Art in Bloom brings Spring Paintings into focus at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Spring Paintings produced at Mandart Studio celebrate mindful moments at the paint wall, offer a colourful antidote to winter’s white and result in the ultimate in low-maintenance gardening. They are proof the gift of a creative licence can get us through even the longest of winters when our gardener’s hands remain unsoiled and our seasonal manicures intact for way longer than we annually hope.

"There are always flowers for those who want to see them"
- Henri Matisse

Art in bloom at the Winnipeg Art Gallery is a biannual festival of spring on the Prairies that merges flowers and Art throughout the galleries. In the spring of 2026, this much anticipated celebration of colour and creativity became the catalyst for a new batch of spring paintings. The spring themed painting project provided an appealing contrast to winter’s icy blasts from January through to April of 2026.

When is enough enough? How many is too many?

Forty four spring paintings bloomed in recent months for the ShopWAG Show. Browse a selection of subjects you’ll find at the WAG in the images below. Visit in person for a dose of spring magic to get this new season off to a colourful and inspiring beginning.

Find a low maintenance garden you can take home this spring at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Colour is a salve where I live in the middle of the Canadian Prairies, especially when snow smothers the landscape for half of every year. We might love to garden but with beds that are often late to bloom, a spring painting offers the best dose of low maintenance colour available in any season.

Extended Art in Bloom hours Thursday April 17, 2026 (11am-9pm) 

 Regular hours, Wednesday (11am-9pm),

Thursday-Sunday (11am-5pm)

…about art in bloom…

“This spring, ShopWAG transforms into a vibrant garden of creativity, featuring a stunning collection of floral works that celebrate beauty, detail, and imagination. Discover expressive paintings by Amanda Onchulenko, intricately beaded earrings by Bronwyn Butterfield, a dreamy felted installation by Margaret Jane Design, blouses featuring pretty florals in Japanese cotton by Simone's Rose, luminous glass sculptures by Huguette Lacroix Gauthier, and intimate night flower portraits by Brenna George. Whether you’re collecting, gifting, or simply looking to be inspired, you can bring the season’s beauty into your world at ShopWAG.”

Styling by @Tope_o (Instagram) Stool by @takashi.iwasaki.art (Instagram)

The “Sirens : Scentsation (l), and Symphony, (r)”, above, pack a colourful punch and earn this season’s title as the ultimate in low maintenance gardening. No weeding or watering required.

Rebirth, renewal and new beginnings…

The focus of my spring paintings in 2026 has been preparing for The Winnipeg Art Gallery’s biennial indoor floral festival, Art In Bloom. Inspiration came from memories and intuitive creative play while my perennial beds rested peacefully under drifts of ice and snow.

Life is full of contrasts…

The painter within dives deeply into visual cues sourced from photographs collected in previous seasons. Some images are gathered during my local travels, others while I’m a drive by shooter capturing the essence of the ever changing landscape with my camera from the passenger seat where any journey can become an adventure.

“Spring writes poetry in golden blooms” -Unknown

The spring paintings (above), encouraged me with thoughts of the seasonal return of our lake garden, blooming yellow. Naturalized daffodils in our side yard are annually balanced by a cloud of forget-me-knots the neighbours pause to take in as they pass. It was those mental images that encouraged these small spring paintings to bloom indoors while the weather outside was still pretty frightful.

I love to paint and while daffodils aren’t a usual subject for my spring paintings, I can hardly wait for the first signs of the spring gardening season to poke out of the earth with their linear fingers in sheltered sunny pockets.

I think of resilient bulbs as brave and courageous in my garden where spring is the shortest of all seasons. The enthusiastic response these works have garnered to date will ensure that daffodils, tulips and bleeding hearts will definitely find their way into future spring paintings.

The Poppy is a perennial player in my studio practice.

“A painting- like a garden-is most inviting when left to its own devices.”-ATO

A Canadian summer is a time when we get intentional about how we spend our time. I find inspiration in the growing season and store those references for colder weather when I can forfeit dirt for paint under my nails. Spring paintings often bloom from memories of last years growing season, like my mother in law’s neat deliberate rows or my garden beds flourishing or floundering in unruly clusters like the planter strewn with poppy seeds that bloomed with personified personality all the way to freeze up outside my summer studio.

During the winter on the paintwall I loved the simple brush marks, in any warm tone that suggested the idea of a poppy. I also love that a line can infer a choreographed visual pathway on a breath or gust of wind. Find these traits in spring paintings on display at The WAG Shop after April 16th, 2026.

I love to find poppies along my travels and they often make their way into my compositions.

You’ll find several at the ShopWAG Show this season. The largest, a triptych , “Fielding Dreams”, 24” x 36” x 3, is shown flanking Panache models in the first image above during the WAG photoshoot for ART in BLOOM. There the dreary outdoors transformed into a vibrant creative hub that felt more New York Vogue fashion shoot and less downtown hometown. Thanks to the talents of Sherri Van Went, Director Wag Shop, and Temitope, Digital Media administrator at the WAG, for initiating this very fun local collaboration and curating creative magic while juggling so many moving parts.

When less can definitely be more…

The smallest, but still impactful, spring paintings are 11” x 14”s. They bring a hint of spring to even the cosiest of indoor spaces. Small spring paintings featuring poppies as well as the roadside “Incidental Greenspace” series, shown below.

The kindness of a neighbour when I first arrived on the Prairies introduced me to the perennial garden and I’ve been a fan ever since. The subject of garden and landscape is a theme that has allowed me to use the full spectrum of colour in my impressions.

“I must have flowers, always and always.” - Claude Monet

I love a little incidental green space, especially weedy uncultivated spreads of optimistic communities competing for space and light in wild robust groups.

The Woodlands series was inspired by an August afternoon in lake country while walking with a group of girlfriends as we chatted, picking wildflowers for the dinner table. This new series uses bolder marks with less definition and more contrast. Some of this series can also be found blooming amongst the spring paintings appearing at the WAG in conjunction with Art in Bloom. Find others at Pulse Gallery at Johnson Terminal at The Forks. The exhibition continues through till the end of May, 2026

Sometimes other people’s reactions best describe a new body of spring paintings blooming on the paint wall …

“The August Afternoon and Incidental green space  series, to me, has shadows that I don’t usually see in your work. It feels like dusk, rather than afternoon or morning light. I think of it as into the woods because of that depth, the precipice between the sunlit field and the dappled light of the forest. The forest of imps and sprites, the shamans cottage, the cool canopy between you and the prairie sun. I like your phrase ‘into the weeds’, because it suggests entering a difficult unresolved space or time, but that connotation layered with the magic of the forest, the beauty of the woodland flowers and shade plants, makes it a space of growing and becoming, where uncertainty is possibility, the moment of magic, not threat.” -CJT

I love that.

Painting for me is a visual equation to be solved. The process flows through layers of time and creative decision making. Subjects and seasons flow but spring paintings might be my favourite, created as they are, in the depths of a Canadian winter when colour is the antidote to winter’s white.

I hope you’ll be inspired to stop in at the WAG during Art in Bloom for an inspiring wander through colour, creativity, and local collaborations.

Art in Bloom Preview April 16th 2026,

Mandart at the WAG Opening Friday April 17th, 2026 5pm - 8pm

Hope to see you there. ATO

www.mandart.ca, @mandartcanada