About the Artist

Elvira Glanville is self-taught artist with a wide range of interests and skills, including painting, sculpture, and digital art. Focusing mainly on painting, she works in oil, acrylic, and watercolour mediums. Her realistic style captures the metaphor in the naturalistic, using texture, colour, light, layering, and detail to draw meaning from the authentic moments she lays onto canvas. Her subjects range from portraiture and wildlife to city scenes and still-life pieces. Her work is about seeing the art inherent in the life around us all, in the moments that create a sense of kinship, familiarity, and community. To Elvira Glanville, art is a sanctuary and a metaphorical home, and it’s that feeling she evokes with every piece she paints. 

My story

I’ve always loved art. For me, it was always a sanctuary I could escape into. Sketching, painting, sculpting – whatever the medium, it always felt like it brought me to myself in a way nothing else ever did.

While my artistic journey began as a child, my real love affair with it began with my first, fateful trip to Italy.

Andiamo, Aviano

I remember the August sun, hot and immediate and flooding the Herc, as the ramp lowered.

I grabbed my gear. My goal was simple — get to the billeting station at Tendopoli (Tent city), find my spot, offload my gear, get changed, and head to the nearest town.

My roommates filtered in just as I was leaving, asking where I was off to, but, already on my way out, I just shouted over my shoulder “I’m catching the next bus to Aviano, and then on to Verona!” They probably thought I was crazy, running off by myself in a strange country where I didn’t speak the language, but honestly, I didn’t care. I was on a personal mission.

Italy, across the eras, has hosted almost all of the brilliant artists of the western canon: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Donatello, Botticelli, Brunelleschi — the list goes on — and I wanted to see them all. I wanted to understand what drew them, what inspired them. I wanted to explore the old masters’ works in churches and cathedrals, I wanted to see the canals of Venice, I wanted to steep myself in all of it. But most of all, I wanted to reconnect with my European surrogate family — it had been almost a lifetime since we’d all been together.

On the bus, it was all I could do to contain my excitement. Scenes scrolled past my window; Hills undulated in the distance, quilted with fields of corn and sugar beets. Lombardi poplars framed the laneways to farmhouses, and the smell of the place was fresh and familiar all at once. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it then, what it was that drew me so deeply – stronger than the call of the masters, or even the reconnection with Cesar and Maria, my European surrogate parents. It was stirring something inside me that I hadn’t quite felt, in that same way, for a long time.

The Question of Home

I’ve moved around a lot in my life. Following the death of my father at the age of nine, knowing where “home” was became…difficult. Between the years spent in Germany living with different sets of grandparents, and the years spent in Canada with an increasingly distant mother, the world had started to lose its meaning. By the time I was fifteen, I was on my own. The basement room I rented never quite felt like home either, but it was better than living with my mother and step father. The art I made, drawing portraits, brought in some income, but mostly, it brought me back to a place I felt safe – a refuge I could lose myself in for a few hours, between high school and the many part-time jobs I worked to keep myself afloat, subsisting on spaghetti and ketchup, mainly. It wasn’t long after that I joined the military and began a career that would span more than 20 years.

When the bus lurched to a stop, I found my way to a piazza, taking in the feeling of both newness and, somehow, familiarity. There was a payphone nearby (this was the era before wide-spread cell phones), but I couldn’t figure out how to work it, since the system used phone cards instead of coins, like back in Canada. Undeterred, I made my way past a small, closed kiosk and into a café. I ordered a cappuccino and tried to ask what I needed to use the phone and get a bus ticket. After much searching through my Berlitz phrasebook and abundant hand gestures, the café owner clapped his hands, and made a sound of understanding. He motioned to another gentleman who said Buongiorno, and in a welcoming gesture, put his arm around my shoulder and lead me out to the closed kiosk, where, it became apparent, he worked. He handed me a phone card and a bus ticket, and said some words in Italian that I couldn’t quite parse – I assumed it was the cost of what he’d handed, but, being unfamiliar with the currency, I simply opened my wallet, holding it out for him to take what he needed as he laughed jovially.

Ten minutes later, phone call made, I was on the bus, headed for the train station in Pordenone to visit my dear friends in Verona.

After that, there were more trips around duty rosters and shifts. On my first weekend off, I headed straight to Venice. Mimes randomly set up performance boxes to act out pantomimes in jester suits, youths practiced flag-throwing in the streets, and Carta Pesta (Paper Mache) shops displayed the most intricate and beautiful Carnivalé masks. There was so much to experience. I walked the main roads and the side streets, stalling to take in the vistas of the back alleys; Nonnas hanging laundry, children playing football, old men watering their garden pots. I could feel the place all around me, quaint, friendly, relaxing, filling me with such a deep inner warmth. It was welcoming here, and it gave me such a sense of belonging.

Another weekend after that, rumbling along in an old Ducato passenger van with my team, we were out exploring the Veneto. We were off to see whatever we could until we hit half on the fuel gauge. With the little cash we had to spend, no one wanted to shell out money for more gas. The deal was that if someone saw something along the way that we wanted to take a picture of, we’d shout out “Picture, picture, picture!” and the driver would stop.

On a little backroad near Aquileia, Cantazaro, I spotted a “rustic farm building in a field, the light hitting just right”  . It was my turn to shout out – I told him to stop just past the chickens. I wanted reference material for a drawing that would capture the sense of place, but more so, the evocative feeling of belonging that I felt here. A few days later, I completed a beautiful pen and ink drawing with a watercolour wash and called it Just Past the Chickens.

                 Just Past the Chickens                                Wine in Water                                     Canadian Air Support

While I’d continued art as a hobby throughout my military career, creating and designing t-shirts, patches, license plates, and other squadron items, it was during this deployment for the Bosnia-Herzegovina Conflict that I really began to understand my drive to create, how deeply I needed it, and how much I had to express. It was in Venice, on another trip, that it started to make sense for me.

As the day came to an end and evening began to approach, painting the city in that famous Italian light, I sat at a small trattoria just off the beaten track, near the Piazza San Marco. I watched as the daylight turn to night, and my small part of the city came to life. I could see the warm glow of the streetlights casting shadows on the cobblestone; I could hear the sound of classical music drifting from the nearby square, and I could smell the scent of food wafting through the air. All around me, the street was abuzz with families eating and talking, and children playing in the street.

I sipped slowly at my glass of wine, drinking in the ambiance, and I understood. I knew why the Old Masters were drawn here, why they painted it with such love and reverence, why they found inspiration here, in the landscape, the stories, and the community. This was where I needed to be. That part of me that had been stirring had awoken. It felt like home. It felt like inspiration. I felt something I hadn’t felt for a very long time, not since I was a child in Germany. That feeling, that found feeling, expanded like a balloon in my chest, buoying me as I walked, still not quite grasping what I needed to do with it — I knew it was there, I knew it was meant for something, but I couldn’t place it immediately — not until I was wandering back to the train station, and saw an artist painting gondolas at the Laguna. It crystallized, all at once, the understanding that had been building all this time, since the plane landed at Tendopoli, and earlier, designing t-shirts for the squadron, sketching portraits in that old basement room at fifteen, and even before that, before my father died, when I was just a child, finding my belonging in art. Finding my home in it.

Before I hit my bunk that night, I had purchased expensive artist’s watercolours, a set I still use to this day.

Art is home

When I paint, it’s that profound, emotional connection that draws me. Some of my paintings resonate deeply, urgently needing to be painted. Others take longer to surface, dwelling in my mind’s eye for some time before they find their way onto a canvas or a panel.

For me, art is home. It’s the place that welcomes you, be you audience or artist, to dwell in the scene on the canvas, to take refuge in it. It’s safe from the cares and concerns of everyday life; it’s a place of warmth, compassion, kindness, empathy, and nurturing. It’s connection – it’s about experiencing the authenticity in the moment, sharing it, and being seen.

My aim as an artist is to share that feeling and connection with everyone who views my paintings, so they too, may have that special place to call home.