Back in 2005/2006, when I was taking courses at Toronto School of Art, I had weekly portrait and figure painting sessions (both!). It was a great experience as I got to try so many ways of working with paint and with representation – all quite apart from the course content I have to say!

The discoveries I made then continue to influence me now.

The painting here is entitled 'What Remains' and was painted from life during one of these classes.

The canvas is 30" x 10", a pretty extreme proportion, one I took on as a challenge, to see how to compose for it successfully.

I started with a dark ground (base layer), which worked well with the strong directional lighting used for this pose. That made the shadows very dark, though (never one to be limited by mere reality!) I lightened some areas just as I put strong colour in some areas, to draw the eye and make this a painterly experience not one of just recording.

Something else I was playing with here was the paint. I made it into a semi-transparent glaze (acrylic), which creates greater depth than opaque paint. I combined that with experimenting with the marks I used to build up the solids (or semi-solids).

​The paint marks I used created a lot of surface movement (her flesh doesn't sit still even though she does) and a mottled effect that led to the title, as I thought it could suggest, not just decay but more philosophically, the dissolution of what began as solid. Like life!

Have you ever commissioned a portrait? If not of yourself or a family member, then maybe of a pet or even your house?

Most people haven’t. And I’m not surprised. It’s not because they’re expensive, they can be, but so can entertainment systems that become obsolete while the portrait remains just as valuable, just as meaningful, as ever. They can also be very affordable, depending on the artist, and bearing in mind that each portrait is a bespoke (custom-made) item, usually hand-made and often with tremendous skill as well.

But seriously, most people have either never thought of commissioning a portrait or ruled it out for some reason.

Now imagine that I show up in your Facebook newsfeed or your Twitter feed, asking you to tell me the name of one of your hero(ine)s, so that I can draw them. When I’m done, I’ll share it on social media, tagging you in the post and asking you to share it with your online friends (naming me as the artist) along with a little explanation of why you chose that person as your hero.

Doesn’t that sound and feel a little different?
Fun even?

That in a nutshell is my #dailyheroes online portraiture project, a way for me to create something positive on social media without sharing videos of cats I don’t have :-) 

While the portraits are far from daily, (I find I need to do them in bursts), they have become a key part of what I bring to my online life, because of what others have brought to it. 

First of all, others bring me names, and when they do some of them share why they chose that hero(ine). It’s like being given a double gift: I get to know my friend or contact a little better and I also get to know figures (past and present) whom I may never have heard of before, or I will learn more about in my research.

Secondly, others have brought me their enthusiasm, both when bringing names and when “receiving” the drawing, and sharing them, whether they were the original commissioner or not.

I love the conversation that’s resulted, and the nascent sense of community building around it, at least for me.

So, when the producer of Night Time (a late night Rogers TV talk show) approached me about appearing in their current season, I knew which project I wanted to talk about! The segment originally aired on Friday, December 4, and will repeat. I will see if I can get a recording of it to share online.

Meanwhile, if you have a hero(ine) you’d like to share, please do so in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter (those words are live links).

I am posting the results in an album on Flickr as well.

PS: The name #dailyheroes is what's called a hashtag. For anyone unfamiliar with how those work, you can search for them in the search bar on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram for example, (you must include the "#" which is the hashtag proper) and if anyone has used the term you enter (it has to be all one word), you will be able to see the posts where they used it.

The decorative knots you see here were made years ago when I was too sick to do much of anything, even, most of the time, to make simple things, but I longed to, and every now and then I had a day when I could break through the thick, dense fog of illness to actually make something. Like these knots. 

I found these while going through stuff in my studio, trying to make space.

There's no practical reason to keep these, but they tug at me and remind me how far I've come, what a gift it is to be well.

They also remind me how powerful that urge to make is in many of us. Making time for it helps us become ourselves again.