When Patience Pays Off

I have always been interested in visual arts. As a child my family always knew for each major holiday that they couldn’t go wrong in gifting me a new colouring book. My sister and I used to make up games and scenarios where we treated a page in the book as though it were an assignment in our made-up school. Our favorite one was the Anne of Green Gables colouring book (we had identical ones) and I remember us acting as though dinner was the deadline to finish a page. 

As I grew older my parents enrolled us in local art classes, nothing technical, just fun ones that contained projects such as paper mâché or mixed media collages. There were only a couple of times that I took classes that focused on specifics, such as cartooning or sculpting. My mom always thought that I had a creative mind. When I first started university in business, she knew it would ultimately not satisfy my interests. I soon learned she was right and switched majors to communications and global studies. Luckily, they were ones that focused more on media and the world we live in and I am glad that those were the aspects that I continued to pursue.

On the side however, I continued to find new ways to keep art in my life. While in university I joined clubs that appealed to that. The most notable was my contributions and later management for the art and literary magazine on campus, Blueprint Magazine. Not only did I get to publish my writing, photography and artwork, but I also got to help design the final issues and shape the social media presence of the club. 

In my spare time, I tried to incorporate the more hands on aspects of visual arts and over the years I have resorted to painting as being that outlet. No teachings, and no lessons, the work that I produce are always somehow self-taught. I would give them as gifts, or my mom would take them and hang them around the house. One of them even made it onto her wall in the kitchen! Whenever someone asked me how long it took, I would always respond with 4-6 hours. They were shocked. My family would say to me that they wouldn't have the patience to sit for that long and work on one thing but for me the hours never seemed to drag, and my frustration never seemed to rise. It was as though I could keep putting paint on the canvas until I felt like it finally looked how I wanted it to. If that took hours, and meticulous detail and effort it didn't matter. At the end of the day when the paint dried and I was able to stand back and look at it, the feeling of accomplishment that ran through my body is one that drives me to want to experience it again and again.