For more than four decades, Sandra Meigs has sustained a painting practice defined by curiosity, attentiveness, and a profound commitment to looking. Through three interconnected bodies of work - Beasts, Clocks, and Popeye - she reflects on what it means to dedicate a life to painting, returning to subjects that have occupied her.

Though distinct, these three motifs are united by a meditation on time. Time measured and counted, time unnoticed, time suspended, and time revisited. Drawing on vintage clocks, toy figurines from the 1930-50’s, invented creatures, and her beloved muse Popeye, Sandra creates works that exist outside standard chronology. Rendered with extraordinary clarity, the paintings subjects appear suspended in a state of quiet attention, caught between movement and rest, presence and disappearance. These images seem to make aware the impermanence of memories, relationships, and perceptions; they emerge, linger, dissolve, and return again in altered forms.

The Clocks, with their emphatic bodies, faces, and hands, become more than instruments for measuring hours. They evoke the paradoxes of time itself: its unforgiving forward motion and its capacity to stretch, contract, and disappear within lived experience. Familiar and intimate, the Clocks suggest both the structure of daily life and the passage of years.

The Beasts occupy a different register. Drawn from wooden, stuffed, paper mache, celluloid, and Bakelite toy figurines and transformed through painting, they inhabit a world between observation and invention, tenderness and strangeness. Pressed together, biting, nuzzling, embracing, or confronting, these creatures enact dramas of connection and conflict. They feel at once playful and deeply human, embodying the emotional entanglements that shape our lives. Existing somewhere between memory and imagination, they resist fixed interpretation, inviting viewers to project their own narratives and associations.

And then, Popeye, Sandra’s longstanding companion, alter ego, and muse. Wandering through Ontario's forests, fields, Popeye is a witness to a number of eras. He moves between the worlds Sandra has created over the course of her career, and we see, as a sort of journey, the connecting images, ideas, and moments within each body of work, forming relationships that might otherwise have remained disparate. Popeye’s presence lends the work continuity, as he becomes the guide to a fleeting retrospective.

As recurring forms appear across the exhibition, they are transformed by sustained attention. Sandra returns to the same subjects not out of habit, but out of a conviction that looking is never exhausted. Each encounter reveals something previously unnoticed. Each painting becomes an opportunity to see again, to reconsider, and to deepen ones relationship with her world.

Ultimately, Beasts, Clocks, and Popeye are not simply reflections on the passage of time, but on the enduring act of painting itself. Together, these works speak to the rewards and responsibilities of a lifelong artistic practice: the patience required to keep looking, the willingness to return repeatedly to familiar subjects, and the faith that meaning continues to emerge through sustained attention. As the paintings appear and softly recede, they leave lasting impressions of observations accumulated over decades, of a care for recurring companions, and of a life devoted to the inventive possibilities of paint.