I was a creative kid. Counsellors in high school suggested a career in art, and it seemed a natural choice. I did my first year at the Alberta College of Art and Design, but I fell in love with Vancouver and transferred to Emily Carr.
Doing a general Fine Arts degree is nice because you can take a little bit of everything. I did mostly printmaking and a little bit of sculpture. It’s nice that in your first year you have to take a lot of different classes. When I started art school, I was thinking of maybe studying photography. I took one photography class and didn’t like it at all. Go in with an open mind; there are so many options.
The community was amazing. I’m still in touch with a lot of people I graduated with. I think that everything I learned about aesthetics and design I learned in school. I learned problem-solving skills and how to think critically. That said, when I was there, the school didn’t focus much on the practical side of the arts. More classes in grant-writing and business would have been useful.
When you’re at art school, you have all of these facilities, like printmaking shops and welding workshops. When you graduate, you’re usually broke and you end up having to do whatever you can, which is usually a lot of drawing, and simple things that don’t require a lot of facilities. I didn’t do a lot of drawing until after I graduated.
I also started doing a lot of screen-printing, and started doing the craft fair market. The business was a logical fit, because things were going so well in the craft scene. Also, I really enjoy mass-producing things. You can only do that for so long before you have to get rid of some of it. There are a lot of opportunities for students starting businesses,—for example, there are government and small business loans. I’d recommend that people take advantage of that kind of thing.
I’m focused more on the business than my art now. We produce a lot of handmade things. I didn’t take any design classes at Emily Carr, but that’s mostly what I ended up doing, designing a lot of products, packaging and cards. It’s still very creative, but it wasn’t the path I expected to take when I left school.
