ArtsNB Guest blog post

I was asked to write a guest blog post about creativity for the Arts Board of New Brunswick, who have generously awarded me a grant this year to finish my novel. I chose to write about some graffiti and paintings I came across on a woodland trail in Highgate. You can read the entire piece on the ArtsNB website, but here’s an excerpt and one of the photos:

“When I went back a few days later most of the paintings I’d seen were gone, many of them painted over in a black and white series that included a single, psychedelic eye set in the socket of an alcove. All that was left of my phoenix was a piece of wing, its body painted over with crude geometric shapes. So much of what I know about art is about permanence or its illusion, from the canonical works I studied in university, to the paintings and Grecian marbles in the museums I was playing hooky on. What doesn’t strive for immortality seems fashioned for commercial ends. But here was powerful work beyond those domains, a gallery seemingly dedicated to the act of creation itself, each work transient as a hallucination, exposed to the vagaries of any passerby with a paintbrush in her hand.”