 at the Shanghai Doland Modern Art Museum in Shanghai and the Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre in Hong Kong, which is now part of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts collection.  She teaches at the Fine Art Certificate Program of the University of Alberta, Faculty of Extension in Edmonton, Alberta.  Amy was born in Hong Kong.  She immigrated to Canada in 1978 and became a Canadian citizen in 1981.