An introduction to The Keeper

2025 has been a reflection year for me so far. I’ve slowed down and created less paintings, but pieces I am really falling in love with. Since covid and the 2020 shutdown when I lost my job, so much of my focus had been on figuring out WHAT I wanted to paint and what I’m trying to say. As great as it is to focus on those things, though, I can’t help but think it might have been easier to calm down a little bit and just focus on making things that I like.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you probably already know I’ve dabbled in still life, sunsets and cloud paintings, vibrant portraits and mythical-inspired art nouveau figures. I love the work I’ve made and the progress that’s come with it, but I’ve been working on something that feels like a really great direction.

In June 2025, I will have my first ever solo exhibition through the Langley Arts Council, and another one in New Westminster the following January. It is a super exciting next step for me, and as I venture into this new territory, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. As I said, it’s a reflection year for me and so far its brought me to a place where I am looking to the past a lot and thinking about all of the things that make me me. Despite my wedding in 2024, it was a rough year. I lost a family member that was very close to me in a way that feels very unresolved, and I also lost my beloved dog a few months later, and these losses brought a lot of other feels to the surface. It’s hard to know how to celebrate a new chapter in life amid all of that.

This probably seems very unrelated, but I promise it’s going somewhere.

I am working on a new painting series that explores a lot of these things, and its acted as a sort of therapy for me so far, and I hope to continue that. The first painting in this series, The Keeper No, 1, came about first in the summer when I was sketching ideas for a poster contest for the Richmond Maritime Festival. I had a lot of ideas, and they all contained a lot of fish, sprinkled around sort of like flower petals in the paintings. I liked it a lot, but when I submitted my ideas, I was told I missed the deadline. I swear it was on time, but it is what it is.

Anyway, the painting ideas sat around for a few months, until January when I was finding it hard to care anymore about the mythology painting ideas I had scribbled about only a few months earlier. I love mythology and storytelling, but I felt so disconnected to these ideas. Maybe because they’re not my stories, or maybe because they exist with or without my input. It seemed irrelevant.

I grabbed one of the sketches I had done for the previous poster contest and whipped out some paper I used only once for a past painting, determined to give it another chance and see if I liked the paper. I think the key here was that I assumed I would throw out the painting afterwards, or at the very least it would never see the outside world.

I showed you some of the progress pictures for this, and if you remember the “booger-like” substance I had on there was also part of the experiment because previously I had ruined a painting by using masking fluid on a paper that couldn’t handle the pressure. So I was giving it a shot. The progress pictures of that painting weren’t too impressive, so you can imagine my own feelings of doubt during the process. BUT if you remember, it was a throwaway! So I didn’t concern myself.

Fast forward a few weeks: it’s now one of my most favourite pieces and after a deep dive into the imagery and how I felt while painting it, it’s become the first in my new series about The Keeper. So let me tell you a bit about her:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden; the words we never say, the memories we tuck away, the things we grieve quietly, without even realizing it.

And that’s where The Keeper came from.

She’s not just a character. She’s a symbol for something I think we all carry inside us. A hidden self that takes on a lot of what we don’t feel like dealing with day-to-day. She is the part of us that gently holds our dreams, our sadnesses, our joy and grief and softness, all at once. She’s the guardian of the things we aren’t ready to say yet. The feelings we don’t always have language for.

The Keeper watches over them, keeps them safe, makes sure their light doesn’t go out—until we’re ready to let them out or let them go.

I think we all need a keeper. And maybe, at some level, we already have one.

I didn’t set out to create her. She sort of appeared on her own—quietly, steadily—through sketches and stories that I kept coming back to. In some ways, she feels like the part of me I return to when I don’t have words for what I’m feeling.

She reminds me that even the quietest things matter. That being tender is a kind of strength.