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Something I think about a lot in terms of my work is the information gap. The information gap is the gap of understanding between two or more people. You will never understand another person's view of the world. You can't. You aren't them. You didn't experience their childhood, their emotional reactions to various life events, their joys or pains. In teachers college, I had a professor who used the analogy that every student shows up to class with a metaphorical backpack. In that backpack, they bring everything that happened after school the day before and the morning of today. They might experience their parents yelling, they might experience a fight with their siblings, they might have experienced bullying at an after-school activity, or their pet died, or there wasn't enough food at dinner, or they had a perfectly pleasant evening. But the point is that they bring whatever happened the night before and the morning of to the classroom, and you might never be the wiser. Those events and life experiences shape their behaviour and engagement. You, as their teacher, are experiencing a huge gap in information about your student and are expected to teach them to their needs as best you can. I think about this idea of the information gap in regard to a lot of things, mainly communication. Humans are garbage at communicating, myself in particular. To communicate with one another, you need to think about intention, inflection, tone, pace, and timing. You need to have a basic awareness of another person's background and upbringing to understand how they developed their own communication skills. Then you need to be aware of yourself. Aware of your own triggers and traumas, your own biases, education, experiences and lack thereof, your ego, and when your ego stops you from truly listening and understanding. Now let's look at that information gap and terrible communication alongside complex individual human experiences and emotions. I express very complex feelings in my art. When I painted the three water pieces in 2024, I wasn't painting or interpreting "depression." I was trying to express a loss of innocence, reconciling with the truth, the feeling of despair so deep in your soul that it changes you permanently, the feeling of being so suffocated by your own pain that you are drowning, endless crying, endless sorrow, and endless grief for a new understanding of the world that you never asked for. Those three paintings were my desperate attempt to both express all of those emotions, and more, as well as process them, come to terms with them, and heal from them.
But I don't think I communicated those feelings successfully in those paintings. There was a gap in information and communication that didn't express those emotions to the fullest extent for another human to truly and honestly pick up on.
An artistic goal of mine is to try to bridge the information gap as best I can over my lifetime of creating. Something I am looking to explore in the coming years is sound. I want to appeal to as many human senses as I can in my artwork in hopes of bridging the experience gap. While I am currently working in the visual, using colour to express and communicate through sight, next I want to use sound with visuals to further heighten the experience. Now, I have no musical ability. I do not know how to play an instrument. I am not particularly good at singing. But I am preparing myself to learn. My goal for this year is to buy a keyboard and start taking piano lessons. I find music evokes an emotional experience in me. I have spent many concerts crying. The Cinematic Orchestra with Patrick Watson singing "To Build a Home" makes me cry almost every time. When I saw that song live, I ugly cried into my husband's shoulder and experienced a new revelation about the importance of that song to me as a human being with consciousness. So my long-term goal for my work is to incorporate two senses, the visual and the auditory. To slowly immerse the viewer in an emotional landscape that evokes an emotional experience. I think colour can do that through its historical and cultural relevance and its connection to the dawn of evolution. I don't think we need physical objects or realistic interpretations to bridge that information gap. If anything, by adding those physical objects or realistic interpretations, you are adding more opportunities for misinterpretation, as every culture and every person will bring their metaphorical backpack of understanding to those visuals, taking away from the shared emotional experience. I will never be able to eliminate individual interpretation. And it is true, once you release an artwork into the world, it is no longer yours. But how interesting is it to attempt to share your feelings with the world by trying to recreate that emotion for others to feel for themselves? I don't know if I will ever be successful in this goal. I likely never will be. But maybe I get close. Maybe a handful of people will experience something similar to what I experienced, and the information gap won't be as wide for a single moment. What might that mean for human connection in a world so emotionally disconnected? What might that mean for teachers trying to reach students or doctors trying to understand the pain of a patient? I think about the information gap a lot, and I hope to make that gap smaller through art.
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Five years ago I wandered through Art on the Street in downtown Guelph with a friend. We were just coming out of lockdown. I had recently moved to Guelph and was coming off a mental health leave from teaching. I was already anxious about returning to work and, if I'm honest, I wasn't entirely sure what came next. As we walked through the booths that day, I remember being completely captivated. Not just by the artwork, but by the artists. Here were people making beautiful things, sharing them with strangers, and somehow building a life around their creativity. I had been to art walks, studio tours, First Fridays, and festivals before, but this one felt different. For the first time, becoming an artist didn't seem like an abstract dream. It felt like something real. That day changed the direction of my life more than I realized. I met Preetam from the Guelph Arts Council and signed up for their newsletter. That led to their mentorship program. Later I worked at the Arts Council for a maternity leave and eventually coordinated two Art on the Street events with the Downtown Guelph Business Association.
For almost two years I helped support artists in my community. Somewhere along the way I realized something. I didn't just want to help artists. I wanted to become one. One of the reasons I chose this path is because I want to better support future artists. As an art teacher, I always felt there was one piece of my education that was missing. I knew how to teach art. I knew about art history and different creative careers. I'd even worked in museums and galleries before becoming a teacher. But no one had really taught me what it meant to build a life as an artist. What does a typical day look like? How do exhibitions happen? How do grants work? How do artists actually earn a living? So when I committed to my own practice, I decided I wanted to try everything. Over the last four years I've worked in galleries and arts organizations, applied for grants, organized exhibitions, shown work in cafés and restaurants, and slowly learned what it actually takes to build an art career. This year, after a year and a half of preparing, I finally became one of the artists at Art on the Street. Standing inside my own booth on June 20 felt surreal. Five years earlier I had been walking through the festival imagining what it might be like to be on the other side of the table. Now I was there. Meeting collectors. Talking about my work. Watching people connect with pieces that had once existed only in my tiny studio. It was one of the best days I've had as an artist. It was also one of the hardest things I've done. In the weeks leading up to the event I had to locate more than fifty artworks, frame them, package them, create inventory, design a booth, learn how to display work outdoors, and somehow transport everything safely. Then there were all the costs that visitors never see. A tent. Display grids. Booth weights. A payment system. Packaging materials. Booth fees. And that's before even considering the cost of making and framing the artwork itself. The only reason I was able to participate this year was because I received a grant that helped cover many of those startup expenses. The more I learn about this profession, the more I realize how many financial barriers exist before anyone ever sees your work. At the end of the day I had made just over $500 in sales. So was Art on the Street a success? Absolutely! Not because of the dollar amount. When I first attended five years ago, I saw beautiful booths. Now I see everything behind them. I see years of practice. Rejected exhibition applications. Grant proposals. Hours spent framing artwork. Vehicles packed before sunrise. Artists acting as accountants, marketers, photographers, designers, salespeople, and small business owners, all while continuing to make the work itself. Making art is only one part of being an artist. Building a sustainable creative career requires an entirely different set of skills, and many of those skills are things I was never taught in school. That's exactly why this journey matters to me. Every exhibition, every grant application, every rejection, every sale, and every event teaches me something new. One day, when one of my students asks me what it's really like to become an artist, I want to have an honest answer. Not just how to paint. Not just how to draw. But how to build a creative life. Five years ago I left Art on the Street inspired by the artists I met there. This year I left inspired by the fact that, for one day at least, I had become one of them.
Art on the Street, June 2026
If you’ve been following the story of the cubes, you know they started as a meditative doodle, then became a method, and eventually developed into a language of their own. What I didn’t expect was how much life would shape them. In 2022, after years of teaching, loss, and stress, I had to hit pause. That pause brought me back to the cubes in a way I hadn’t anticipated. After struggling with burnout, family deaths, and anxiety, I took a stress leave from teaching. I needed the world to stop. I felt like I was on a rollercoaster of endless loops and desperately needed to get off. Teaching during COVID was indescribable. The constant pivoting, adapting, and revising turned the rollercoaster of my personal life into a haunted house for my career. Even today, I still feel the impact of those years. During my stress leave, I struggled to keep myself busy and started taking random commissions to give my days some structure. While waiting for one painting to dry, I allowed myself to play, revisiting old artworks, reworking ideas, and returning to the cube. In those quiet, unstructured moments, I realized the cube had become more than a shape. It was a way to think, feel, and make sense of my work. The cube has grown with me over the years. What started as a simple doodle is now the structure behind almost everything I create. Working in cubes lets me break things down and rebuild them, allowing me to explore memory and emotion without needing a perfect plan. I layer colour like layering thoughts, one small square at a time, until it turns into something unexpected. The cube gives me a place to explore chaos while still feeling grounded.
As that grounding returned, so did a bit of confidence. After spending weeks reacquainting myself with paint and slowly shaking off the imposter syndrome that had been sitting on my shoulder, I finished a piece that actually felt like me. On a whim—equal parts bravery and “why not”—I decided to submit it to a juried show. While applying to shows, I met the team at the Guelph Arts Council and applied to their Emerging Artist Mentorship Program. After being accepted, I worked with wonderful people who encouraged my creativity, and I eventually had a piece accepted into a juried show in Etobicoke.
After that, everything happened quickly. I was hired for a programming position covering a maternity leave at the Guelph Arts Council, working directly with artists and promoting art within my community. Through this position, I realized that while I loved helping people make art, I needed to pursue my own work more intentionally. That is when I began trying to solve my biggest artistic challenge: how to combine cubes and landscapes. During the years of drifting in and out of working with the cube, I never stopped painting. I created small en plein air landscapes during camping trips. In 2017 my husband suggested painting our adventures as a keepsake, so he bought me a small travel paint kit and book. I have been painting our camping trips ever since. Fast forward to 2023, I started breaking down the colours of the landscapes I loved and using the cubes as vessels to hold them. I fell in love with capturing the essence of a landscape without including the actual visual references. I began experimenting with using cubes to draw shapes, inspired by the movement of water, exploring themes of depression and sadness. As each new experiment was completed, I slowly built confidence and momentum, and success followed. The depth of my work grew alongside it. A pivotal moment came during one of my last visits with my grandma in the care home after her memory had become inconsistent. I brought my laptop to show her photos from my latest camping trip because she was the one who introduced me to canoeing. During that visit, I was devastated when I could not reach her. The blankness on her face and the searching in her eyes as she tried to place who I was broke me. I was a stranger to her, a familiar stranger at moments when she smiled with flickers of recognition, but still without memory. Since that visit in 2021, I have been quietly grappling with what this might mean for me and my future. Alzheimer’s runs in my family. My great-grandmother also experienced it before her passing. I found myself unconsciously taking more photos and writing things down. I went to therapy for grief after my grandma’s death, but I was also processing my own acceptance of what might lie ahead. I researched memory loss, read about why we forget, and learned how emotional resonance can increase the details we retain. I explored family stories and revisited old pictures and memories. And I continued to paint. Suddenly, everything made sense. Capturing my camping trips, abstracting colours to express my emotions, and the reason behind it all was to remember. Many people want to leave a legacy, whether local, regional, or national, for friends, family, or children. We pay attention to the rich and famous because everyone knows who they are, while we live our daily lives forgetting that we are our own local heroes. I create and remember not to leave a legacy, but in hopes that I can remind myself of who I am if I follow the genetic path laid before me. In the last year, I have begun writing down every material I use, keeping notes of my thoughts while I paint, leaving myself reviews of materials I have tried, and documenting my creative process as much as possible. Perhaps I can remind myself of what I have done, and give myself a road map for how I create so I can keep making art even if I forget how. It is funny because after writing these three parts exploring why the cube, I realized that my process is closer to Sol LeWitt than I ever expected. He created instructions for others to make his artwork, while I create instructions so I do not forget how to make mine.
The cube has been with me through doodles, experiments, and personal upheavals. It is more than a shape. It is a way to process life, colour, and memory. Looking back on its journey, I see how much it mirrors the way I move through life: one small step at a time, building something larger from what feels chaotic in the moment. That is what makes this work meaningful to me and why I keep returning to it. In Part 1, I shared how the cubes began, born from a mix of frustration, curiosity, and Sol LeWitt-inspired experimentation. But like many beginnings, that spark faded for a while. After undergrad, the cubes' evolution was stunted for some time. Teachers College and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Gallery and Museum Studies left the cubes on the edges of my notes, literally.
The meditative nature and unconscious movement aided in my success with note-taking. It’s funny how we learn to learn almost too late in our education. To this day, when I am at workshops or conferences, you will find me sketching the cube while jotting down key phrases and ideas as I learn. While I was working on my post-grad diploma, I audited a printmaking class. There, I fell in love with the process of lithography and was introduced to screen printing. During my audit, I was still experimenting with “my style.” I remember my first lithography print was a whale diving into the abyss. My instructor was not in love with the imagery. My next print had to include a reduction of the first, and I came back to the cube. My instructor was thrilled and encouraged me to only do cubes for future prints. It was the first time someone outside myself saw something distinct in the cubes, and that encouragement stayed with me even after the semester ended. For a few months, I dove into the cube through the lens of lithography, experimenting with various techniques and focusing less on the imagery and more on the process itself (a hint of what was to come).
However, the semester came to an end, and for several years the cube was just doodles in my notes. I would casually come back to the cube when making art for my first shared apartment with a boy (my now husband), and I proudly carried my fourth-year art of cubes and tape doodles between two apartments and a house. But it wasn’t until Covid that I started to come back to the cube again. During my first five years of teaching in galleries and schools, I had started to accumulate a variety of half-finished artworks that I began as examples for my classes. Now, stuck at home and miserably failing at teaching online, I took it upon myself to “finish” this pile of half-baked artworks. During this time period, I started experimenting with colour theory, painting techniques, and abstraction, with the cube as the medium for my madness. I also experimented with landscapes, taught myself watercolour, and transformed the walk-in-closet-sized spare bedroom into my studio.
Between 2014 and 2022, the cube was my home away from home. It was something that I could always come back to, consciously and unconsciously. It was a shape that I could abandon and revisit whenever I needed, familiar enough that I could draw it with ease, but complex enough that it allowed for variation, deconstruction, and transformation.
By the time the world reopened, the cube had transformed from a doodle into a language of its own, one that would soon shape my current body of work. The other day, I was chit-chatting with another artist/educator when they suddenly asked, “Why the cubes? Is it a style choice, or is it something deeper?” That question is like Kryptonite to Superman for me. It’s the one question I know I need to learn how to answer—but also the hardest one to communicate. In my final year of undergrad, I was given an assignment to research an artist and write a 1,000-word paper discussing their themes and issues. While that paper has long been lost to a dropped hard drive or corrupted computer, I do remember that the artist I chose was Sol LeWitt. What fascinated me about Sol LeWitt at the time was how he created these massive wall drawings—except he wasn’t the one actually creating them. He would meticulously plan the composition, choose the colours, even suggest measurements. But the core of the work was that others carried out his instructions. The drawings existed only for the duration of the exhibition and were then destroyed. I found a quote in my sketchbook during my research: “Without the traditional support of canvas or paper, wall drawings exist as a set of instructions and can be installed again and again.” As a budding artist, I thought this concept was wildly fun and inventive—odd, too—and it made me wonder: Is this really art? (That’s a question I’m still mulling over twelve years later.) Regardless, I was inspired. By my final year, I felt an increasing push to “find my style” as an artist. But I’ve always been, and still am, someone who wants to try everything: portraiture, landscapes, abstracts, animals, acrylic, oil, watercolour, gouache, pen and ink, printmaking, ceramics—if it’s art, I’ll try it. So, as you can imagine, I was much the same in university. Not a single piece I made in those four years looked like it was done by the same person.
The one consistent thread, however, was my doodles. I was encouraged to translate those doodles into large-scale paintings. Most people today would recognize them as “zentangles,” but at the time, I would just fill page after page. When I tried to bring that smoothness of pen on paper into paint on canvas, I hated it. The paint was never thin or even enough, the canvas wasn’t gessoed or sanded to my liking, and I was always dissatisfied with the way the edges separated.
That frustration led me to experiment with tape. I invented my own process of doodling with tape, sealing the surface to create something smooth and mirror-like. The result was abstract works with some wonderful—and some terrible—colour combinations.
At the same time, while I was learning about Sol LeWitt, I began simplifying my doodles. They shifted from curves and organic shapes into cube motifs. It was almost as if the act of using straight edges changed my meditative state while doodling during lectures and note-taking.
By the end of that semester, we were given a large-scale drawing assignment—at least three by four feet—where we had to develop a series of New Methods. These new methods had to consider questions like:
Sol LeWitt inspired the scale and impermanence of the wall drawings. My experiments with tape doodles inspired the cubes.  Final series of Artwork from Semester 2, 2014 including my New Methods wall painting To spare you the terrible writing of my 22-year-old self, I won’t share my notes word for word. But here are a few excerpts to give you a sense of how much that project influenced me:
A part of my artistic practice is trying to portray emotions—and to portray emotions, you have to live through them. These past few weeks, I’ve been revisiting the emotion of grief: the joy of happy memories, the difficulty of letting go again, and the reality of life after losing someone you love. In March 2022, my grandmother passed away. She was one of those grandmothers who often felt more like a friend than an authority figure. Grandma Adeline took me on my first (and only) motorcycle ride, joined me in sewing classes, helped me create Halloween costumes, and showed up at every soccer game, dance recital, school play, and graduation. She was a constant presence in my childhood—stealing Splenda packets from restaurants and adding extra salt to her McDonald’s fries. If you haven’t gathered by now, I really loved that lady. So when dementia slowly took her memories and her passing came sooner than expected, I was shattered. Her absence was deeply felt, and I still get choked up about it to this day. My 2026 show was inspired by her. Her loss of memory made me think deeply about what it means to remember. I’ve read psychology papers on memory and considered it in the contexts of history, conservation, and preservation—thinking about what we, as a society, choose to value and hold onto. But throughout this process, I always found something missing: the emotion. After teachers’ college, I completed a year of study in Museum and Gallery Studies, where I learned both theoretical and practical skills in curation, public programming, cataloguing, and preservation. What stayed with me most were the exhibitions, objects, and histories that stirred emotion. Facts, statistics, and context were important, but they didn’t resonate with me in the same way. So, in preparing for my show, I knew that if I wanted to explore memory in a meaningful way, I would have to bring forward the emotions I carry for my grandmother and my childhood. Of course, saying that is much easier than doing it. Over the past six months, I’ve felt a lot of resistance. At times, I worried I would have little to show next year. But with time and patience, I’ve begun to make real progress on my piece about my grandmother—and it’s been a wild ride. Grief is incredibly complex, because humans are incredibly complex. I loved my grandmother—she was my goofy, shining light. But she was also the first person to make me doubt my ability as an artist. While my family tells me they found my paintings in her house after she passed, her outward reaction to every artwork I gave her was dismissive: a quick “That’s nice,” followed by tucking it away. I remember being angry, even telling her I wouldn’t give her any more art because she acted like she hated it. When we grieve, our memories do strange things. I felt guilty for remembering her in that way. For holding onto a negative moment. It made me feel like I had to come up with three positive memories to outweigh one bad one. My inner dialogue told me: She’s gone—you can’t be mad at her. But grief reminds me that she was fully human—someone with both positives and negatives. She made me feel immense love and safety, but also frustration and sadness. To deny those mixed emotions wouldn’t be fair—to her or to me, both fully complex humans in our own right. So I found myself lovingly drawing her, then washing the drawing away—because memory fades with time. I spent an afternoon, sitting on the floor with that drawing, eating her marshmallow salad and crying over every good and sad memory I had of her. This summer, I created far less artwork than I planned, but I spent more quality time with my grandmother than I’ve had since high school. I heard wonderful stories about her from family members and poured over the scrapbooks she made of my dancing years. Reliving grief wasn’t a five-star experience—my poor nose from all the tissues I needed can attest to that—but it was oddly beautiful, deeply cathartic, and exactly what the work needed. If I have nothing else for my 2026 show, at least I will have my grandma—and that, in itself, is worthy of an exhibition.
Maybe it isn’t our fault for being so distracted. Maybe it was all designed this way. The more we are away from peace the less likely we are to fight for it. It takes A LOT of conscious energy to reflect on our role in these things. How am I engaging in Social media? What value does my job have to my health, my happiness? Am I truly satisfied with the way I am living? Those are introspective ideas that were not taught. Not in school, not at home. No one tells you, teaches you that happiness is not a goal to be strived for, that in fact true, honest and pure happiness is boring. It is simple. It is easy to achieve. Happiness is the small moments right now. The present moment where that sunset makes you stop and stare. Our phones take that away. The speed of our cars takes that away. Have we been conditioned to forget the small things that truly make us happy?
Camping forces me to stop in my tracks. Forces me not to be distracted. Forces me to stop, to breathe, to look, to be present, to slow down. And that's when I am truly at peace. That's when I am reminded that me, my problems, my worries, my life is so small, so insignificant. I’m not devaluing my life, but I am paying attention to its impact. When I am at peace I see the greater issues. Not just my pains but that my pains are part of a greater system error. That there is a domino effect that myself and so many others are suffering from. But for once I am not too selfish to notice. See when we are at peace for long enough we no longer only see ourselves. But when we start to see the problems around us we realize we need to make a change and the people above us don’t want change. So we have built a world that a majority of us just survive through and we stop being present. We stop looking, we stop seeing. We can’t see beyond our own problems, our own pain. So we can’t comprehend that our pain is everyone else's too.   On Saturday, May 24, 2025, I participated in my first trail race. It was 50 kilometers long. By definition, anything over 42 kilometers (the distance of a marathon) is considered an ultramarathon. So, not only did I participate in my first trail run—I also ran the farthest I’ve ever run. Why would anyone do this, you might ask? That’s a long-ass run. Great question! I actually had a friend who was absolutely befuddled when I told her I had signed up for this race. Three months before race day, I told her, jokingly, it was so I could stay healthy enough to go to the bathroom by myself in my old age—but in reality, I needed a challenge. 2024 was a tough year mentally. I had to do a lot of internal fighting with anxiety and depression. So, I decided to flip the script and channel that energy into something physical. As part of my training, I signed up for the 30km Around the Bay Race and spent most of April’s weekends on the Guelph to Goderich trail—running for 4+ hours, learning how to eat while moving and pace at distance. When race day finally arrived, I questioned my sanity. Life circumstances had significantly messed up my rigorously planned training schedule, and I felt immensely underprepared. But I showed up. I started way too fast. I chatted with a few kind racers. At 24km, when my leg cramped so severely I couldn’t bend my knee, a stranger gave me salt pills. I ate a lot of bananas because it was the only thing I could keep down. I may have been a little salty myself to some very nice volunteers—something I do feel terrible about. I cried, calling Travis with broken reception just 5km from the finish line, and wanted to give up. Almost the entire time. They say you hit a wall in long-distance running when you’ve burned more calories than you’ve taken in and your experience shifts from uncomfortable to unbearable. I think I hit the wall two or three times. I walked every hill, tripped over countless roots, and can’t remember a single song I heard the entire time I was on the trail. I was out there for almost eight hours. When I crossed the finish line, my mom was screaming, my dad hugged me despite my stench, and I cried again. Running that race was the hardest thing I have ever physically done. I learned the importance of salt replacement and electrolytes. I was humbled by hills and mud. And I proved to myself that I can do hard things. After finishing, I told my mother-in-law that this was the stupidest thing I’d ever done (we all say silly things in pain), but I felt hilariously euphoric—after the crash and stiffness, of course. I even felt excited to try the race again in a few years. If you ever need a reminder that you can do hard things, I recommend joining this race. Now, you don’t need to run 50km—there’s a 10km or 20km loop instead. Or, if you really need to know you can do hard things, there are also 50-mile, 100km, or 100-mile options. I recommend this experience because, unlike a road race, trail running is calmer, quieter, and filled with moments where it’s just you and yourself, working through the pain. At the end of the day, no one is coming to get you. If you want to go home, you have to finish that race. Reception isn’t great—so even if you call, the call might not hold out. If you need to pee, you finish the race. If you’re hungry, you finish the race. At my worst—around 46km in, only 4km away from a shower, watermelon, and my couch—the pain I was feeling radiated throughout my body. My knees were weak. I felt blisters forming on multiple toes and both heels. My back ached. I was getting a headache from the lack of salt and water. Then I watched a 60-year-old woman with a 100km bib run past me, and I thought, What the fuck am I doing here? That’s when I called Travis, crying. Through the broken reception I heard, “It’s all downhill from here. You’re so close!” I finally hung up and started running again—everything in my body screaming to stop. But that’s the cool thing about humans: we can override the pain. For the next 4km, I repeated, “Your legs don’t hurt and you are not tired.” I sang it to myself, out loud and in my head, to the tune of every song that came up in my playlist. Sometimes, you just need a reminder that you can do hard things. May I recommend a trail race for your next reminder?
Okay, so June has been a terrible month for me in the studio. With summer coming up, I’ve been supply teaching extensively over the last few weeks in preparation for a stagnant income. This means studio time has been few and far between—sometimes just sketching on my lunch breaks, adding a layer or two after dinner, and doing a lot of staring at artworks that feels like they are taunting me. I have over 20 pieces of artwork on the go right now, and honestly, they all feel terrible. This is a first for me. I’ll be honest. I usually have multiple pieces in progress so that, depending on the mood or emotion I need to express, there's always something to work on. But being 20+ pieces in and feeling like none of them are driving me forward? That’s new. I think I’m in my own head a bit. I’ve built up next year’s show so much in my mind that every time I step into the studio, it feels like it has to be productive—which, of course, makes it the exact opposite. I know ugly or “bad” artwork is very much part of the creative process. It’s necessary for learning and growth. But still, it feels like I don’t have time to fail right now. And because of that, everything I make feels... ugly. Like a puzzle missing key pieces. Take this one landscape of Stormhaven I’ve been working on—for two years! I’ve never spent that long on a piece before. I’ve reworked and reworked it over and over again. I’ve sent it to friends and family, pleading for suggestions—or hoping someone will take pity on me and just take it away. But still, this painting sits in my studio. I’ve hidden it away for the better part of 2024, and apparently, now I think it’s time to try working on it again.
I’ve been told to cut it off the stretcher and move on. I’ve been told to gesso over it and start fresh. I’ve been offered other suggestions on how to “fix” it. But me and this painting, we’re arm-wrestling our way through oblivion.
And for some reason, I can’t seem to let it go. So here I am—stressed about a show I’ve built up in my head as career-defining and fundamental to my practice—wrestling with a painting that, at this point, is probably laughing at me. Does anyone else do this when they have other priorities? Pick the most annoying task and refuse to move on until it’s done? I know, just like with running, you need bad runs (or art days) to appreciate the good ones. But a whole month of slogging through it feels like the 50km race equivalent of desperately wanting to give up after three sets of 45-degree hills. Instead of my knees hurting and every downhill threatening a full-body tumble, I’m waiting for the moment I’ll just sit on the studio floor, stare up at what I now consider a monster of a painting, and have a good cry about it. I foresee a desperate act in my future. Maybe I’ll throw paint at it and turn it into an abstract piece. Or maybe I’ll find the mindset—and energy—for the tedious shading needed to salvage some of the congealed forest I accidentally turned into one massive bush. I know social media makes painting look like an aesthetic technicolor dream, but honestly, my time in the studio this month has felt more like wading through mud in a rainstorm—while being eaten alive by mosquitoes and deer flies.  I ripped a hole in a pair of my favorite pants while hiking the East Coast Trail. Not only did I shred my pants—I shredded my knee, too, and had to go to the hospital. For the rest of that trip, I walked around with duct tape over the hole, determined to fix the fabric when I got home. That was two years ago. Those same pants now sit in my closet, beside the sewing machine my grandma bought me in high school. Both collecting dust.
Why haven’t I fixed my pants? I lack the time. Time to teach myself how to use the sewing machine again. Time to problem-solve a skill I know I have but haven’t used in over 15 years. Time to set up at the kitchen table. Time to research my machine, find a YouTube video on how to set it up, and another video on how to repair the specific hole in a specific location. Our daily lives have become harder. We’re asked to do more with less time and money, all while prioritizing our health and well-being—especially if you’re a parent with kids in activities outside of school and home. Don’t forget to clean your house occasionally, have a social life, do laundry, prepare your car for each season. Feeling overwhelmed yet? That’s my theory about capitalism. The more overwhelmed and consumed you are by everything, the more exhausted you are to do anything about it. When I was teaching full-time, I was working 14-hour days. The minute I woke up, I was checking emails—because I knew I wouldn’t have time once I got to school. I got ready, drove an hour and a half (one way—who can afford to live in Burlington?), prepped my classroom, taught all morning, and then spent lunch as a dissociated zombie, usually doing café duty or supervising the art room so students could catch up on projects. Then I taught all afternoon. After that, I had 75 minutes to clean, write emails, mark, call parents, or get pulled into another classroom for supervision. Then I’d drive home—another hour and a half—walk my velociraptor of a puppy, eat dinner, and start planning the next day’s lessons. If I was lucky, I got to bed by 10:30 pm, just to do it all over again. During that time, I had no social life. I didn’t take care of myself physically. Saturday was the only day I could see my husband. Sunday was for cleaning. I had no time. No energy. If anything went wrong—like car troubles—it felt like the end of the world. I’d burst into tears, completely overwhelmed by what should have been a small inconvenience. I didn’t know how unhealthy I was. I didn’t know how unsustainable that life had become. Car troubles happen. So do family deaths and puppy blues. These are normal parts of life. But when they happen while you’re already operating at max capacity, it breaks you. I had to take a stress leave. Before I was even 30, I hit a wall. I needed the world to stop. And what about everyone else? People who feel the same way? Maybe they don’t work 14-hour days or carry their job's emotional baggage the way I did. But they still don’t have the time or energy to think, problem-solve, or sit down—let alone fix their damn pants. Now add social media to the mix. Algorithms steal the time and energy out of your cultural consumption. Too tired to find music? No problem. The algorithm gives you the most broadly liked, least offensive songs. It’s not exactly what you want, but it’s not bad enough to change. Looking for a coffee shop? Google Maps knows you’ve been to Starbucks 20 times this year—it’ll send you to the closest one, even if there’s an indie spot a block away. Algorithms make decisions for you, so you don’t have to. Sounds convenient, maybe even utopian. But think of all the music or coffee shops you could have discovered if you had the time and energy to search yourself. One of those might have changed your day—or your life. Maybe that’s where you’d run into an old friend. Maybe that unfamiliar song becomes your new favorite. Since leaving teaching, I’ve reevaluated my life, meticulously. I’m more thoughtful about how I eat—less meat. More thoughtful about my mental health—I finally addressed my anxiety and underlying depression through therapy. More thoughtful about what I buy—do I really need another bathing suit? I swim five times a year. More thoughtful about how I spend my time and energy—burnout, it turns out, takes years to recover from. I’m still recovering. I think about what kinds of decisions people would make if they had the time and energy to make them. And I recognize my privilege: If I had kids, I wouldn’t have been able to leave teaching. If I didn’t have a supportive spouse, I’d still be teaching. If we didn’t make enough between us, I’d still be teaching. I think about all the teachers I’ve spoken with since who wish they could quit but can’t—because of kids, finances, or both. I think about parents who are burnt out from jobs they can’t afford to leave. We’re all tired. So many of us are burnt out before we even hit 40. I see a problem—a big one. And it’s being fed by companies, governments, and social media. Capitalism steals our time. When we have less time, we have less energy to care, to think, to analyze. And when we have less energy to care, we seek easy solutions—solutions sold to us through targeted ads and data mining, down to the creepy feeling that your Alexa or Google Home is listening. We used to have a Google Home on every floor of our house. We love music, so it made sense. But we started noticing weird things—it would start talking randomly during board games, lights flashing when we were mid-conversation. Our ads got eerily specific, tailored to whatever we had just talked about. So we tested it. And what we found was uncanny. Now we only use it as a speaker—with the microphone off. And those oddly specific ads? Gone. Evan Puschak, in his essay “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind,” writes that we no longer spend time discussing what we experience because: “The internet isn’t interested in those gaps, those moments of reflection or conversation.” That isn’t just about the internet. That’s how daily life works now. While Puschak says the internet “obliterates the time between experiences,” I think the expectations of modern life do the same. He also writes: “The internet of today, designed to make you a permanent input, does more than just steal time from you; it erodes your agency and substitutes internet-awareness for self-awareness. Those are the three things—time, agency, and self-awareness—that we use to construct our identities. Without them, sense of self weakens, identity destabilizes, and the result is what we see in the research and feel in ourselves: stress, anxiety, or worse.” When I read that, everything stopped. I sat in bed rereading the paragraph over and over again. I think Puschak is one point away from the full picture: Who controls the internet? Not the government—they’re years behind on policies to protect citizens. My theory, in all its simplicity, is this: late-stage capitalism. Our world revolves around money. Not through quality products anymore—but through cutting corners, planned obsolescence, cheaper materials, and most of all: profiting off your exhaustion, your lack of time, and your inability to think your way to a better solution. Of course, this is just a theory—one filled with confirmation bias. I know I’m seeing others online say the same things, and maybe I’m missing another perspective. I probably am. But maybe you’re reading this, sitting in bed, and thinking to yourself: “FUUUCCCCCKKKKK.” Because all of a sudden… it makes sense to you too. Puschak, Evan. Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions. Atria Books. Kindle Edition. |
Katherine PercivalArtist, educator and consumer of culture! Archives
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