Some people pick a renovation colour scheme first, then find things to hang on the wall to blend with the palette.

As I discovered and wrote about in Colouring our palette, our colours for this renovation have been inspired by a table runner that, for years, I had used to cover a water-damaged bookshelf top.

But there are other forces driving our colour choices, forces that will ultimately be the focal point in the rooms they grace: paintings by my former colleagues Anda Kubis and Luke Painter.

For three years, from 2012 to 2014, I led marketing and communications for OCAD University, which describes itself “the largest and most comprehensive art, design and media university in Canada.” At that time, Anda and Luke both taught — and still teach — at OCAD. I got to know them because each was then serving as a department chair, Anda for Drawing and Painting and Luke for Printmaking. In my first weeks, I had one-on-one meetings with each department chair, including these two.

In my three years at OCAD, I did try to buy one of Anda’s pieces she donated to fundraising auctions, but was always outbid. A few years ago, we got back in touch and she invited us to look at her work in her Junction-neighbourhood Toronto studio. Once we got caught up on news over a glass of wine, we started pulling out pieces she had in the studio that I had seen in an online catalogue and admired.

I took a turn around a corner in the studio into a blind alley and there, propped up on the ground, was a gorgeous piece: golden, vibrant, full of the sweeping sense of movement that was a signature of Anda’s art from that period. I had never seen this one in her catalogue. “I forgot about that one!” she said. She had painted this piece but didn’t send it out for exhibition because she wasn’t satisfied with it. She started adding more details, especially more touches of blue, and felt it then revealed an abstract view of reflections in and foliage along a gently moving steam. She named it On The Edge. We bought the painting that day and rearranged our apartment dining area to give it pride of place.

A few days later, Anda reached out to let us know she had a piece hanging in her home that she thought we might like better, painted around the same time. She offered to bring it to our apartment and let us decide which one we preferred. This one, called The Skier, doesn’t photograph well. What looks like white in a photo is actually a complexity of gorgeous, gentle tones — those breaths of blues, pinks, mauves and golds you can see in snow at dawn or dusk.

To the right of the painting are bolder streaks. Anda said she was inspired by her son’s ski races and these streaks she imagined as skiers racing to the finish line, blurred as if in time-lapse photography.

At the time, while we liked Skier better in many ways than On the Edge, we didn’t have room for both, and that golden piece looked better in our apartment. Anda said she would give us first right of refusal on Skier and took it back to her condominium, where it stayed until fall 2022.

As we built out our renovation colour scheme, I kept thinking of The Skier. Once again, Anda brought the painting to us and this time it stayed, moved (like the rest of our art) in a carefully packed car trip from Toronto to Stratford. It will be the focal art in our new living room and every piece of fabric, or any other item with colour, will need to play well with Skier.

Luke Painter’s work is very different than Anda’s. To quote from his artist bio, he “explores a wide range of historical and contemporary subjects in relation to pattern, ornamentation, technology and his own personal history. He creates atmospheric, fictional spaces that sample and purposely reimagine these subjects in surreal, humorous and narrative ways.”

We follow each other on social media and one day he posted a photo from a piece that was going to be part of a by-appointment-only art dealer exhibition, the only kind possible during those COVID gathering-restrictions months. I wrote something giddy like, “Omigod, love this!” as a comment on his post.

Allsorts and Marbles is just that: a painting of marbles and licorice candies set on a reflective surface. But the colours! And the whimsy of a few of those marbles actually hovering inexplicably above the surface!

Art dealer Devan Patel lives in a studio residence just east of the Don Valley, south of the Gerrard Street bridge, about a 20-minute walk from our Cabbagetown apartment. We went to see the work in person — the only ones there in a pre-booked appointment, wearing masks as was the law at the time. While I knew the dimensions — 11″ x 14″ — the painting looked smaller and more delicate than I imagined. We both fell for it. My partner (and my late father) love licorice; I still have a Crown Royal bag of glass marbles from my childhood kept in a toy box for young visitors.

We plan to place Luke’s Allsorts on a narrow wall that will divide the kitchen from the living room. Luka and Anda’s art will have friendly conversations, as they as people do in real life.