Toronto-based mixed media portrait painter Morgan Booth has built a distinctive visual language centered on monochromatic blue figures that challenge conventional approaches to color psychology and female representation. Her “Tooth & Nail” series features eight paintings of powerful women rendered in her signature blue palette against fire engine red backdrops, each wielding weapons ranging from samurai swords to ninja stars, flails, arrows, and barbed-wire bats. The collection emerged as a direct reaction to experiences of feeling small or unsafe, with Booth explaining that her characters act as protectors and guardians — warriors simmering with feminine rage, poised and ready to defend, unafraid to take up space and stand tall.
Booth’s technical approach combines stenciling with beautifully rendered realism to achieve exceptionally clean lines and sharp contrasts, creating an eye-catching vibration in her bold work. Working with oil, acrylic, and metallic paint on panel, she layers these mediums to create surfaces that simultaneously evoke calmness through blue tones while stimulating through intense warm colors. By playing with the perceptual experience and physical response to color, Booth generates the same illusionistic intensity found in geometric op art. With some early formal training, she attributes her current mastery of technique to personal exploration with mixed media, demonstrating how self-directed experimentation can yield technically sophisticated and emotionally resonant contemporary portraiture.
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in Bahia.