I am a planner and much of my planning skills developed from moving through the world on the seat of my wheelchair.
Going out for dinner? Call ahead to confirm that the restaurant is wheelchair accessible—and then sanity check on Google Streetview in case the person answering the phone has a weird idea of what constitutes accessibility. This type of planning ahead is baked into my existence.
I am also a dreamer and ambitious—waaaaaaay too ambitious. This is particularly evident when it comes to my creative projects.
Take as an example, my computer-animated short film, “Sir Stumpy”.
Between 2002 and 2004, I attended animation school intending to work in the rapidly growing field of animated movies. Like all animation students, I was required to produce a demo reel that I would send out to prospective employers.
But I didn’t just want a regular student reel. I was ambitious and I wanted my reel to be a full animated short film. It was going to have multiple characters, multiple sets, complex animation and so on. The reel was going to blow the minds of the studios I sent it to and they would be clamouring to hire me.
My instructors did try to talk me out of it, but I had a plan. Even though I was only a fledgling animator with virtually no experience, I figured if I just stuck to the plan I would be able to get it all done.
And then, in December 2003, I was hit by a car at a crosswalk and all my plans went out the window.
In hindsight, I can see now that I was never going to finish the entire “Sir Stumpy” short as I had envisioned it. I was trying to make a Pixar-level short film by myself when even Pixar would’ve needed a small army of artists and animators to get my short film done.
My ambition had gotten the better of me and, in the case of “Sir Stumpy”, I was far too attached to my original vision and I struggled to scale it back in a meaningful way. When I returned to school after the accident, I was able to finish roughly 90 seconds of Sir Stumpy—maybe a third of the planned film. I also wasn’t happy with the look of the film at all and I felt frustrated with the quality of the animation.
I was so disappointed with the final result that I felt too embarrassed to send it out to studios. My animation aspirations fizzled and died in the years after.
Fast forward to 2019 and I’m sitting on the cusp of getting married and my first solo art exhibit.
Once again I am up to my neck in elaborate plans. I was going to fill every wall of this huge gallery space. I was going to create multiple new paintings even while I was still holding down my full-time corporate job and planning my wedding. I did at least have the sense to re-purpose as much of my old art as possible through reproductions and canvas prints, but as the months to the exhibit opening shrank down I could feel my stress level climbing.
It was in my THRIVE Mastermind group—a mentorship group for like-minded female artists—that I was introduced to the concept of “exhibit triage”.
It could be summed up as follows:
Let go of the original vision and recognize that not everything can be saved.
What are the must-have pieces that need to go in for the exhibit to hang together?
What are the pieces that are nice-to-haves?
What pieces can be dropped entirely?
It is a hard thing to let go of a creative vision, but I quickly realized the value of this approach. Not only did it take a great deal of stress off my plate, it gave me the bandwidth to re-centre my time and energy on what was going to have the greatest impact.
And this brings us to my 2024 exhibit…
I always knew that I wanted to create a large series of paintings for this exhibit highlighting all these ordinary moments between myself and my husband.
But how many moments? How many paintings?
I knew I wanted to tell our love story, but I didn’t want to make the same mistake that I had with “Sir Stumpy” where there was a risk of a less-than-spectacular final product if I couldn’t finish the whole story. I wanted to give myself a way to triage the exhibit if I needed to and this ended up informing how the entire exhibit was conceptualized.
The paintings in the exhibit are moments without context. They are in a rough chronological order and grouped by the underlying story points they are meant to convey, but all of this is only suggested to the viewer rather than being explicitly spelled out in any way. This means that the number of paintings in each section can be expanded or collapsed as needed. Also, as I’ve been creating paintings over the past year and a half thus far, I’ve been deliberately jumping around and creating paintings from different points in the timeline to ensure that the story as a whole is covered.
Of course, when I was coming up with this idea, I couldn’t have anticipated cracking a rib last December. The injury and recovery were frustrating, but at the same time, I knew I’d built a great deal of flexibility into my ambitious plans.
Still, now that I’m fully recovered and looking at less than five months left before the exhibit opening, I have spent the last couple weeks taking a hard look and a sharp scalpel to my plans. Things that unfortunately aren’t going to make the cut:
A book version of the exhibit that I’d hoped to make available for purchase for attendees and folks who weren’t able to come to Calgary. This will get pushed out likely to 2025 or even 2026.
A 2025 calendar of my paintings that would include pieces from the exhibit. I genuinely love art calendars, but I haven’t had a chance to create one since 2022. This will also get pushed out to next year.
Audio descriptions of the different sections of paintings in the exhibit that I’d hoped to professionally record for attendees with low vision.
The decision to drop the audio descriptions this late was honestly the toughest call of all of these. While the goal has always been to create the most accessible exhibit experience possible, I recognize now that I underestimated the amount of bandwidth creating that level of experience would take. If I were to do it all again, I would hire someone with the right expertise to help shoulder the extra elements that are needed for that fully accessible exhibit experience. I am still hoping to release an audio companion to the exhibit alongside the planned book.
As for the exhibit itself, of the 44 paintings planned, I currently have 28 paintings complete and I’m working on four more simultaneously.
What will stay? What will get cut?
I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, here’s my last painting I finished. Stay tuned!
Love those bright, sunlight greens in your latest painting! (And good luck on the triage. That shit is haaaaard. Sending a big hug!)
Fascinating look at your process and progression. Thanks for sharing this. Hugely helpful in thinking about what is truly essential and the courage it takes to let some things go. Thank you! Best wishes with your preparing for your show.