Born in Montréal, Canada, in 1935, Carol Donalda Armour first studied under Arthur Lismer at the Montréal Museum School of Fine Arts, and completed her education in London at the Central School of Art and Craft in 1957. After returning to Montréal, were she developed her artistic practise whilst also teaching art, she met her husband, Ashraf Mahtab, in 1964, and accompanied him to Berkeley, California, in 1966. Ashraf’s work for the US Bureau of Mines led the couple to live for extended periods in Colorado, Ontario, and New York City, where she exhibited in solo shows with Outer Space Gallery between 1988 and 1999. This was followed by a move to Upstate New York, and briefly Italy, before they finally returned permanently to Canada in 1993. It was here in Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia, that Mahtab would live and work for the last nineteen years of her life, in the studio which she had built behind her nineteenth century family home, overlooking the narrow peninsula of Digby Neck.

Mahtab’s passion and compulsion for painting remained strong throughout her life. Her dedication to the act of making led her to the studio almost every day throughout her seventy seven years, leaving a deep artistic legacy, fed by the landscape of the many places in which she lived, from the great national parks of California to the fierce beauty of Niagara Falls. Her incredible sensibility to colour and form is dominant throughout her rich and varied oeuvre, in which natural and man-made forms are alluded to yet not defined, remaining mysterious, evocative, and alive.