Linda Fritz
Special to Niagara Now/The Lake Report

Serious, joyful or just plain mischievous: The children depicted in Emily Profit’s portrait work run the gamut of expressions and have included a variety of young sitters, including the grandson of the current Duke of Wellington.

Next week, Profit will be paying a weeklong visit to Queenston, arriving May 26, where she will connect with the village’s active art scene and be available for commissions.

Profit specializes in the portraits of children, though her portfolio also includes adult sitters, such as Tom Bradby, the British television journalist and novelist. Her works are in collections in London, New York, Italy, Belgium and the United States.

Although Profit now lives near Winchester in the English county of Hampshire, she trained in Florence, Italy where she met Queenston artists Sharon Okun and Adam Markovic.

Queenston, a village of around 400 people, has an active art scene. It is home to RiverBrink Art Museum as well as individual painters, potters, map makers and sculptors. It has also hosted weekend art shows and sales at the community centre.

Profit works from photographs that she takes herself. She needs approximately half an hour with the subject in order to get the best images. The finished portrait, usually 16 by 20 inches, should be delivered to the client in four to six weeks. She is willing to discuss group portraits.

Her base will be the studio shared by Okun and Markovic in the former Laura Secord school in Queenston.

Markovic and Okun met Profit in Florence in the late 1990s. They studied together at the Charles Cecil studio where they received training in classical techniques of drawing and oil painting.

The studio is located in Florence’s most historic artists’ workshop still in active use. It was recently profiled on the CBS program Sunday Morning.

Florence remained home to Okun and Profit for some time. They later apprenticed together with Richard Serrin, an American painter who lived and worked in the city for more five decades.

Okun says that they would wake up at the crack of dawn to go and draw the statues at the Loggia die Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria next to the Uffizi Gallery before the tourists got there.

Florence not only made them friends for life, it convinced them that art was integral to their lives.

You can find Emily Profit’s website at emilyprofit.com.

If you would like an appointment to commission a painting or more information, contact Sharon Okun at inquiry@sharonokun.com.