Leighton Bannock / May - Lily of the Valley

Leighton Bannock is a Toronto-based figurative painter working primarily in oil. Using both personal and found imagery as source material, she collages and repositions figures into contemporary settings to explore memory, intimacy, and the emotional weight of everyday life. Her work often incorporates tight cropping, reflective surfaces, and subtle surreal elements that create a tension between familiarity and unease.

Interested in atmosphere over direct narrative, Leighton uses colour, gesture, and fragmented composition to suggest moments unfolding just beyond the frame. Mirrors, obscured faces, and unusual vantage points recur throughout her work, creating scenes that feel psychologically charged yet intentionally unresolved.

Rather than presenting fixed stories, her paintings leave space for ambiguity and interpretation. Through shifts in perspective and composition, ordinary moments become slightly disorienting, encouraging viewers to slow down and spend time with the work. Colour acts as both an emotional anchor and structural device, guiding how each scene is experienced and understood.

This body of work centers around birth flowers, with each painting corresponding to a different month and its associated flower.

"I’ve always been drawn to flowers because of their symbolism and historical associations, but for this series I wanted to approach them in a way that felt less decorative and more physically connected to the figure. Rather than treating the flowers as still life objects, I became interested in placing them onto the body so they feel almost fused with it, as though they’re emerging from the figure rather than simply being worn. That tension between beauty and slight uncanniness is something I’m consistently interested in exploring within my work." — Leighton Bannock