Serenity

During my early years of discovering myself, I often felt that I had a different worldview than most people, and it wasn’t simply due to the fact that I am a visually impaired individual. My worldview was made of layers of what would later make me the artist that I am today.

I was the child that you found building tree houses and spending most of my time up there atop my second home. During these years, I spent 70% of my day in an imaginary world; an imaginary world of safe places I created in my mind to escape to when things on the outside were too much.

So where does art play a role here? You see, those safe places I made in my mind are the images I now draw and paint. Over 100 places in my mind that I now am ready to share with the world. I started really diving into my artistic abilities back in high school around the age of 14. I remember one of the first art classes I had was a lesson on painting in which I grabbed a canvas and red paint and splashed the whole canvas with red as if to say my mind is bleeding everywhere. That was the day I realized that art was my way of expressing my deep engrained pain that words could never tell. A few splashes of red paint told a lot.

I started my creative journey with both visual arts, and creative writing. At 15 years old, I had already accumulated many art pieces into an art folder and by age 21 I had published 4 poems and received the award of “Great Poets Across America”. During the years that followed up until 2016, I sold many of my art pieces at local events in Ottawa, and other organizations like The Canadian Mental Health Association, Salus Fisher, Centertown Community Health Centre, Hopewell, and Support Snaps. People seemed to always gravitate towards my pieces, and I often wondered why they even bothered as I simply did not see the value in my artistic talent. However, as the years went by, I realized that the reason people wanted to look at my art is because it triggered emotions in them. I realized that my art spoke of a silent story that many of us humans are too afraid to share with the world because allowing ourselves to be vulnerable was too scary. I share my journey, adversity, and suffering through my art whether it be with a paint brush to share images, or with words. In the past 13 years I have done many public speaking events where I shared my story including an even at City Hull here in Ottawa. I spent 13 long years battling my own demons of Anorexia, Addiction, Depression, and Anxiety. My escape was always through creative arts. When I felt like I was losing my identity to my illnesses, I picked up the brush again and was reminded that no matter what my eating disorder or the drug took away from me, it will not take my creativity away from me. My identity revolves around art, and it will always be that way. In fact, many of those years where I grew as an artist, I was sitting on a hospital bed with an IV in my left arm and a paint brush in my right.

My story isn’t over yet and I would like to keep sharing my journey through my art with the world, because perhaps those safe places I paint may become someone else’s safe places like they were mine when I needed them.