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Mona LeBlond
CANADA
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"I survived cancer. I survived Lyme. Then I found painting."
Mona LeBlond came to painting not through formal training or early ambition, but through a door that opened unexpectedly at the age of sixty-nine, when a neighbor's invitation to a weekly painting session set in motion what would become one of the most prolific and transformative chapters of her life. She had no prior experience with fine art as a practice, though she had spent a lifetime drawing quietly, camping in the Canadian wilderness, and paying close attention to the natural world with the kind of patient observation that nursing also teaches. When she picked up a brush for the first time, something already waiting inside her found its outlet. Within a short span of years, she had produced hundreds of canvases, developed a distinctive visual voice, and gained recognition across international platforms. The story of how she arrived here is inseparable from everything her paintings contain.
Birch against fiery sky | Acrylic
$864
24x18
Birch Against Fire Sky
I painted a close-up birch trunk against a sky of bold reds, oranges and cool blues. The bark’s textured surface contrasts with broad, swirling color fields, and the layered brushwork gives the tree a tactile presence against an energetic background. The piece presents a simple moment in nature turned vivid — an eye-catching focal point that will bring color and contrast to your space.
LeBlond was born in Timmins, Ontario, into a French Canadian family of seven children, and grew up immersed in the language, rhythm, and landscape of northern Canada. The wilderness that surrounded her childhood, the forests, rivers, open skies, and the particular quality of silence that the Canadian north carries in every season, became the emotional foundation of her artistic sensibility long before she knew it. She pursued nursing studies across Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton, eventually completing her nurse practitioner program, a career that trained her to see suffering clearly and to hold it with steadiness and care. That capacity for attentive, compassionate witnessing has never left her, and it runs quietly through everything she paints.
Seven birches | Acrylic
$640
16x20
Breezy Birch Groove — I painted this lively grove of birch trunks against a swirling backdrop of teal, blue, yellow and red. Thick, textured bark and bold black markings give the trees a tactile presence, while energetic brushwork in the background creates movement and playful contrast. The mix of cool and warm tones keeps the scene fresh and uplifting, perfect for a living room, office, or hallway. A great addition to your space.
Her life has not been without its own weight to carry. LeBlond is a breast cancer survivor and lives with the lasting effects of Lyme Disease, experiences that have given her a particular relationship to the body, to resilience, and to the value of presence. These are not subjects she addresses directly in her paintings, but they have shaped the emotional register in which she works. There is in her canvases a quality of hard-won tenderness, a celebration of ordinary beauty that seems to know what it costs to still be here to notice it. Painting, for her, is not merely an aesthetic practice. It is a form of ongoing recovery and gratitude.
"One canvas a day because time is not guaranteed anymore."
LeBlond has been married to Marc, a retired high school teacher, for over fifty years, and together they have raised three children. The stability and depth of a life lived with sustained commitment to others is visible in the way she approaches her canvases, not with urgency or restlessness, but with a quality of settled attentiveness. She paints every day and often late into the night, producing on average one canvas per day, a pace that speaks not to haste but to an almost physical need to keep making, to keep the conversation between herself and the work alive. The studio has become for her what she describes as a sanctuary, a space that belongs entirely to the interior life.
Red sky | Acrylic
$960
24x20
Birch Beyond — I painted a stand of birches against a vivid red sky and calm blue water. Luminous white bark and dark knots rise from textured grasses, while expressive brushwork and flat fields of color sharpen the contrast between foreground and horizon. Cool blues and greens balance the horizon’s intensity, and spare black branches add a rhythmic, graphic note. It’s an approachable landscape that brings color and personality to a room.
"Stormy Whiskers" presents a nocturnal scene where bare trees reach into a sky threaded with pastel lightning, and small cats sit like curious sentinels among the branches. Dark trunks and warm-toned felines contrast with the cool, electric light, creating a lively tension across the canvas. I layered translucent washes and expressive brushwork to build depth in the clouds and grass, giving the composition a playful, slight
Nine cats | Acrylic
$3,456
36x48
Her practice moves freely between abstraction and representation, sometimes within the same canvas, following the emotional logic of the work rather than the demands of any single style. Landscapes and natural subjects appear frequently, drawn from the rivers, stones, skies, and trees she has spent a lifetime observing. But even when her work is most representational, it is never purely descriptive. She is not painting what she sees so much as what she feels in the presence of what she sees, the particular emotional atmosphere a given scene carries, the hush of a northern forest, the energy of early spring, the quality of light on water at a certain hour. The visible world serves as a vocabulary for an interior language.
"When Master Safa Bute said the storms in my soul flow from my fingertips, I understood for the first time why I cannot stop painting."
"I was a nurse practitioner. I raised three children. I survived breast cancer and Lyme Disease and fifty years of a life fully lived. When people ask what made me start painting, I never know exactly what to say. The honest answer is that I think the paintings were always there, waiting. Everything I had witnessed, every patient, every season of the northern wilderness, every silent moment of a marriage that has lasted half a century, it was all accumulating somewhere I could not yet reach. The brush was simply the first thing that could reach it back."
Her technique is rooted in the physical and immediate. Working primarily with acrylics, she builds texture through layering, allowing the surface to accumulate depth as the painting develops. She never sketches before she begins; she surrenders to the process, letting emotion and intuition guide each decision from the first broad stroke to the last. This willingness to begin without a plan and to follow the work wherever it leads requires a particular kind of trust, a trust LeBlond has earned through the accumulated evidence of thousands of hours at the canvas. Her paintings carry the mark of this freedom in their surfaces, the visible energy of a hand that moved with conviction and without hesitation.
Grandfather | Acrylic
$2,592
36x36
I painted this scene to explore contrast — a gnarled, leafless tree rising against a crowded stand of birch and evergreens while a sky shifts from soft peach and pink to deep navy. Layered color and energetic brushwork give the foliage and clouds a textured, almost musical rhythm, and the twisted branches lead your eye through the composition. The mood sits between calm and gathering weather, a quiet tension that feels alive rather than solemn
The pace of her development has drawn sustained attention from those who have followed her work closely. Master Safa Bute, who has observed her practice over an extended period, has written that the difference between her early works and her recent ones is incredible, and that the storms in her soul have reached such a state that they flow from her fingertips and are transferred to her canvases. This kind of rapid growth is unusual and speaks to an artist in whom the creative faculty, long dormant, released itself with extraordinary force once the conditions were right. The work does not carry the hesitancy of a beginner; it carries the authority of someone who has lived a great deal and finally found the form in which to say it.
Tree facescape | Acrylic
$2,592
36x36
I painted Tree Facescape as a playful meeting of trees and faces: dark, sculptural silhouettes suggest trunks and profiles while delicate branch lines form facial features. A soft wash of blues and greens—applied with loose brushwork—reads like sky and canopy behind the figures, creating a calm, airy backdrop that offsets the bold forms. Each silhouette carries its own personality, so the piece rewards a second look and a little curiosity.
Recognition has followed naturally from the quality and energy of the work. LeBlond's paintings have been featured in galleries with mentions of placements in New York, Russia, and London, and one of her works was selected for the cover of the anthology Road to Recovery: Pandemic's Aftermath. These acknowledgments matter to her, but they are not what drives her. She paints not for recognition or for an audience but for presence, for the quality of attention that the act of painting demands and the quality of stillness it produces. The exhibition page, the gallery wall, the cover of a book, these are where the work goes after it leaves her hands. What matters is what happens while she is making it.
Moonlit Branches portrays a quiet night when twisting limbs reach across a deep blue sky, silhouetted by a luminous full moon. Warm amber highlights on the branches contrast with the cool, star-speckled background, lending the scene a calm, curious mood. Flecks of light and subtle streaks suggest distant meteors, adding a hint of motion to the stillness.
Moonlight branches | Acrylic
$1,280
16x40
"Nursing taught me to witness suffering without ever looking away."
Autumn | Acrylic
$1,280
16x40
This panoramic piece presents a windswept stand of trees against a clear cobalt sky. Dark trunks and a single gilded column anchor the scene while dozens of red, brown, and gold leaves spiral across the canvas, suggesting gusts of air and a changing season. Lively brushwork and layered texture let nests and twigs peek through the foliage, and metallic highlights catch the light as you move around the room
Nature, across all its registers and moods, remains her most constant subject and her most reliable mirror. In the rivers and stones and open skies that recur throughout her work, LeBlond finds what she calls echoes of her own emotional landscape, the external world reflecting back the internal one with a clarity that language rarely achieves. Her canvases invite the viewer into this same act of reflection, asking them not merely to look but to feel, to find within the brushstrokes their own memories, their own associations, their own particular relationship to the beauty and fragility of the natural world. The painting is complete not when she puts down the brush but when it finds the viewer who needed it.
Moonlit Whispering Tree — I painted a solitary tree stretching its limbs across a layered cobalt sky, the full moon glowing behind the trunk where a faint, contemplative face appears. Bright green leaves and glittering highlights float against deep blues, while textured brushwork gives the bark a tactile presence.
Sister | Acrylic
$400
20x10
Mona LeBlond's story is, at its heart, a story about what becomes available when a life is fully lived and then, unexpectedly, opens into something new. She came to painting late, carrying with her six decades of observation, loss, love, resilience, and the hard-earned knowledge that time is not guaranteed. All of that is in her work. Every canvas she produces is an act of presence, a refusal to let the moment pass without marking it, and a quiet insistence that even in ordinary things, even in the light on a stone or the color of a winter sky, there is something deeply beautiful and worth the effort of paying attention to. That conviction is what makes her paintings feel, to those who encounter them, like something genuinely necessary.
Tree of life | Acrylic
$3,456
48x36
Tree of Life depicts a simplified trunk in warm copper-brown, its organic branches forming fluid openings filled with layered blues—from pale turquoise to deeper cerulean. Loose brushwork and a subtle metallic sheen give the surface movement and depth, while the contrast between solid form and airy color encourages quiet reflection
"The wilderness of Timmins never left me, not really."
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