Shallon Fadlien
Colour as memory. Pattern as prayer. Figures and flora, carried from Saint Lucia to an Oshawa studio.
A symphony of colour & memory.
A vocabulary made of colour.
I was born and raised in Saint Lucia, and colour has traditionally been a dominant part of our lives — sea, sky, flame tree, frangipani, the slow heat of a Castries afternoon. All of that nostalgia still shapes my palette.
I moved to Canada as an adult and took a BFA at OCAD University. Oshawa winters sit strangely against Caribbean memory, and that contrast is where a lot of my work begins — carnival and La Rose season held up against Ontario light.
My figures are often androgynous and quietly joined — a man and a woman held together by a string instrument, a child folded into a womb-shape. I paint in acrylic, draw in ink, and move into mixed media and digital when a piece asks for it.
Read her storySelected collections.
“A rhythmic experience — painting and poetry as one orchestral performance.”— The St. Lucia Star, on Song & Symphony
“Bold colours and simplistic lines — she blurs the boundaries of realism.”— Calabash
“Colour has traditionally been a dominant part of our lives.”— Shallon Fadlien, The Blue Mountain Review
“A fabulist strain that moves between the real and the imagined.”— John Robert Lee
“The physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual dimensions of human reality, in the same frame.”— Artist Statement
Something quiet is on the way.
A considered release of limited editions and signed works drawn from the Symphony series, the Nature works, and new ink pieces.
Learn moreProcess notes.
Daily fragments from the studio — colour tests, ink pages, work-in-progress between Oshawa and home.