Ask the Artist: How was I trained, and when did my love of art begin?

For the first installment of Ask the Artist, I am featuring a question sent in by Ruth M. from the Seattle, WA area. She writes:

What schooling did you have, and did your love of art start in your youth, like so many artists?

Great question, Ruth!

I have loved creating art for as long as I can remember. I was drawing long before I knew how to write and took every art class that was available to me between kindergarten and high school.

Portrait sketched by Martin Machacek

Drawing came naturally to me and was always a passion of mine. I decided in high school that I wanted to pursue art as a professional career. When most of my friends were applying to medical or engineering programs at university, I submitted a portfolio of sketches and drawings to the Alberta College of Art & Design (ACAD) and was accepted into their Foundation Year. This was an exhilarating time for me but was met with caution and a bit of panic from my family, who wanted to make sure I had opportunities for gainful employment after graduation. Rather than majoring in Drawing or Painting at ACAD, I decided to specialize in Visual Communications. This program was quite revolutionary at the time, bringing in noted instructors from New York and offering classes in computer graphics, not to mention promising better career options at the end. :)

One of the required courses in the VC program was Architectural Rendering. I loved this class and subsequently excelled in it. My instructor, recognizing both my enthusiasm and potential for architectural illustration, essentially took me under his wing, suggesting guilds and associations I could join to pursue this line of drawing on a professional level. I took his advice, and upon graduation from ACAD, I landed a position creating renderings for one of the most prominent architects in Calgary. I spent several years working in the field of architecture and generated extremely precise illustrations of new buildings.

Hand renderings were becoming a dying art, however, with the emergence of Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) and other digital drawing tools. I enrolled at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) to pursue specialized training in CAD, but quickly realized that I was not interested in clicking a mouse for the rest of my life. My love of drawing is what got me into architectural rendering in the first place, and it is what ultimately took me out of it and onto a new creative path in the end.

The dynamic style of paintings I have been creating for the past 10 years is certainly informed by my years of experience in the field of architecture; however, I have not taken any courses or training specifically for this style. It emerged spontaneously one day when I was looking at a cathedral reflected in a glass building, and it has grown and evolved steadily since then.

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