Kaarsemaker, David

Lives in Victoria, BC

David Kaarsemaker holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the University of Ottawa.

He was a finalist in the 2025 Salt Spring National Arts Prize and the 2017 RBC Painting Competition and his work is included in the collections of Global Affairs Canada, the City of Ottawa, the City of St John’s, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, and the Newfoundland Provincial Art Bank.

Developed through extended walks in remote landscapes, David Kaarsemaker’s paintings bring distant vistas into dialogue with close observation, collapsing proximity and expanse, enclosure and horizon.

His paintings are made through successive layers of opaque and translucent applications, with paint added and removed at each stage, allowing light to emanate from within the image itself. Referencing both stained glass and LCD screens, the resulting glow hovers between natural and synthetic registers, situating perception at a threshold where the atmospheric becomes structural. 

David’s new series, “Sun Glitter”, brings together close-up views of sunlight reflecting from water waves. This series explores how this shimmering phenomena seems to embody or generate light itself, refracting into a broad spectrum of saturated colour. David honours the intricacy and specificity of these fleeting perceptual moments. He builds luminosity through accumulations of small, precise dots, constructing glow through patient, repeated mark-making. This repetition encourages sustained attention. The deeper you look, the more the repeated forms begin to vibrate, to question themselves, to ask what they are beyond what they represent. A dot becomes a decision. The ordinary becomes the threshold of something more.