MY STORY
I once heard that, when scared, a snail leaves a trail no other snail will follow. I’m not sure this is accurate, but I found something really moving about it. I imagined a little snail, frightened and alone on a path, yet desperately wanting to warn its friends of danger. The snail, scared yet determined, leaves a trail behind it, a silent warning the others instinctively understand.
For me, that’s a little like painting.
Painting lets me say the things I want to say but can’t put into words: the pain of a loss too difficult to speak about, the feeling of rain after a long dry spell, the secret that can never be shared, the feeling of loving and being loved. When people tell me they like one of my paintings, they often can’t explain why. For whatever reason, they say it resonates. I get it.
As a child, I found solace in drawing. I would sneak out of bed late at night, armed with a pencil, a flashlight, and a fierce determination to finish whatever I’d started earlier that day. In those moments I felt most present, as my childish worries transformed into marks on a page. Marks that, unlike worries, I didn’t mind sharing with others.
As I grew older, so did my passion for painting. I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Western University in London, Ontario, graduating with the Gold Medal in Fine Arts, and my paintings were shown in local galleries including the McIntosh Gallery and the Palace at 4am. For six years after graduation, I travelled to over 35 countries, working variously as a bartender, tour leader, English as an Additional Language teacher, factory worker, and volunteer development worker. Although my own painting dwindled, my love of the arts did not. Through my travels, I saw how art is used across communities and cultures to express the complexity of our emotional lives.
While teaching English in Gwangju, South Korea, I took painting lessons from a local artist who showed me how a thin black line, painstakingly drawn in ink, could convey both the fragility and the strength of a cherry tree branch. In D’Kar, in the Kalahari, I watched San artists use bright, bold colours to capture both the vibrancy of their homeland and the tragedy of their displacement. Later, as an HIV/AIDS educator in Vancouver, I saw how women used slashes of paint seared across body forms to expose the pain of unspoken wounds that refused to heal.
These experiences still nestle into my art in interesting and unexpected ways. My current series works with words directly: personal transcripts, notices, handwriting, torn, cut, scattered, and buried in layers of paint. It asks whose words get to define a person, and what happens to words when they are too hard to say plainly.
Through these stories, I rediscovered something I think I’ve always intuitively known.
The marks from my paintbrush carry on where words alone fail.