Paintings of 2026: Spring and Summer
I don't know if painting is the smartest thing to do.
2026 brought with it a foothold in the fine art world, a welcome change from adapting AI-generated logos so that companies could say human hands touched their marketing material.
This is not to say that all graphic design work has been meaningless. I have an ongoing contract with CMHA Nova Scotia to develop educational material for their hands-on mental health workshops, and the experience of working with them has been great.
The problem with graphic design is that the values of the company really matter, and sometimes the written values don't match the practice.
Fine art is different.
Painting relies on my vision and skill – both of which can be refined gradually over time. Drawing and painting is what gave me confidence in myself for the first time, 7 years ago, when I was still deep in the alien landscape of schizophrenia recovery.
Painting allows me to work with the whole, the sum of my parts. I don't have to shrink or conform. I can be mentally ill. I can rest my body or pursue an obsession, in equal measure.
It's this freedom that has forced me to confront a very real concern in my life, which is to learn how to trust in...what exactly? The universe? My community? Myself? And just get on with it. Make my silly little marketing videos, apply for funding, and paint.
Reference and self-reference
Learning how to see the world over and over again has led to some interesting moments in time. I find myself capturing reference photos during my commute or during travel to other parts of the province. My camera has become a dutiful sidekick.
Something about capturing reference images forces me to examine the differences between the world within psychosis and the world outside of it.
In many ways, psychosis creates compositions, just like a work of art.
But there's a voyeuristic and nuanced quality to carrying multiple frames of reference with me at all times. There's the composition my camera captured, the composition in "real life" (whatever we want to call consensus reality) and the composition that schizophrenia enables me to examine.
Merging overlapping layers of psycho-spiritual memory, emotion, and consensus reality is my goal. I do it imperfectly. Sometimes I am practicing the skill and technique of painting, and other times I am capturing something internal. Sometimes both, and sometimes neither.
Sometimes, the work is more explicitly psychotic, like "Derealization" (above), which during the making of, I experienced a strange and sudden depersonalization process. I began to feel like a non-person. Just an entity experiencing the weight of the present moment, every second on the clock felt within my bones.
"Snow Crab Sunrise" and "Tiny Mountain Valley" are my first foray into painting miniature works, allowing me to build up layers of impasto technique quickly. 5x5 inch canvases allow me to land on compositional choices immediately and confidently.
"Procession" was my first successful oil impasto painting, and it nearly made me quit. Oil is notoriously difficult to get right, and there's a "messy middle" stage to oils that lasted for many hours while working on this. "Procession" was painted after laying our matriarchal grandmother to rest at High Head trail in Nova Scotia.
Throughout this painting, I lost sight of my process many times. Eventually I realized I was painting my grief.
On a more joyful note, my paternal Greek grandmother is alive and well, and so I shipped this watercolour with my parents (who leave for Greece today) for her. She has always been a huge supporter of my work, and shipping to Greece is exceptionally difficult, so I was glad I could pack something small and flat for her.
Thank you to all my subscribers, supporters, family and friends. I couldn't do it without you.
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