MIKE BEREZOWSKY
Examiner Staff

For Tessa Nunn, art is in everything. Or rather, everything is art. "Every moment is art for me," says Nunn, artist-in-residence at the Harcourt House, 10215-112 St. "Beauty can be seen in the way light hits garbage piled up against a dumpster."
Sitting with legs crossed on the floor of her studio space, Nunn explains that art is a way of seeing the world.
She graduated from the University of Alberta with a bachelor's degree majoring in medical anthropology before completing a bachelor of fine arts degree focusing on painting and sculpture. It's all related in her mind. Nunn's art reflects her passions - anthropology, spirituality, and culture.
"Art just seems to be the way I can put together all my interests."
That can be seen on the canvas with a series of paintings Nunn is currently working on as the Harcourt's artist-in-residence.
Nude figures pose in front of drapes featuring iconic images from different religions. Behind the curtain is an open window.
The curtain, with its religious connotations, hangs as an illusory boundary between the physical world of the body, and the spiritual world outside the window, Nunn explains.
She says she's long felt an obsession with the human form, evident both in her paintings and studies in anthropology.

"It's the most beautiful thing ... and the fact that it has a psyche, the fact that it as a mind, as well as the body."
As the Harcourt's artist-in-residence for the next year, Nunn is required to mount an exhibition, a lecture, as well as offer instruction. She also teaches at the University and Grant MacEwan College.
Teaching is a way to remember her lessons from the U of A and the New York Academy of Art where she studied the last two years.
But just as her art examines transcendence, Nunn says her classes go beyond convention.
"I have a lot of information in my head I was given, book smarts, and practical ways of dealing with technical material. I give that, but in a different way."
Nunn's classes focus on experience. When a model poses for students, "all the information and inspiration is right there," she says.
"The students who come into the room think, 'I want to hone my drawing skills,' and basically what I'm saying to them is, 'You will, but that takes practice.'
While the techniques can be learned, the creativity is something that just happens, adds Nunn. ''You can't teach Buddhism, or meditation, or what it feels like to be in love. It can't be taught or described in words. It just is and that's what I create in the classroom."