Discovering My Art Practice Through Writing

How being part of Foster helped me discover my calling

The man in the camel-coloured coat pointed to a horizontal painting in a white frame. “I’ll buy that one,” he said.

I heard his words but felt like I was in a lucid dream, with my body floating in the distance at the same time. It was a physical manifestation of shock, disbelief, and utter joy all at once. I knew this day would come but I didn’t think it would be so soon. 

The exhibition manager took a red circle sticker and placed it on the painting’s label, signifying to everyone at the art fair that it had been sold.

It was my first time selling a painting and, fittingly, it was one of a woman’s back.

The best part was that this man was a total stranger, which meant he liked my work — or I had managed to flatter him to the point of purchase during the three minutes we spoke prior. Either way, it was a win for me and my budding art career. 

I’d only been painting for ten months at that point. I’d decided to take part in the exhibition because it was at my art studio and I didn’t think there was anything to lose. It was an uncurated show after all, and I thought it’d be fun because I knew most of the other artists showing their work. 

Soon after this exhibition, I effectively put all my eggs in the art basket. I decided to leave my full-time job to pursue painting with spaciousness and dedicated attention. Since then people often ask me if I’d always painted and whether it was something I always knew I wanted to do. They want to know how I got into it.

The simple answer is that through the act of writing in community, I discovered a deeply repressed desire to paint. Writing helped me awaken to the realisation that I had been harbouring something deep within me that was dormant and waiting to emerge. 

Had I known it was there? No. 

Had I repressed it consciously? Also no. 

It wasn’t a grand manoeuvre that happened one day. Nor was it a painful extraction of a desire hidden away like a disease. It just popped its head out of the ground and gave a friendly wave in my direction when the conditions became right.

To tell you about these conditions I have to go back to books. I’ve always loved books. I’ve always found deep comfort in words strung together to form an opinion or for the sake of entertainment. You’ll hardly ever find me in front of a TV; I was and am always in the company of a book instead. 

And because I’ve always loved books, I’ve always yearned to write. I wanted to share my thoughts in the same way that writers I respect do. But while I’d write every once in a while, I’d never really known how to keep going. My challenge wasn’t so much about how to write or what to write — in that arena I was blessed with abundance — it was more so about the ability to sustain a writing practice over a long period of time. 

One day through the introduction of a friend, I became a part of Foster’s global community of writers. It was like God had handed me this gift on a silver platter. Suddenly I changed from a wannabe writer who didn’t know how to keep writing into a writer who didn’t know how not to keep writing. 

I’d found my tribe: a group of people who were interrogating the hardest questions about life in the most sincere of ways. Questions of ego, trauma, healing, friendship, love, loss. Inquiry into all the -isms, from alcoholism to workaholism and beyond, were always on the table, keeping my questions around meaning, purpose, existence, and expression in good company. 

I wrote and wrote and wrote. All the things I’d left unexpressed over the years poured out onto Google Docs and into the hands of my community of fellow writers and editors. 

A friend once described writing as a psychoactive process, and I believe it to be true. “Psychoactive” is defined as having a profound or significant effect on one’s mental processes. When you write in community, fellow writers not only give you feedback on the grammar and punctuation, they also help you develop your ideas and strengthen your arguments. The last part is where psychoactive magic happens. 

Often I’d write about insecurities, questions, quasi-formed opinions, or even things I thought were facts that I’d get challenged on. And I’d be writing about my life experience — the pains, the joy, the discovery, or search for meaning, the darkness, the light, the hope, and how I made sense of it all. I would then send my work to the Foster community for content and developmental editing, where my fellow writers would encourage me to reconsider or expand or elaborate or even challenge what I’d written. 

It has time and time again been in these exact moments that I stop to think about whether I’ve gone awry in my opinions on those areas. Have I been too harsh on myself? Have I drawn conclusions based on incomplete evidence? Did some bias or trauma or past experience skew my belief and therefore my views? Was my fear warranted? Were my judgements called for? Where did I have a blind spot?

It was through the accumulation of these moments of questioning that the repressed desire to paint made itself known to me. It said, “You’ve always enjoyed life drawing,” and encouraged me to develop an art practice. It emerged and lingered so strongly that I enrolled for a summer course in painting, then another one, and then painting weekly became a core part of my life. 

Four months later in January 2023, I was painting and drawing almost every day at the art studio. Five months after that, in May 2023, I sold my first painting to that stranger in the camel-coloured coat. Two months after that, in July 2023, I handed my notice into my job (at Foster).

Just like writing, art is a form of expression that only gets better with time and dedication. My art journey is still nascent; I’ve just crossed my first year of serious practice as an artist. In that time I’ve painted about 100 paintings, which you can browse here. 

I want to walk you through this journey from the beginning. I think visual art is an expression that has a more apparent and obvious nature of its progress. 

This is the first-ever painting I did in my weekly studio practice. Just a man in a few simple colours. 

Leapfrog to a few months later, we are here. 

And then a few months later, I made the first painting that I felt truly proud of. It was my best work to date but also the first piece that showcased my style. 

In the same way, the practice of writing has the same trajectory. Consistency, time and dedication is key. 

A question I often get is, what are the parallels between my writing and art practice? I answer that writing is my medium for sense-making. Writing allows me to explore ideas and distill thoughts so that I can comprehend my place in the world. Making art is my medium for expression. It allows me to show the world who I am and share my style, process, perspective, and views.

Put simply, writing helps me understand the world, and painting allows the world to understand me.

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