r/painting

Heritage as Survival

20 years in the art world teaches you numerous things. 🧐 The two that changed everything for me: your roots 🍃 are yours whether you claim them or not, and your artistic 🎨 voice is a living document.

For most of my career, traditional materials could have killed me. 💀 Digital was never my preference, it was my only option. Losing the use of traditional mediums also removed my natural instincts with play, mark making, and physical media itself. I did not have the ability to naturally explore my artistic voice.

A proper diagnosis and medications ❤️ changed that a few years ago. When I started using traditional mediums again after almost 2 decades, I tried to replicate my digital work. Replication was a killer of my voice. The therapy, escape, and joy all went quiet.

Unsatisfied, I start thinking deeply about who I was, what I wanted to create and more importantly my roots.

My roots always were elusive and disconnected to me. Growing up in a very violent home and learning when I was 15 that was adopted and lied to for so many years was crushing. Heritage felt like something to escape and hope to survive rather than carry.

Then I started looking at the present. 😍🏠 My home is a maximalist cathedral, every wall and shelf filled with art, color, pattern and objects with meaning. The way I dress, the way I live, everything layered and symbolic and intensely mine. So why wasn't my art?

It clicked, it was always there but I spent the better part of my life rejecting it. So I dug out a box of photographs 📸 I hadn't looked at since my mother died in 2013. I already knew the answer the moment I asked the question.

I found the image I was looking for and it was everything. 🤩 I was sitting at a bright green children's art desk, sewing something I can no longer remember. Horrible wood paneling as my backdrop to the elegant lamp shade, aloe vera plant, gaudy candy dish, Polish tapestry and the brightly blue 💙 flowered chairs that I loved.

When I looked at this image it clicked, my roots and voice have been there all along. I just had to return to meet them and plant 🌿 them in healthier, more fertile soil.

I am the gardener of my roots.

From a lighthouse cruise in Boston Harbor.

Origami Horse

Size: 4' (cm) x 5' (cm)

Medium: Oil and acrylic

Support: Canvas

After some years of living in Alberta, and finding that my art doesn't have a large audience there, I began pondering how i could make my art more accessible to a prairie based viewer. Having already competed three pieces for my origami series i thought of this as an opportunity to bring a sense of action to these works. 

Wild horses are a symbol of the west that is slowly being replaced by dreams of loud engines, and absurdly lifted trucks. In a world where their necessary habitat is being destroyed they could one day be a forgotten feature of the foothills.

flatirons, spring snow. 2x3” oil on canvas with tin of used paints 🔴

Sharing the process of how I made the painting that made it onto a whisky label. One of the coolest projects I've got to work on!

Golden Open Acrylic on gessoed paper

This is one of my recent paintings. This one was actually displayed in a gallery. Had to redo the first attempt, and this one took me around 13 hours.

Still, I would be glad to get feedback from experienced artists. 🌟🌼

this is 24x36 I think

I stretched it myself