When I make a painting, I am either looking at something (a landscape, a coffee cup, a house…) or – in the case of my abstracts – I am thinking about a place (the ocean, the forest, the city…). However, the inspiration for the Sight Unseen series came from a very different place. On a morning earlier […]
Yesterday, I was putting the finishing touches on the fourth of a series of paintings I’ve been working on over the past several weeks.I have been really pumped about these new works, and was looking forward to sharing the off-beat story behind how they came to be. What I’m trying to say is, I was […]
They say dreams are when our minds sort through painful emotional experiences, and by dreaming, our brains work out solutions to problems we didn’t even know we had.Several months after my dad died, I had two dreams that gave me strength during a pretty dark time.In one of those dreams, he and I had a […]
I bought this apron at a garage sale when I was in my last year of art school. It was a warm fall day and my mom and I had taken a walk through a subdivision located just behind where my parents owned an audio store in Barrie Ontario.The sale featured lots of trinkets and […]
Ten things I will not do. 1) Drink booze.I once threw up on a security guard’s foot at an outdoor concert. I was a teenager. Drinking just didn’t hold any appeal after that. 2) Eat raw meat/fish.Um, enough said. 3) Stop loving chocolate.Dark chocolate is a source of iron so I’m basically harming myself if I don’t eat […]
The house was two stories high with big, boxy rooms, low pile carpet and very little furniture which meant our voices echoed every time any of us spoke.There were what seemed like 10 bedrooms on the second floor, and in the basement was a barn full of animals, resulting in the entire house smelling of […]
I am eating string cheese while Post Malone’s Circles plays on Spotify. I am safe. My skin is light.Today I am privileged.My daughter asks me why some people hate others simply because of the colour of their skin. “I don’t know,” is the not the only answer I can give her. I explain that ignorance results […]
We are living in interesting times…Smack dab in the middle of a pandemic is a place most of us never expected to be and yet, here we are.Make no mistake. COVID-19 is a threat. But, the hysteria surrounding the pandemic is becoming as dangerous as the virus itself.If we all try to stay calm and […]
After she had spent several hours at the horse barn on a frosty December evening, I offered to make my daughter a hot chocolate to warm her up.Because she has food allergies, making a drink like this for my kiddo is a bit more complicated than simply pouring boiling water over a packet of Carnation […]
One morning when my daughter was 3, she and I were walking along the seashore at low tide, searching for what the waves had brought in.As we stepped carefully around the rocks – our rubber boots sinking into the squishy sand beneath our feet – we discovered seaweed, sand dollars, crabs, sea urchins, periwinkles and […]