Here is Your Invitation to the Opening Reception

Sitting with The Drishti Paintings

I am thrilled to invite you to the opening reception of my latest exhibition, The Drishti Experience: Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being, happening on Thursday, November 7th, from 4:30 to 6:30 pm at the beautiful Amelia Douglas Gallery at Douglas College.

This collection is especially meaningful to me, as it visually reflects my journey of healing, well-being, and spiritual growth. Through vibrant colors, layered textures, and sacred geometry, I’ve captured what I discovered along the way. 

Each large-scale painting represents one of the body’s energy centers, offering a glimpse into the emotional and spiritual connections that have guided my creative process.

The reception will include live music, delicious hors d'oeuvres, and a chance to connect. I’d love to meet you, share more about this journey, and hear your thoughts as you experience the artwork.

Event Details:

• Date: Thursday, November 7, 2024

• Time: 4:30 – 6:30 pm

• Location: Amelia Douglas Gallery, Douglas College
  (700 Royal Avenue, New Westminster, BC)
  Fourth Floor North

I hope you can join me for this celebration of art, community, and well-being! Feel free to bring friends and family, as this evening will be an open and welcoming event for all.

Thank you for this community

I would like to thank a number of key people in our Gabriola Island community who helped me with the various aspects of this exhibit. 

The Gabriola Arts Council for awarding me the grant earlier this year in support of this exhibit. Thank you. 

Our local artist, Tyrrell Clarke, for taking all the promotional photographs. Thank you. 

Carol Ferguson for helping me write the BC and Canada Arts Council grants. Thank you. 

Jonathan Hoskins for making the beautiful small frames for the Little Drishti paintings. Thank you. 

Stephanie Artuso for taking the final photographs of the large Drishti Paintings for the exhibit catalog. Thank you. 

Catherine Hallum of Free Spirit Gallery for cheering me on every step of the way. Thank you. 

Willow Friday of Iron Oxide Art Supplies for getting me all the materials I needed to create these paintings. Thank you.

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The Drishti Experience – Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being

Deb Chaney, Solo Exhibit, Amelia Douglas Gallery

November 7, 2025 – January 9, 2025

Seven large scale mixed media abstract paintings by Deb Chaney. Her latest work is inspired by her desire to experience and visually express the frequency of her well-being. This series sheds light on the link between healing mental illness and developing spiritual consciousness.

Location

Amelia Douglas Gallery
Fourth Floor North, Douglas College
700 Royal Avenue, New Westminster, BC V3M 5Z5

Gallery Hours
Monday–Friday: 10:00 AM–7:30 PM
Saturday: 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Sunday: Closed
Gallery Website

Welcome to The Drishti Experience (Part 2 of 5)

Look closely for the lightly placed pencil marks creating the compositional ground for this first large Drishti Painting.

This is the second in a series of 5 posts focused on my upcoming solo painting exhibit: The Drishti Experience - Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

With my choices in symbols and colours covered in the last post, it’s now time to discuss the third component: composition.

The Importance of Composition

Composition is the groundwork of an abstract painting. And during the past few years of researching and formulating this series, I still felt unclear on the composition for this series.

This became truly evident with an exhibit of mine in West Vancouver where I was showing some medium format Drishti Paintings at the Silk Gallery. I realized that the composition was all over the place, but I showed them anyway–which certainly took some courage!

But rather than lose focus, I viewed these artworks as beautiful learning failures.

I knew that I wanted to capture a feeling of flow that I feel is an integral part of experiencing well-being, I just didn’t quite know how to best do that. I went to Lynn Valley and sat by the river, pondering this compositional conundrum. I felt that rivers had something to teach me. I also had yet to come upon the Fibonacci sequence.

What is the Fibonacci sequence?

The Fibonacci is a mathematical sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding it.

It is named after Leonardo Fibonacci, the 12th-century Italian mathematician who observed these number patterns in Nature.

Walking through the woods, he noticed that growth patterns in petals and leaves appeared universally consistent. When a certain plant sprouted from the ground, it would grow by 1 leaf, then 2 leaves, then 3, then 5, then 8, and so on.

This pattern of numbers eventually became known as the Fibonacci Sequence and, if you’re given any 3 consecutive numbers in the sequence, you can easily recognize the pattern. It’s a very special sequence that is truly crucial to Life.

Discovering Fibonacci

After returning home to Gabriola Island, a book I’d ordered from the library arrived. And as soon as I started reading The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life by Drunvalo Melchizedek, I couldn’t put it down.

He writes about how the pyramids of Giza, the Sphinx, and other great monuments in Egypt, are positioned along the Nile River according to the Fibonacci sequence. With each structure representing a chakra, they served as guideposts along a path of transformation for students learning to access higher dimensions.

I realized that my own journey to well-being was linked with spiritual consciousness–and both involve a journey up the energy centres. So I was excited to discover that the Fibonacci sequence embodies this principle and has connections to a river as well!

A pattern for spiritual growth

The Fibonacci sequence is regarded as a fundamental blueprint to the universe in many spiritual traditions–for it appears in natural forms, from the spirals of galaxies to the arrangement of leaves on a plant.

This is seen as evidence of an underlying order or intelligence in the cosmos, suggesting that the universe is a reflection of a divine or spiritual consciousness.

The Fibonacci sequence can be interpreted as a metaphor for spiritual growth. Just as each number in the sequence builds on its predecessors, spiritual evolution is a process of continual growth, where each stage of consciousness builds on the experiences and lessons of the past. As well, the sequence heads inward to a focal point - a drishti - within itself. Just as on our healing journey we must learn to go within ourselves.

I learned that as I pursued a healing journey, it became synonymous with a spiritual one and that the more conscious I became, the better I felt in my life.

Show Information

The Drishti Experience – Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being

Deb Chaney, Solo Exhibit, Amelia Douglas Gallery

November 7, 2025 – January 9, 2025

Seven large scale mixed media abstract paintings by Deb Chaney. Her latest work is inspired by her desire to experience and visually express the frequency of her well-being. This series sheds light on the link between healing mental illness and developing spiritual consciousness.

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 7, 4:30 PM–6:30 PM

Featuring live music and hors d'oeuvres

Artist Talk: TBA

Location
Amelia Douglas Gallery
Fourth Floor North, Douglas College
700 Royal Avenue, New Westminster, BC V3M 5Z5

Gallery Hours
Monday–Friday: 10:00 AM–7:30 PM
Saturday: 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Sunday: Closed
Gallery Website

Look Who's In The New Issue Of What Women Create!

I’m proud to announce that I’m featured in the 2024 Fall Issue of WHAT Women Create magazine. The 14-page article is truly an honour and I hope you will take the time to check out this wonderful magazine.

About the article

In the article–which I wrote in the first-person–I share my journey as an artist and how I’ve arrived at this point: which is my upcoming solo exhibit of 7 large-scale paintings. The art exhibit, featuring my Drishti Paintings, runs from this November until January 2025.

The article is very personal to me as I open up about loss, grief, and depression, and how art was my saving grace. It brought me back from the edge and was essential to my healing and mental well-being.

Follow me from Vancouver, British Colulmbia to Hermosa Beach, California–where I got my first art commission–and back to Canada, where I eventually settled on Gabriola Island. My art continued to flourish, from licensing agreements with Hilton Hotels to deals with Hulu and Netflix.

I discuss my creative process, from meditation to nature walks to painting test pieces before setting to work on a large canvas. The Drishti Paintings are a decade in the making and this article really helps you understand the what and why of this series in particular and my art in general.

About WHAT Women Create magazine

WHAT Women Create is a beautiful and inspirational quarterly magazine focused on women artists and artisans. Each issue is an anthology of the processes and the passions of what our artisans and makers create.

The articles are written in first-person so you can envision being inspired in the same way as the artists and artisans. Each story celebrates courage and tenacity, and teaches us all that we, too, can create that which comes from our soul, that which is seen through our eyes, and that which is made by our own hands.

The magazine is available in print and online.

Order print and digital copies here: https://magdogs.com/product/what-women-create-fall-2024/

The Drishti Experience – Show Information

The Drishti Experience – Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being

Deb Chaney, Solo Exhibit, Amelia Douglas Gallery

November 7, 2025 – January 9, 2025

Seven large scale mixed media abstract paintings by Deb Chaney. Her latest work is inspired by her desire to experience and visually express the frequency of her well-being. This series sheds light on the link between healing mental illness and developing spiritual consciousness. 

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 7, 4:30 PM–6:30 PM

Featuring live music & hors d'oeuvres

Location
Amelia Douglas Gallery
Fourth Floor North, Douglas College
700 Royal Avenue, New Westminster, BC V3M 5Z5

Gallery Hours
Monday–Friday: 10:00 AM–7:30 PM
Saturday: 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Sunday: Closed
Gallery Website

Upcoming Solo Exhibit—The Drishti Experience (Part 1)

The Dristhi Paintings (in process) by Deb Chaney

This is the first in a series of 5 posts focused on my upcoming solo painting exhibit: The Drishti Experience – Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being.

What is a Drishti?

Imagine you are in a yoga class. You’re doing a pose that requires you to balance and the instructor encourages you to find a spot on the wall to focus on.

That spot is “a drishti”. And by focusing on this, you begin to lose your wobble and hold steady.

The same applies in life, when we choose a positive focus, it helps us to find our well-being.

9 Years in the making

While giving an artist’s talk in 2015 Vancouver Arts Colloquium Society, an audience member asked me if I could identify the key factor in my healing from mental illness. My answer was the definition of a Drishti. I realized that when I chose a positive focus, this in turn helped me to create my well-being and support my healing.

And it was then that the seed for this Drishti Paintings series was planted. I wanted to find a way to visually share how I found my well-being.

The beginning of this series started with many small studies on paper that typically measure 11” x 15”. Before I could even think about starting the large paintings, I needed to figure out all of the components–the sacred geometry flower of life elements, colours, and composition–and how they would work and layer them together to visually capture the essence of well-being.

This is why, up until last month, I still had all of these large blank canvases. Dozens of smaller works, as well as hundreds of hours, can often be found leading up to a single finished large painting.

If you're curious, you can see some of these small studies in my “Little Drishti’s” series on Saatchi Art.

Starting small

While working on these small studies, my process evolved into clarity that would serve me when I finally tackled the big paintings. The clarity for how I would execute all the components I wanted to include in the final large scale Drishti Paintings didn’t come at all at once. It felt like I had to figure out one component at a time.

I was confident in my choice of colours–each colour representing the energy frequency of each energy centre (chakra) in the body.

I was also clear about incorporating the flower of life’s sacred geometry, representing the interconnectedness amongst all living things and what I feel is one of the essential ingredients of our well-being: connection.

The third component of these paintings–the composition–still escaped me. I’ll get into the story about how I finally figured out what it would be in the next email (Part 2) in this series.

To our well-being,

Deb Chaney

P.S. You can also read my full feature article in the September 2024 issue of What Women Create Magazine or online here.

Show Information

The Drishti Experience – Capturing the Frequency of My Well-Being

Deb Chaney, Solo Exhibit, Amelia Douglas Gallery

November 7, 2025 – January 9, 2025

Seven large scale mixed media abstract paintings by Deb Chaney. Her latest work is inspired by her desire to experience and visually express the frequency of her well-being. This series sheds light on the link between healing mental illness and developing spiritual consciousness.

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 7, 4:30 PM–6:30 PM

Featuring live music, hors d'oeuvres, and a cash bar

Artist Talk: TBA

Location
Amelia Douglas Gallery
Fourth Floor North, Douglas College
700 Royal Avenue, New Westminster, BC V3M 5Z5

Gallery Hours
Monday–Friday: 10:00 AM–7:30 PM
Saturday: 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Sunday: Closed
Gallery Website

What Can You See Beneath the Chaos?

Underneath all the chaos is pure love by Deb Chaney (16” x 16”)

I’m excited to say that my original abstract painting Underneath all the chaos is pure love has been sold.

Thank you to Mr. and Mrs. McNicoll for your enthusiasm and support by being collectors of my original artwork. I hope it brings as much joy to your space as it brought to me while creating the artwork.

About this painting

This abstract expressionist painting features a vibrant interplay of colors and textures, evoking a sense of energy and depth. Bold blues, greens, and oranges applied in broad, gestural strokes create a dynamic composition, with layers of color overlapping and interacting to create a sense of movement.

Stencils of sacred geometry of various sizes repeat through different layers across the canvas.

The painting's vibrant colour palette and energetic brushwork may reflect the joy and excitement of life's experiences. The abstract forms could represent the fluidity and ever-changing nature of life's journey. 

This captivating and thought-provoking painting invites viewers to explore their own interpretations of its meaning. Of course, the title, Underneath all the chaos is pure love, suggests a positive and optimistic outlook.

The original mixed media on canvas painting measures 16" x 16" x 1.5".

Little Drishti Series

This original abstract painting is part of my Little Drishti Series. These paintings are smaller pieces I use to practice and test techniques for a large-format series I am working on called the Drishti Paintings. The series will be presented in a solo exhibit called The Drishti Experience, which runs from November 2024 to January 2025. 

The small study pieces help me figure out the paintings’ colours, layers, and the interplay with sacred geometry flower of life symbol, so that when I get to the large paintings I have confidence and clarity for my creative approach.

Prints and Original Artwork for Sale Online

Even though the original painting of Underneath all the chaos is pure love has been sold, you can buy high-quality prints of the painting online at Saatchi Art here:

https://fwf0.short.gy/underneath-chaos-p 

Reproduction prints on Saatchi Art are available in 3 formats:

Fine Art Paper

310 GSM, 100% cotton linters, archival quality, natural white finish with a slightly structured, soft-textured surface.

Metal

Specialized inks infused into specially coated, thin, high gloss aluminum sheets. Exhibit mounted on 2mm black Styrene and finished with a black Metal Inset Frame.

Canvas

Museum grade, matte textured (20.5 mil), bright white, poly-cotton blend with no additives and no agents.

Can You See The 3 Concepts Applied in this Painting?

Worlds Within Worlds by Deb Chaney (9” x 12”)

I’m excited to announce that my original abstract painting Worlds Within Worlds is finished and now available for purchase.

The original painting is still available and you can also get high-quality reproductions in a variety of sizes and formats.

How I named this painting

The word drishti comes from Sanskrit. It is often used in yoga practice to refer to a single spot for the yoga practitioner to focus on in order to maintain their balance. 

I have called my series of abstract artworks The Drishti Paintings and I created them to invite the viewer on a visual journey inwards. They draw us into our own alignment, re-connecting to the love we have inside and thereby re-connecting to the drishti within ourselves.

About this painting

This painting is a practice piece for a large-format series of paintings that I have been working on since 2021 and will be showing later this year. 

There are several inspirational factors that are based on the key elements I found to be most helpful in my personal healing journey. These are Space, Focus, and Connection. Each of these concepts has been applied visually to this painting and each of them is in this new series.

The series and the paintings are evolving as I go, which you can see in the evolution of these small practice pieces. I am learning a lot in my journey of exploring, painting, and being in the frequency of my well-being.

The colour palette of this dark painting consists of black, blues, and purple and orange and red. Stencils of sacred geometry repeat throughout the painting, which is a common element in the series.

This one-of-a-kind mixed-media artwork is acrylic and sand on paper and measures 9” x 12”. 

Prints and Original Artwork for Sale Online

You can buy the original painting and high-quality prints of Worlds Within Worlds online at Saatchi Art here:

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Worlds-Within-Worlds/499285/11237841/view 

You can see more paintings in the Little Gems series here:

https://www.saatchiart.com/art-collection/painting/Litte-Gems-Small-works-on-paper-and-loose-canvas/499285/160111/view

Reproduction prints on Saatchi Art are available in 3 formats:

Fine Art Paper

310 GSM, 100% cotton linters, archival quality, natural white finish with a slightly structured, soft-textured surface.

Metal

Specialized inks infused into specially coated, thin, high gloss aluminum sheets. Exhibit mounted on 2mm black Styrene and finished with a black Metal Inset Frame.

Canvas

Museum grade, matte textured (20.5 mil), bright white, poly-cotton blend with no additives and no agents.