​Born to a family of Romanian-Jewish immigrants, Betty Goodwin explores themes of absence, grief, and the fragility of the body and life. These leitmotivs reflect the trauma she experienced after her father’s death, as well as the horrors of the Shoah and the anxiety caused by the nuclear threat. A self-taught artist, she began to paint in the late 1940s, notably still-lifes and portraits of Montreal’s Jewish neighbourhoods. Her series of portraits realised in 1954 (such as the print Autoportrait III) is of a great intensity and expressivity. After returning from a sabbatical year in Europe in 1958, she realised prints in which the characters freed from gravity revealed her fascination with Chagall. In 1968, she studied engraving with Yves Gaucher. Sensitive to pop imagery, B. Goodwin carefully studied found objects and waste, and clothes in particular, which became symbols of the body both as trace and as absence in her works. She engraved copper plates with clothing. Her series Veste (jacket) earned her international recognition.
Fascinated by art and the philosophy of the artist/shaman Joseph Beuys, she realised the series Bâche (Tarp, 1972–1974) consisting of mural works composed of found blankets. Her most emblematic and enigmatic work, Nageurs (Swimmers), largely transparent drawings representing the ambiguous way in which the body floats in water, was born in the 1980s. Her reflections on the passage from life to death reached their climax with her latest series, such as Mémoire du corps (Memories of the Body, 1990–1995). A major Quebec artist of the 20th century and a mentor to a number of artists such as Geneviève Cadieux, B. Goodwin represented Canada at the Venice Biennial in 1995.

- Sonia Recasens, Aware

Encouraged from an early age to develop her artistic abilities, Mary Pratt found her expression in drawing and painting. She refined her skills during her studies in the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, graduating in 1961. She studied with the artist Alex Colville, who influenced the development of her style and her subsequent move toward realism. Pratt remarks that childhood memories of light informed her visual vocabulary and influenced her work.
In 1957 Pratt married fellow art student Christopher Pratt, whom she had met at Mount Allison University. By 1964 Pratt had four children and she continued to paint. A combination of events led to a radical shift in Pratt's artistic style. Frustrated by the lack of time she had to devote to art, Pratt began searching for a new working method to describe the heightened modes of perception that were central to her experience. She began to experiment with the use of light to transform an ordinary moment into a charged theatrical scene. What she found, however, was that light changed faster than she could sketch or paint. She responded to the dilemma by using a camera to "still" the light and the moment. The image became a record of a potent visual experience that she could later interpret in her paintings. With this methodology, and with her children older and less demanding of her time, Pratt began working steadily in her studio.
In her work of the 1970s, Pratt addressed the everyday objects of women's domestic lives. By depicting them close-up and in detail, she suggested larger symbolic meaning, as well as a sense of absurdity. Red Currant Jelly (1972) is characteristic of Pratt's elevation of banal domestic activities to the state of ritual. Light plays upon the subject to activate the mundane and infuses it with new meaning. Here jelly is put out to set, but the scene is tenuous and unsettling. The intensity of the late afternoon sunlight reflecting on the liquid becomes suggestive of other red fluids, like wine or blood. This celebration and re-contextualization of the ordinary has earned Pratt a national reputation.
The acclaimed East Coast painter, who was named a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1996, died on August 14, 2018 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she lived and worked.

​~ National Gallery of Canada

​"I am a teacher currently working on my masters in education and neuroscience. Being neurodivergent, I loved learning but really struggled in a school system geared towards the neurotypical. My goal is to create a learning environment that is welcoming and alternative. I work with students where they are at rather than where I think they should be at. Need to walk while you listen? perfect. Need timer cues and noise cancelling headphones? perfect. I use the neuroscience surrounding brain development to engage with my students to create the class space I needed as a student. My focus right now is looking at how we can use art to improve student executive function skills, skills that are essential to everything we do." - Alex Funk