Barb Symons

Barb Symons is a Toronto-based artist whose work ranges from monoprints, life drawings and other works on paper, to large oil canvases.

She graduated from Montreal’s Concordia University in 1975 with a BFA and has participated in solo and group shows in Ottawa and Toronto,

In the late 1970s she shared a studio with Tom Hodgson, an abstract expressionist and member of the Ontario group known as Painters Eleven, who was a strong influence on her emerging style.

Winning a Jury’s Choice award from Lakeshore Arts Association allowed her the financial freedom to rent a Niagara Street studio in Toronto’s Queen West hub, where she facilitated art/dinner monoprinting workshops to help support her own creative efforts.

These workshops were designed as team-building exercises to encourage creative thinking, and appealed to a wide variety of participants from womens’ clubs, physiotherapists, corporate colleagues to children’s groups with a goal to facilitate creative responses to problem solving.

The workshops proved to be a springboard for personal investigations informing her own work. She continues to produce works that combine the monoprinting process with chalk pastel or watercolour-based images.