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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - A cozy home-based art gallery quietly opened on the bottom of School Draw Avenue two years ago.

A small sandwich board on Franklin Avenue and another displayed in front of the lakeside residence during business hours are the only hints that a stunning collection of Northern art is available for sale at the location.

Painter Bonny Madsen creates commissioned work for individuals and businesses throughout the North and for southern clients as well. She has opened a gallery at her home on School Draw - Daron Letts/NNSL photo

Painter Bonny Madsen has worked professionally as an artist since 2003. Since opening her gallery, Artistic Expressions, she has filled her walls with a decade of work that chronicles contemporary Northern history and captures the spirit of the landscape and its people.

Though her gallery maintains a low profile, her work is featured prominently around the territory and beyond. Her art has adorned the NWT and Nunavut Chamber of Mines conference literature for five consecutive years including the brochure for this year's forum, which depicts a worker pouring the last glob of molten gold before Con Mine closed.

Her work hangs in city hall and she designed the logo for Diavik Diamond Mine's mine rescue team among other organizations. She produced the two mining murals displayed on the side of the Coldwell Bankers office on Franklin Avenue as well. Several businesses and Great Slave MLA Glen Abernethy have featured her work on their greeting cards and other communications material.

She has painted portraits of community leaders such as a commemoration of Barb Bromley's work for the Baker Centre board and a touching portrait of Roxy Engle and Bob Engle, former owner of NWT Air.

"I'm very humbled and very fortunate," she said. "I've had a lot of work from businesses and individuals and friends."

Madsen reproduces her oil and watercolour paintings as framed Giclee prints, high-resolution digital reproductions on canvas. Twenty of the paintings are recreated on art cards and Madsen offers a line of bookmarks and other simple and elegant items adorned with her art.

"I'm a realistic painter so my formal training has been to work in the way of the old masters from the eighteenth and nineteenth century," she said.

"You get your bases and you create your mood and what you want to portray and then you put your own realistic and impressionistic modern twist on it."

She said each painting takes about 100 hours to complete and she produces about five paintings each year.

Her subjects range from an aerial view of a truck toting machinery up an ice road to intimate portrayals of elders on the land. This month she is working on a scene of Frame Lake from the perspective of the shoreline behind the Stanton Hospital.

Madsen got inspired to take up the challenge of working professionally as an artist after attending oil and watercolour painting classes held by the City of Yellowknife and led by architect Kayhan Nadji.

"I knew from the beginning that she had artistic talent," Nadji said.

"She creates paintings from her imagination, which is a talent. The colours she uses are alive and she's quite energetic. I'm very glad that she's found her way to be known as a very talented artist."

Madsen went on to pursue formal training through Pros Art Studio in Edmonton and an honours certification in the commercial and fine arts program through correspondence study with the Granton Institute of Technology in Toronto.

Today she balances the time she needs to organize her young business with time spent painting in her studio and her commitments to her family.

"My family comes before anything else," she said. "That's why I just open my gallery from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays."

Madsen also distributes her prints through Linco's Pottery Nook, Gallery of the Midnight Sun, Northern Frontier Visitors Centre, the airport gift shop and Winnie's Gift Shop in Enterprise.

Artistic Expressions is part of the Aurora Arts Society Artswalk open house event on Saturday, Sept. 27.