Our Mission

– We strive to build an inclusive and welcoming community of both novice and experienced artists – learners and teachers, who explore their creativity and make art through a broad range of programming.

– We seek to enrich our neighbourhood by providing a fun learning environment for artists of any age and by bringing outreach art activities to the local community.

– We offer scholarships to talented children who cannot afford art education to help them develop their potential.

About Artbarn School

Artbarn School is located in midtown Toronto, along the Eglinton Way (Eglinton Avenue West at Oriole Park). Since 2005, we have been offering art classes for adults and for children as young as one year old.

In 2005, Mary Thelander, Frith Bail and Linda McMaster envisioned a welcoming not-for-profit community art school. Since then, under Linda’s leadership, Artbarn has inspired hundreds of budding artists of all ages. We’ve used up buckets of paint and tons of clay on our way to create a growing community of artists and teachers who make art using a wide variety of techniques.

Adults can sign up for our watercolour, acrylic, oil painting, pottery, drawing, printmaking and mixed media classes. Classes are open to people at every stage of development – from the terrified beginner to the hobbyist looking to take their skill further. Pop-Up Adult workshops, with a full day concentrated curriculum, such as our Colour Theory class, are also offered throughout the year.

Children’s art classes are designed with the child’s age in mind. We offer Mini MiniArt for our youngest art explorers. School age children will enjoy clay, drawing, painting, and mixed media. We have drawing class and a comic book class for tweens. We also offer Winter Artbreak, March Artbreak and Summer Art Adventures during school holidays, to fill your child’s day with arty fun!

Recently we have worked with artists in our community on a variety of large art murals and installations. We helped paint murals on the Eglinton Park Field House in 2016. In 2018 we were commissioned to create the Dot Art Project with all the students at John Fisher P.S. In 2019 we worked with Eglinton P.S. students on a tangram mural for the front of the school.