F*ck it all February

Clawing our way out of a January that felt like it was 3 months long, we have finally arrived in February, one of the more depressing months in the Northern Hemisphere— where you know you’re so close to spring but there are mounting piles of dog-piss-coated snow and brown slush lining the streets and sidewalks. All of this in conjunction with a raging vitamin D deficiency, a classic case of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and a massive decline in freelance opportunities has really had me leaning into my tortured artist complex this winter. Anybody else?

I’ve been feeling so nihilistic lately, so deeply resentful of how difficult and confusing life seems and how unfair it is to have to operate against our natural rhythms in order to survive. Especially in these grey and bleak days, where we have to soak our shoes in the snow to gather our provisions for the week AND battle through snowstorms to get to our jobs that don’t afford us anything other than the opportunity to *almost* pay our bills. I don’t know how relatable this is, but January-March are my worst months for freelance creative work and the financial strain is palpable. My abundance spells aren’t working fast enough. The universe isn’t listening to my affirmations, and even I don’t believe the mantras I speak to myself. My stores from the summer are long depleted and if we were living in a hunter/gatherer society I’d probably be dead months ago, but instead I’m forced to endure this half-life where I need to be places I don’t want to be and do things I don’t want to do, so more imaginary numbers can appear in my bank account and I can survive another month.

If I could have a conversation with my astral-self I would literally shake her down for sending me to this earthly plane because frankly, it sucks here and I’m over it. I feel like a giant woman-baby, stumbling around in waist-deep snow trying to build a snow-fort while it melts all around me. I’m mopping the ocean, I’m sweeping the desert. I’m Sylvia Plath watching the rotting figs or whatever and I’m really living up to the stereotype of the "starving artist” lately.

What was the artist actually starving for, in that metaphor? Probably money which is super relatable, but maybe something more.

Personally, I’m starving for a life that feels like my own, for time outside of stolen moments between a job and life admin. I’m starving for a future that is just beyond my grasp but clear enough to see. I’m starving for connection, community, purpose. I’m tired of this “pay to play” society and the failure of our “leaders”, who remind me of the aloof and out of touch clientele that frequent the spa I work at. I want to live in harmony with nature. I want to live in sync with the rhythms of my body, with the phases of my cycle. I want food sovereignty and bodily autonomy, safety and for humanity to really need eachother. I want cataclysmic and radical change in our systems and policies. I want a collapse of the monetary system, so that we may see the true value in people and not the numbers tied to them that dictate their worth. I want to crawl gently into the soil to join the mycelial network and learn the secrets of the earth. I want my consciousness to expand beyond my conditioning, I want to commune with the ethereal. I want AI to do my laundry and clean my apartment. I want the aliens to blast the billionaires and bigots and misogynists into oblivion. Is that so much to ask?

This blog post has taken a turn and I’ve lost the plot entirely (or have I?) so I’ll leave it here:

February won’t be the month I rise from the ashes as a financially literate phoenix who has liberated themselves from the confines of capitalism, so for now I’ll just show up to work and put on my best customer service voice, check people into their bio-hacking appointments and continue to hold onto the tiny fluttering bird of hope in my chest, that one day I will never have to work in the service industry again. We’re basically in March at this point and let’s be real, things will probably be more of the same, my abundance spells need more time to kick in ;)… but maybe April? Maybe when the snow melts and the birds return, when everything comes into colour again and the air smells like rain and grass. Things will get better.

Anyway, how are you doing?

Freestyles

On finding your style as an artist/illustrator

I’ve been an artist for a generous handful of years now and only in the last few years of my career, have I finally developed a recognizable personal style that finally makes people say “oh yeah I recognized your art”. Underwhelming, but still the sweetest music to my ears after much struggle and strife. Finding an art-style takes time, development, trial and error and commitment. I can already feel you resisting this post- but trust me you’ll want to read through to the end because I’m going to share some hot tips to help you find your style and stay on track.

Will art school help me find my style?

I’ve always been an avid doodler, I can fill a page with colourful squiggles and decorative motifs like nobody’s business and I have a decent eye for colour-theory. Somehow my portfolio of manic scribbles got me accepted into Emily Carr University in Vancouver and OCADU here in Toronto. Being the small town girl I am, it was my dream to live in Toronto so I promptly enrolled at OCADU and that’s where I effortlessly I developed the illustration style you see now.

Just kidding, art school somehow made it more difficult to find my own style due to the inundation of assignments and pointless essays on existentialism getting in the way of actually taking the time to explore what I wanted my art to look like. My weird squiggles and chaotic doodling was doing me no favours when it came to following assignment guidelines on composition, subject matter, and conveying a message. I struggled through the first few years of University, handing in pieces that I hated, but: perfection is the enemy of done in these institutions so you better hand in whatever you come up with, even if it’s looking clunky and low-key kind of beat. Despite the rigidity of the university course-load, I was able to find time to experiment across media, from gouache, to watercolour, collage, polymer, digital, acrylic, textile, block-printing etc. however, I wasn’t sold on sticking with any of these techniques for 4 years.

Assignments: block printing, some type of impressionism painting, frottage, collage, acrylic semi-realism. Lots going on here but none of it cohesive. 

I didn’t have a well-defined style going into OCAD and sometimes I wonder if that’s the secret sauce to success. So many of the top artists and illustrators in my program had a very developed personal style that was easily recognizable and I think that it earned them an advantage in their Thesis and in finding meaningful work after school. How did all of these talented people already know exactly what their art was going to look like and pull it off so effortlessly every time?

They must have been spies, planted there by OCAD to make it look more reputable (jk jk jk). By the time my Thesis came around 4 years deep into art school, I still had no idea what my illustration style was. I finished with a portfolio of strange images-separately they were strong pieces, with a defined and unique illustrative style applied to each of them, but together this amalgamation of illustrations looked like they had been done by a collective of artists and not just by me. Somehow I managed to graduate from OCADU in 2021 in the height of Covid lockdowns, with my weird portfolio of illustrations jankily-displayed in an online gallery that looked like it was slapped together by a highschool student. This experience was incredibly unfortunate and anticlimactic and did me absolutely no favours when it came to knowing how I wanted my art to show up in the world. (Don’t worry, I’ll be writing a whole blog post on OCADU later…)

SO! I took my little diploma and stuffed it away somewhere and continued on my journey to figure out just what the hell it is I’m trying to do. All that to say- art school isn’t always the best place to look when you’re trying to develop your personal style. Maybe look elsewhere before you dig yourself $40k worth of debt like I did :)

Thesis Illustrations: “History points to women as being the proprietors of herbal knowledge and the first ones to document and categorize herbs by their medicinal and toxic qualities. This ancestral knowledge lives on today through storytelling, mythology and communal practices. Herbal Heroines seeks to position women as the champions of their own lives, to gain autonomy and to help others.Themes explored in this series include: empowerment, feminism, autonomy, ancestral knowledge, education, re-writing women’s history, reclamation of lost knowledge, fighting against the patriarchy and capitalism, mythological stories and folklore.”

I loved my thesis topic, but there was a lot going on here stylistically, you can tell I wasn’t confident in picking a stylistic direction for my art. 

Room for one more?

As I turned my back on art school forever and foraged deeper in my quest to find my style, I was aghast to see that people were already making the type of art that I wanted to make and had been doing so successfully and commercially for many years. It was all there on Pinterest and Instagram- all of the coolest work I’d ever seen, illustrated and out in the world, made by someone else’s hands. And not mine.

If this was the case, where did I fit in and how could I stand out among these legends who somehow went into MY brain and stole all of MY super unique and totally original thoughts and ideas? Did the world really need another illustrator drawing weird girls with flower-heads and creepy medieval botanical illustrations? Or more suns and moons with faces, black cats, tarot cards and affirmations? “What’s the point”, I lamented, as I stuffed my face with Oreos and went back to the drawing board. But just then, my HUMN-4002 Intro to Existentialism brain kicked in : What is the point of anything? Just DO. Do the thing and do it your way, stop overthinking it. No one can do it like you. No one has your mind, your hands, your dreams. Even if it’s the same recycled content and symbols, it’s original because you’re the one making it.

It’s so easy to feel discouraged when you see other artists already making the type of work you want to make. It can cause major mental roadblocks when you’re of the mindset that there isn’t space in the world for your art. Let me tell you something: There is always enough space for your art and your creative voice. We are not each other’s competition, but reflections of each other. Of course someone else out of the 10 billion of us had the same idea as you. If it feels like everything has been done before, that’s because it probably has been done, but not by you. So get to work because the world needs YOUR art.

Some works created during my time in school and after. I had something going here but couldn’t commit to the flower-headed women anymore after seeing so many artists doing the same thing.

Hoard inspiration.

Find what inspires you! Make an art-style mood-board with artists who are making the type of work you want to make, collect examples across mediums. If you’re an illustrator trying to achieve a painterly feel in your work, look at what the painters are doing. If you work digitally and struggle with composition, refer to your favourite film directors. Find elements within their work that inspire you, maybe it’s a texture they use, their use of coloured lines, the use of positive and negative space in a composition. Take some small elements from a large collection of diverse works and try it out.

It’s not about emulating another artist’s style, but appreciating their technique and trying to find a way to organically incorporate it into your own work that makes sense. There are so many amazing free resources online to help artists learn new techniques. In this age of information, there is almost no reason an artist shouldn’t be able to level-up their skills independently. The experts on Youtube University have taught me so much as an illustrator and websites like Skillshare and Domestika offer affordable courses to help any artist advance their practice, *not sponsored but maybe one day?

Just a handful of my many mood-boards I refer to when I’m feeling uninspired. Sometimes just looking at what someone else is doing will light a fire under my ass to make something, anything. 

Try all the things!

As aforementioned in my art-school paragraph, I tried a little bit of everything on my way to finding my style, both in school and out of school. I didn’t limit myself to one medium or discipline. I had to get all of my pent-up creative energy out. I couldn’t call myself an illustrator because I wasn’t really “illustrating” in the traditional sense, I was just flopping around in my studio making a bunch of weird shit trying to find something that stuck. I loved the way that a grainy block-printing experiment looked when I didn’t apply even pressure to the print. I love the misty speckled effect created by aerosols, the flat but tactile application of gouache on 120lb watercolour paper. I messed around with polymer clay, with weaving and collage and how certain textures and materials reminded me of something else that I could try to achieve digitally. I drew a lot of women, a LOT of flowers, I tried cartooning and character design for a brief stint- and as I dabbled in different media and art styles, referred to my inspiration boards and pulled on whatever fleeting knowledge leftover from school that I hadn’t smoked out of my brain, I slowly started seeing my style come together. I had always wanted to create work that looked hand-rendered (as in not digital). I’ve always been a maximalist when it came to filling negative space, I love ornamentation, motifs, symbology, numerology and surrealism and I started finding a way to distill all of these separate ideas and practices into one cohesive style. I can proudly and confidently call myself an illustrator now, however, I cannot say I have it all figured out.

Recent Illustrations demonstrating some cohesion and heavy use of the symmetry tool in Procreate. 2023-2024

Where do you want your art to live?

Knowing how you want your art to show up in the world is an important thing to consider after you’ve found your signature style, actually, even before. This is a problem I am currently confronting myself. For a while I was happy making artwork that looked great on a screen or as small-scale prints. Now I’m beginning to question if this is really how I want my art to show up in public spaces. I’m moving away from digital illustration now that I am more confident in my style and hoping to complete some larger-scale paintings that I believe will make my work more impactful. There are so many avenues to pursue, from licensing, surface design, poster design, apparel, functional goods, prints, it’s hard to pick one, so I don’t. Now as I design, I try to be conscious about how my designs would look in many formats and this informs the overall composition, colour and the level of detail.

Variety is the spice of life.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you need to have one style and stick with it to be successful. Finding an illustration style was important for me because I’m pursuing editorial illustration and sometimes my personal work isn’t always the right fit for a project, so it was good to have a portfolio that showed my clients the stylistic direction I would take. It would be blasphemous to tell an artist they can only do one thing for the rest of their lives, so I encourage you, if you’re anything like me and you like to dabble in everything, diversify your offerings. Your variety of styles is an asset. I paint realism pet-portraits in watercolour, I’ve done representational portraits for editorial projects, my murals look like something out of my sketchbooks and nothing like my finished illustrations- I am an art chameleon in that sense. I adapt my style to suit the project, but when I’m applying for jobs I make sure to send in a very refined and cohesive portfolio of images done in one medium. Don’t frighten the art-directors with a portfolio that makes them wonder if you have 58 different people living inside your brain. Save that for the fine art world.

Sketchbook Collage of cut-up works and studies 2024

One last word of wisdom and I’ll stfu. Finding your style takes time, it will always be changing as you carry on in life and art. Don’t rush it, people reinvent themselves in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, you have the time now to figure things out. New things will inspire you, your visual library will expand and you’ll grow stronger as an artist. Make room for the change and embrace the discomfort, the experimentation, the mistakes. Keep going. ILY.

Make it Work

After a decade of post-secondary education I somehow have no employable skills. I stare glossy-eyed at the LinkedIn job postings and wonder how anyone has 5+ years of experience and 10 different skillsets required for just one position. I think about the ridiculousness of it all, the futility, the absolute audacity of these companies who expect curated cover letters, custom CV’s and resumes that hit every key-word their algorithms search for to even have a shot at standing out among the hundreds of applicants. If you’re lucky enough to even get an interview, you then must go through the emotional rollercoaster of the interview process and the ego-death of being rejected over and over again. The pursuit of stability and monetary abundance is a mind game. It’s a rat race and I’m just a little mouse trying to paint pictures and regulate my nervous system. I can’t be out here fighting to find stability in a 9-5 that will ultimately pull me away from myself.

So I pick a different kind of fight.

The fight to pursue a dream, to pursue the gift that I’ve unconsciously nurtured throughout my entire life from the moment I could hold a pencil. I fight for the right to be an artist, in an unforgiving city, in a society that doesn’t value artists the way they should be valued. I fight against the “Starving Artist” trope. I fight against myself some (most) days when I wonder where my next pay-check will come from, if I shouldn’t just pick up another BS job in the meantime to relieve some financial burdens. It’s a constant battle that no one sees, but many suffer through. If you’re reading this I want you to know that you are not alone. If you feel listless, hopeless, defeated, exhausted, under-qualified, I’m right there with you and I’m here to remind you that your worth as an artist is not tied up in how much income you’re generating.

First of all- we were not put on this earth to plug away at computers for 8 hours a day, to line the pockets of billionaires and conglomerate companies while we watch the world burn around us. We are not here to have our worth reduced down to imaginary numbers and fake credit scores. We are not our income, our assets or our net worth. We are human beings, born free in a system that was built broken. Every human should have access to shelter, clean water and food and we can’t even get that right in our “developed” society- so if you have these things, AND you have a little time to make some art, consider yourself blessed. We really don’t need much more despite what social media drills into your brain every millisecond of the day.

Now that that’s out of the way…

Money Magic, an old illustration of mine

On the days when I’m feeling especially self-loathing I try to look around at all of the positive things in my life. I have a cozy apartment (that sometimes catches on fire lol), food to cook, an artist boyfriend to share the struggle with, a beautiful family and not much else besides my worldly possessions. I might not have a savings account or a retirement plan set in place, but do artists every really retire? Someone else’s blog somewhere says No.

If you’re struggling with self-deprecating thoughts I encourage you first to try to find gratitude anywhere and everywhere. Look at the sunset, find simple joys in the everyday. Your cup of coffee, that cute dog you saw on the sidewalk, the confetti of colourful leaves in the gutter. The energy you put out is the energy that will return to you. If you feel like you’ve got nothing to be grateful for at the moment, write down your desires and core values. This is something that I do to reaffirm my path and keep me on track. It reminds me what I’m working towards and why I chose this lifestyle. It’s easy to fall into shame-spirals when it feels like you just cant get ahead in life but at a certain point you need to let go of your shame. If you’re like me, you’ve been down this road before, you’ve made it work with less and you’ll continue making it work. Trust yourself to have your own back and if you’re lucky enough to have supports, lean on them.

I think we can all agree that many of life’s little problems would go away if we had more money, but the big problems and questions remain: What am I doing here? What is my purpose and what makes me happy and fulfilled?

At our very core we know why we’re here and what our true purpose is- to create despite it all, in defiance of it all because we know that we have one life, and to spend it doing anything other than creating would be a disservice to ourselves and to the world (so dramatic lol). I also think that many people who choose to pursue the arts hate being told what to do. To live the life of an artist is to throw your middle finger in the faces of everyone who says it’s too hard, too unattainable, too precarious, even though they’re right to some degree. So we struggle a little bit, we make ends meet and we make it work for us, however we can, whatever that looks like.

What other choice to we have?

The Pseudo Studio

For the last few months my partner Gratian (@Gratian.art) and I have been renovating our studio to make it more functional. We are multi-media artists working across disciplines so you can imagine how many supplies we’ve accumulated over the years. Unfortunately our supplies overtook our workspace and we were relegated to about 10 square inches of desk space each. Not conducive for creating, and I don’t know about you but I literally cannot function in a chaotic, disorganized space. It’s not so much a studio as it as a 10’x10’ junk drawer and catch-all and it’s absolutely draining my creative life-force.

Wish I had somewhere to use all of these amazing materials… oh wait

Our respective hobbies are abundant- from embroidery to block printing, to guitar, keys, animation, illustration, oil painting, polymer sculpting, sticker-making, market-vending, mural painting, canvas-hoarding and more things than I care to list here because I’m sure other artists are reading this and can already relate. All of that to say, sorting through our clutter has been daunting, exhausting and very uncomfortable as I stare out into my dining room at piles of boxes, folding tables and crusty old canvases. I feel like I’m in purgatory, forced to reflect on all of my abandoned projects while they scream at me “Why aren’t you using us?” There are a few reasons 1.) I can’t find anything and 2.) there’s no space to do it. See figure below:

Having a cat who steals the only office chair also doesn’t help.

Stage 1:

THE PURGE// Death of Sentiment

Has anyone heard of Swedish Death Cleaning? You basically just rid yourself of any worldly possessions that you wouldn’t want to burden your family with having to sort through, were you met with an untimely demise. It makes sense in theory, I would never want my family to suffer the hell of trying to clean this studio, but surely they would see the same potential as I do in my box of broken picture frames, or my scraps of fabric I’m saving for upholstery mending. Those old publications of National Geographic with all the good photos cut out of them is perfect for a collage night that never seems to happen… Those polymer clay ornaments that I painstakingly hand painted and coated in sticky resin that didn’t set properly… It’s all so hard to let go of. Why?

I think we attach ourselves to things because we like the idea of the person who would use them. The up-cyclers, the hobbyists who can turn something destined for the trash into something useful. Like any artist, we want to breathe new life into objects and items, but it’s kinda hard to breathe when the walls are closing in on you, so we save what we can and find places for the rest.

A fresh start. 

So far we’ve installed some peg boards for keeping our most frequently used materials within reach, painted the walls (and the ceilings a little bit lol), we’ve decluttered, categorized, donated what we can and saved only what we need and will realistically use within our lifetime. There are still boxes of picture frames lining the floor, tote bags holding more tote bags, crusty dusty canvases to re-prime… but we’re finally getting somewhere.

LFG

From my notes app to myself:

The artist life is an act of resistance 

Observation takes stillness, awareness and thoughtfulness, it makes time disappear for a while. It quiets the mind and hones the focus on the subject. Peripheral distractions are easily shrugged away when the artist connects to the cosmic source of creativity, the pure intrinsic automatic reflex of pencil to paper, aerosol to brick, oil to canvas, fibre to fabric etc etc. 

Connecting to this part of ourselves and the unconscious energy that drives us to create and alchemizing thought to tangible image is a gift, it is magic and no value can be ascribed to it because it is priceless. It cannot be mined, simulated, extracted, processed, or diluted. The artist process is resistance of capitalism, of societal pressure, of consumerism and commodification. It exists in a liminal space from which all creativity lives.

If you have access to this, you are abundant. Perhaps not always monetarily, but in spirit, life and freedom.