Bio
Linda Mackey Lang is an internationally acclaimed expedition and climate change artist whose paintings are based on the knowledge she gained from her Inuit friends, scientists and over a dozen expeditions to the Polar Regions. She first travelled to the Arctic in 2002 with her mentor Doris McCarthy. She has led expeditions and exhibited throughout Canada (including the Arctic), United States, and in Russia.
Lang is a former board member of the Society of Canadian Artists, an elected Signature Member of Artists for Conservation, former Art Liaison for International Polar Year, and founder of Polar Artists Group and the Arctic Quest 2006 project. She represented polar artists at the launch of International Polar Year in Paris, France in 2007, participated in the Circumpolar Artists Round Table discussions at the United Nations Office in Geneva, and in 2008 and 2009 she represented Canada at the Northern Lights Festival in the Russian Arctic. Linda has taught art workshops for the TDCSB, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Students on Ice Climate Change expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica, in Russia, and the United States.
Linda’s painting Follow Your Dreams was presented to Ontario’s Lieutenant Governor, the Hon. James Bartleman in 2006 by the TDCSB.
Linda's paintings reflect a profound appreciation for Canada's High Arctic and the devastating effects of global warming on its fragile, yet extreme, ecosystem. Her paintings channel deeply felt experiences of travelling and working in the Arctic, feeling its raw, potent energy. They trace the direct connection she has for the land and its people. Through an iconography that is easily read and understood, Linda conveys a complex message and a warning that the human species is transgressing on nature's sublime, primordial skin with little regard for the consequences of our actions. Hers is an elegiac message, telling us of what is lost, and what is vanishing in this glorious creation.
Linda's art has the true power of conviction and direct expression. Experiential, her paintings lift the specifics of her journey through the spare, spiritual landscapes to a level of a human epic in search of a soul, vanishing as would a glacier under the warming breath of an invading civilization not attuned to the subtle harmonies and balances of life forms and natural habitat.
—Tom Smart, former CEO & President,
McMichael Canadian Art Collection