Stratford artist Carlie Pearce making connections on canvas

A sun-splashed storefront. A highway sunset. A person riding their bike.

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Snapshots in time that Carlie Pearce captures and then paints in a corner of her second-floor apartment overlooking downtown Stratford.

“I don’t know where it came from, but I’ve always been obsessed with art,” the 35-year-old from Hamilton said. “Art is one of those things. . . . It really feels like it saved my life. That was the most consistent thing in my life I could go to and get gratification from. At the same time, it’s a release.”

This is what Pearce has done since she was in Grade 3 and started drawing and painting, unaware that it could be more than sketching Mario Kart characters off a freeze frame. She won an art award in middle school and then, early in high school, made her first sale.

It was a pencil portrait of a dog that belonged to her mom’s friend. Pearce dropped it off to the woman, who then asked Pearce to sign the portrait in case she became famous.

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“That’s a moment I’ll always remember because it was, ‘Wow, maybe I can do this,’” she said.

Art school was restrictive, so Pearce ended up getting a sociology degree before diving back into what she loved. She started taking commissions painting Hamilton landmarks and storefronts — “things people could relate to and had memories with and was a good way to build my following.”

That following is growing in Stratford, a city Pearce fell in love with the first time she visited.

“I liked the old buildings, everyone seemed really nice,” she said. “You’ve got the theater, which is very artsy, and I felt like I could fit in here pretty well.

“I was feeling sort of the lost the last couple of years about which direction I was going, and I thought back to what I did in Hamilton, and I wanted to start right here, where I am.”

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Pearce has made a name for herself posting her work on community social media sites. Storefronts of current and past business, brought to life through vibrant acrylic paintings, have become especially popular.

“I think it makes people stop and think about that place,” she said. “There’s photography, which is amazing and I love, but when somebody paints a picture of a place it sort of makes you wonder why they took that much time to do it. It makes you think they see something I might have passed by so many times and makes you pause for a minute. People think about all the memories they’ve had over the years in those places, and just capturing a moment in time.”

Pearce typically paints two or three pieces a week, whenever she’s inspired by the right moment. Some of her originals already hang in the businesses she’s painted, but she’d like to one day showcase her work in a larger gallery or open a studio on the main floor of the building where she’s spent the last five years.

Until then, she’ll keep posting to social media and catering to an audience that can’t get enough.

“It’s really nice because painting is such a lonely job,” she said. “I spend a lot of time by myself and in my own head. When I post something like that, it makes me feel more connected to my art and to the people who are seeing it.

“It’s almost like when I get older, I want to look back on my work and feel like it’s a visual diary.”

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