"The formula stays. The confidence is a work in progress." How I Price My Work I price my paintings using a formula: materials plus an hourly rate based on the medium, with a small addition for commissioned work. Acrylics I price at $45 an hour. Watercolour at $25 because I'm still developing in that medium and I don't think it's fair to charge for learning time I'm still accumulating. Studies and demo pieces get minimum wage because that's honest about what they are. On pape

"By the time I finished I could think again." Painting as Anxiety Management I have high functioning anxiety. It's rooted in PTSD from experiences I've written about elsewhere and won't repeat here. What matters for this post is what I've found that works. Painting works. Not in a vague wellness way. Specifically and mechanically. When my nervous system is dysregulated, when the anxiety is running and the thoughts are circular and nothing is resolving, picking up a brush forc

"The work happens in the margins. It always has. I've stopped apologizing for that." What Shift Work Does to a Creative Practice I work three days, three nights, and six days off. Except getting that six off is never a guarantee. Add in travel and football and time turns into my most valuable asset. On paper this schedule should be terrible for a creative artistic practice. And in some ways it is. There's no consistent rhythm or flow. I have no reliable window of when I will

"I am making the work she didn't get to see me make." My Mother's Paintings My mother was a painter. Margaret Morisette. Impressionistic landscapes, oil on canvas, the kind of work that had an elegance to the brushwork that I didn't fully understand when I was a child sitting beside her watching. Looking back now, with painter's eyes, I can see she was classically trained. The way she handled light. The economy of her marks. Nobody self-teaches that kind of control. There was

"Paris isn't Paris because of the city. It's the people you find inside it." What Paris Actually Feels Like I hated Paris the first time. I want to be honest about that because the mythology around Paris is so thick that admitting you hated it feels almost like a character flaw. But I did. It was overwhelming and loud and I couldn't speak much french and everyone seemed to already know where they were going and I did not. What changed it for me was the people. Paris isn't Par

"He lost interest. I didn't." Learning Guitar Badly and Why I Keep Going I started learning guitar during COVID because my son wanted to learn. He lost interest quickly. I didn't. This is probably a personality trait at this point. I pick things up because someone else is interested and then they leave and I stay. The guitar sat in the corner after he moved on and I kept picking it up whenever I had a spare moment, figuring out chords, playing badly, playing slightly less bad

"The market corrected me." The Painting That Wouldn't Sell My “Winter Tree" painting had been sitting in my shop for a while. Nobody touched it. I finally put it on sale at $35 and still no one looked at it. I had painted it during a Fort McMurray deep freeze. The kind that seeps into your bones and it physically hurts your face every time you go outside. If you ever felt anything minus thirty or below you know what I'm talking about. It's the kind of cold that makes you ques

"The first time I tried to find Grease Monkey I never made it on time. Budapest kept interrupting me." The Budapest Garden He stood me up again in Budapest. I won't get into the details because they don't really matter and also because he reads these occasionally and I'd like to keep him humble. What matters is I was alone in Budapest with a free afternoon I hadn't planned for. The normal thing to do would have been to go back to the apartment and sulk or go on a rant in a fi

"If I hadn't put my heart out there despite every reasonable objection, I would never have found that garden." The Budapest Garden He stood me up again in Budapest. I won't get into the details because they don't really matter and also because he reads these occasionally and I'd like to keep him humble. What matters is I was alone in Budapest with a free afternoon I hadn't planned for. The normal thing to do would have been to go back to the apartment and sulk or go on a rant

"People at the Fort McMurray art market call me the fruit lady. I've made peace with it." Why I Paint Fruit People at the Fort McMurray art market call me the fruit lady. I smile every time I say that. I didn't set out to be the fruit lady. It happened gradually, an orange here, some grapes there, a bowl of cherries that turned into a series. At some point the pattern became undeniable and now it's just part of who I am as a painter. The fruit lady. I actually quite enjoy it.