Being a visual artist is really all about seeing things as they are below the surface, below your conceptual mind. You learned to create visual shortcuts in school from about the age of 11, when abstract thinking became more important than seeing. So you created shortcut images in your mind for the everyday world. When you heard the word dog, you immediately conjured up an image of a hot dog with ears, a tail and four stick legs. Then your mind did not have to linger any longer on the image. You knew what the other person was referring to. Unfortunately due to the fact that left-brained activities became the most important through your school career and later on, you stopped really seeing altogether.
Drawing is really about learning how to see light and dark shadows and the edges of things, contour lines. Most people never pay attention to these things preferring to use their symbols conjured up in there minds.
When I taught adults art, who were beginners and did not have time to go through four years of art college and learn technique, I would teach them to see and think like an artist instead. Often times they were able to draw a decent self-portrait after eight lessons, instead of four years of school.
Why you ask? Because they learned how to really see what was there.
One of my exercises was to have them view a white bland coffee mug for ten minutes without thinking about anything else, a sort of mindfulness meditation. At first they struggled due to an overactive mundane mind, thinking to themselves “how boring, I came to learn to draw faces, not white mugs.” But with encouragement they overcame their resistance and started to become involved in the seeing itself. One of the reasons they struggled is because they were used to being primarily in their left brain with the kinds of activities demanded of them in their everyday life. The extreme left side of the brain functions in a very fast way, needing more and more stimulation and being easily bored, needing constant novelty. Thus the technological fast-paced age is born, feeding that need.
To help my students pop over more to the right side of their brain, they needed to stay with their feelings of boredom until the left side gave up (apparently it gives up only in times of boredom or shock and I could not bring a gun to class) and the right side to take over a more leadership function.
Things would suddenly change and people began to get excited about the activity and find meaning in it. People who insist we always use both sides of the brain maybe are correct but we need to understand that the brain is vast and unexplored and it is useful to talk about the continuum line, where activities are placed, to understand how we can have more control of the brain. There is a lot of research on this topic I won't go into, just share my own experience of how to move people from an uncreative way of perceiving the world to a creative one.
What happened next astonished them. All of a sudden they began to enjoy what they were doing and were able to see more and more of what the cup actually represented, in other words they saw more than just the cup, plus the cup as is, and they felt wonderful doing it.
I used to tell them if they actually looked at their partners and children and pets in the same way, life would be nothing but adventure and a miracle for them. Unfortunately after the initial honeymoon we start imagining we know our partners inside out, have a shortcut version of them in our minds and actually stop seeing them at all.
Out of touch with our senses, imprisoned in our conceptual mind we also stop feeling and need more and more stimulation to know we are alive. It is no wonder porn is big business.
The adults in my classes did not necessarily become professional artists but their lives started to change, they learned to enjoy and appreciate every moment of their existence, they become more tolerant, less judgemental and saw the world as mostly beautiful. That is what really seeing will do for you.

I was born in Poland and have lived half my life here, in Toronto. Both countries have influenced and shaped my art, for better or worse. But, mostly it has been introverted meditation and silence that gave birth to the images in my paintings, telling a story of my inner worlds.

Also I am a keen observer of life and people and have attempted to share my observations by painting mainly women. Many Strings symbolize our connectedness to all of life and each other. We can not exist as isolated beings, divorced from Nature or even ourselves. I am a seeker of what is real and true, even if ultimately it does not exist.

There is too much pretence and role playing in our worlds, false opinions that cause us to war with each other about who is right and which country and religion. In all this, love is lost. The heart has become a mere superficial iconic symbol on social media.
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I ask whether by clicking on countless hearts on the web we have become superficial and depthless humans, careless about the plight and suffering of our fellow men and women.

The American Dream has become a Nightmare. We need a new paradigm for our economy.

Lets talk about post corporate and extreme capitalism life. How can new companies actually look. They would be based on a cooperative model of profit sharing and decision making and co-creation.

I used to do creativity workshops in businesses and there is possible a different paradigm in business based on Generative rather than Consumption Oriented Community. Companies as arenas for creativity and cooperation with an organizational structure that eliminates hierarchy.

And establishes instead a collaborative process of problem-solving, goal setting, personal growth and profit sharing, and profits that come back to the company. Capitalism needs to change if we are to survive.
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The visible difference between the corporation of the future and its present-day counterpart will not be the products they make or the equipment they use but who will be working, how they will be working, why they will be working and what work will mean to them.

Thinking about how our society, especially America has become so amoral in recent times, makes me realize that people are simply not spiritual and enlightened enough to live without religion. They need the laws to choose to do the right thing. But of course besides guidance and a certain safety that religion provides there is also the cult of the other, the different, which needs to to be vilified. So besides love, religion teaches hate.

Social media has become increasingly a new venue for amorality. For example before there were strip clubs that men occasionally attended but now porn is at the touch of your button with you every minute. It is much harder to fight temptation without external guidance and a belief in a Universe that does not condone porn...
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Maybe only a discovery of your own inner goodness and moral backbone is all there is for now.

H​I read a while back, when Norval Morrisseau, who in the 90's was the only Canadian artist known in Paris, was told by the National Gallery when he tried to donate a work, that he should try the Heritage Museum. Norval Morrisseau responded with, "I'm not dead yet".

The white man's guilt for being racists and general schmucks towards black and indigenous people is now causing a backlash of what I think stupid decisions. The point is to open up the art venues in Canada to be more inclusive and accepting of black artists and indigenous artists and women (yes still women are way behind in being included).

Instead they are creating separate venues for black artists and separate again for indigenous artists. Nothing for women artists.
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What this will create is an art ghetto situation, where once again the art powers at be will only show male white artists and they will contimue to dominate, while the poor second cousins will continue to be poor. And racism will continue as is.

​I don't know about you but I paint over my paintings regularly as I just can't afford new canvasses everytime I have a new idea. Then I usually say goodbye to the old one and proceed.
It occurred to me that, that is what Tibetan Monks do when they make sand paintings. They work for days to make a beautiful mandala with coloured sand, then at the end blow it all away.
A reminder of impermanence of life as we know it.