Verna Vowles has painted since the 1950's, beginning with oils and later working with watercolours. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in painting from Montreal's Concordia University in 1978.
   For many years, Verna experimented with varying degrees of abstraction in an effort to free herself from representing the natural world. A breakthrough came with tearing watercolour paintings and reassembling the pieces to form collages. The works were closely related to the world we know: trees, rocks, figures, etc., but in abstracted forms.
   The freedom of collages opened the way to further abstraction using liquid acrylics. Verna's technique is a very wet process in which a fluid acrylic-water mixture is brushed or poured on a surface. These paintings are purely motivated by intuition, existing as expressions of thoughts and feelings while evolving with respect to such principles of painting as color, shape , texture and space.