ABOUT
Meet the Artist
MD Antoine creates paintings that explore how composition shapes a story. Working across abstraction, portraiture, and figurative scenes, she uses colour, rhythm, balance, and negative space to explore memory, identity, and human experience.
Who's MD?
MD Antoine is an Ottawa-based artist and communication researcher. She holds a PhD in Communication from the University of Ottawa, where her research examined how information is communicated, understood, and acted on following an autism diagnosis.
Her academic work has explored the experiences of families, the role of peer communities, and the ways communication can shape understanding and decision-making during periods of uncertainty. Alongside this research, Antoine has continued to develop an independent painting practice concerned with how people interpret what they see and the meanings they bring to an image.
For Antoine, art and research are separate practices, but both begin with a similar curiosity: how people make sense of experience.
PHILOSOPHY
An Ongoing Inquiry
PROCESS
Layer, Respond, Refine
Painting gives me another way to think. A memory, an observation, or a visual question can become a starting point.
I’m interested in what happens when those first impressions take shape, and in the unexpected relationships that emerge between figures, colours, and spaces.
I build each painting through observation, experimentation, and revision. Some marks remain; others disappear beneath new layers.
I adjust placement, colour, and balance as the work develops, with each decision informing the next.
Artist Mission
I want viewers to bring their own memories and associations to the paintings, finding something that holds their attention and changes with another look.
COLLECTOR REFLECTIONS
In Their Words
“There is something very personal about owning an original piece. I chose this one because I kept coming back to it, and I still do.”
Private Collector, Gatineau, QC
The Sight
2025