About Debra Tate-Sears

Debra Tate-Sears is a painter who has exhibited and presented her artwork to the public for over thirty years. For most of those years, her work has focused primarily on watercolour painting, and the development of a unique detailed, “dry-on-dry” transparent layering technique.

This stylistic approach is very similar to the technical aspects employed with egg tempera, and over the past few years Debra has enjoyed the exploration and diversity that the inclusion of this medium in her portfolio has allowed.

Chance circumstances introduced old slate roof tiles as a support for painting (a fundraiser for replacement of a roof on St. George’s Cathedral in Kingston). The old weathered slates are beautiful in their own right, and it seemed a shame to cover any part of it with a solid paint that would diminish or hide the natural stone, and so after some failed experiments, a transparent ground was applied that allowed for the use of india ink as a transparent paint that complimented the natural surface, and still allowed the stone to dictate the composition.

Debra has a background in the study of Art History, and her artistic inspiration is firmly rooted in the Romantic period of art, and more specifically, the works of the British Watercolourists of the early 19th Century.

She is passionate about heritage architecture and the narrative it can imply, and the use of architecture in the landscape that came to prominence during the “Great Age” of British watercolourists, most notably Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman, has inspired and influenced Debra’s approach to the traditional landscape.

Debra’s studio/gallery is located north of Kingston Ontario, and like many Lake Ontario shoreline communities, is a landscape that was settled and developed in a way that reflected a connection to Britain. An evening walk through streets lined with Georgian style stone and brick townhouses, or a drive through a countryside dotted with stone Regency cottages illustrates where Debra finds the subject material for the basis of her “created” compositions.