I made a thing.

And that thing surprised me.

I stopped making visual work a year or so after graduating from RISD after a stimulating and rewarding, and also chaotic and bruising educational experience. (I was too young, too lacking in confidence, for the omnishambles of art school).

It took the pandemic—being locked down for eight months in Toronto—to start sketching and painting again. I mostly used it as a form of journaling, to record my everyday experience, and to still my mind. Making visual art can be a form of meditation in the way that writing never can.

It had not occurred to me to make anything of my visual journals till a friend, Sujata Berry, pressed Leanne Shapton’s books into my hands and told me to try to mix the visual and the written.

If you don’t know Leanne Shapton’s work, do look it up. She doesn’t subordinate one medium to the other. Her visual images aren’t just illustrations of the text. Rather, the visual and written forms accompany each other, and add up to a whole.

I admired that. I kept sketching and painting. And I began to think about how I might bring my journals into my main creative practice.

My first attempt was published in Globe and Mail on May 11, 2024. The online version is available through this link, and the paper version—a two-page spread—is below.

I’ll be honest, I was surprised a piece with such a handmade arts-and-crafts vibe made it to the Globe and Mail. I was thrilled, of course. And I began to think about how I might make mixed-media work again, and how I might develop and deepen my aesthetics as I continue.

For now I’m just thankful that I got to pull together my first graphic essay. Thank you to everyone who inspired it, and of course to my partner Daniel for taking me on the oddest “dream holiday” ever.