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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Tracey Breitbach paints what she knows. Growing up in Yellowknife and discovering her artistic voice in the North equipped the artist with a detailed knowledge of the sub-Arctic textures represented in her oil and acrylic paintings.

"I'm always studying things close up," she said. "I like the opportunity to stand back and look at something from far away. It brings the bigger picture into focus."

Painter Tracey Breitbach displayed her monumental two-piece portrait of a grayling in acrylic on canvas in the Snow Castle's frozen gallery last weekend. Breitbach stretches her own canvases, often abandoning rectangular borders for less conventional frame-shapes. "When I draw I draw very big," she said. - photo courtesy of Markham Breitbach

Breitbach exhibited nine works in the frozen gallery at the Snow Castle last weekend. A massive two-piece portrait of a grayling, which filled an entire interior wall of the castle, showcased her macro-perspective. The grayling is part of a series that also includes a pickerel and a trout.

"The grayling reflects how I'd like to go big," she said. "I'm influenced by the space in the North. A fish is not just a fish, it's a landscape."

Other paintings in the display concentrated on tiny natural patterns found in rock and lichen as well as magnified cranberries, cloud berries and other images of the North's lush underbrush.

Her favoured colours include soft shades of blue, various greys and hints of green.

"The North is my palette," she said.

Breitbach began enlarging images of lichen and cracked, mottled patterns found in Canadian shield rock while studying painting, photography and installation art at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in the early 1990s.

"Back then I was interested in the micro perspective," she said. "My theatre background is where I discovered I like to work large."

She toured the Canadian fringe festival circuit as a set designer late in the 1990s while pursuing an interdisciplinary fine arts degree at Concordia University. That program reinforced her skills in video and performance arts, which she poured into her innovative multimedia stage designs.

After returning to Yellowknife at the turn of the century, she applied her theatre projection techniques to a Crazy Legs Contemporary Dance production titled Flesh and Stone. The artist projected carefully-timed slides of translucent fish skins, close-up views of veins and crevices in rock and other off-beat organic images onto the performers, across the stage and over the back wall, adding a fresh sense of movement and depth to the dancers' movements.

At about the same time she brought her appreciation of the dance of light and colour to her studio art with a series of massive mosaic murals fashioned from melted crayons and wax paper.

Today, Breitbach continues her artistic experimentation with forays into impasto painting, which accentuates the textural and tactile potential of paint.

She is planning a show of new work later this year.