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What Endures

At Mission Group headquarters, sunlight illuminates a new day while oil paintings anchor our progress. Rooflines rise on sites where buildings have vanished, their memory layered beneath the city’s new forms. Façades return carefully and deliberately to a city that has grown. Hanging there for more than a year, the paintings engage the space quietly, shaping how the eye moves through it rather than commanding attention.

For decades, Randall Shier shaped the Okanagan by building forward. Trained as an architect, he read place like a carefully drawn plan took in its scale, restraint, and long view. Streets, buildings, communities: his hand is in their measured evolution. Today, his materials have changed. His eye has not. 

Shier’s turn to oil painting is less a new chapter than a continuation. Architecture taught him how to see. Painting allows him to remember. 

On canvas, long-gone buildings sit alongside present landscapes. Each line and brushstroke bears the discipline of sections and elevations, the same precision that once governed construction documents. The works celebrate the life that once was. They record. They insist on attention. 

Lost Kelowna – Royal Anne in The Block’s lobby

Randy Shier with Lost Kelowna Post Office in The Block’s lobby

I’ve always been interested in what gives a place its character. Sometimes that’s what’s new. Sometimes it’s what’s disappearing. – Randall Shier

Randy Shier with painting The Wild in progress

The instinct to preserve without freezing, to honour without sentiment, has guided his leadership as much as his design practice. Buildings that endure never needed to shout. His paintings operate the same way. They ask the viewer to slow down, to see continuity, to measure change. Some invite you into worlds that exist only in his imagination. 

Stepping away from schedules and approvals brings clarity. In oil, time behaves differently. Layers accumulate. Decisions are revisited. Memory surfaces. What emerges is not abstraction, but recognition. A familiar street corner. A structure once taken for granted. A landscape that remains, even as its edges shift. 

Most recently, Shier has added his work to the lobby of Alma on Abbott, a newly opened condominium community in Kelowna’s Lower Mission. Here, the paintings continue their conversation between memory and place. Residents encounter them as companions, meant to be noticed slowly, over time, like a city revealing itself in fragment

Before the Harvest 1, one of Alma on Abbott’s lobby art pieces.

Before the Harvest 2, one of Alma on Abbott’s lobby art pieces.

Legacy, in this frame, is not a closing statement. It is continuity. Retirement is not a conclusion but a shift in medium. The same architectural intelligence that once shaped streets now records them. The same leadership that once guided teams now curates memory. 

In a culture obsessed with speed and reinvention, Shier’s work offers another rhythm: what endures is worth preserving. The buildings may have disappeared. The memory endures. 

And in that preservation—careful, deliberate, deeply informed—legacy continues its quiet persistence.