Max Elliott

BiographyMax Elliott is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Banff, Alberta. Over her wide-ranging career, she has worked as a painter, book illustrator, curator, and parks interpreter. She graduated from ACAD in Calgary in 1988, majoring in Drawing, and from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), Halifax, with a BFA in Fine Art in 1991. These studies included print-making, drawing, painting, as well as art history. She subsequently took a Mountain Parks Heritage Interpretation Association course in 2001. Since moving to the Banff area, she has created drawings, paintings, mixed-media collages, prints, mosaics, ceramic pieces, and poetry, all reflecting her love of an ever-changing mountain environment.

In 2010, she held an exhibition in Banff, A is for Alpine, at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. This comprised 26 mixed-media illustrations, using painting and collage, one for each letter of the alphabet. The illustrations celebrated activities, wildlife and scenic attractions in the Canadian Rockies. They were produced to illustrate a poem introducing mountain concepts to very early readers, in a book published by Summerthought Publishing, Canadian Rockies ABC (2010, 2014). The work was short-listed for multiple book awards.

Max has had solo exhibitions at ACAD and at NSCAD, at the Banff Public Library and, at the Whyte Museum, a show entitled Glacier-fed. Her work has also been included in group shows at Num Ti Jah Lodge, on Bow Lake, Alberta; at Mount Royal College and at the Muttart Public Art Gallery, Calgary; and at the Whyte Museum, at Wild Elements Gallery and at Old Crag Cabin, Banff.