When the Work Asks for More
Expanding the Art Practice
Over the past year, I’ve been building a new body of work. It grows from a painting practice I’ve sustained for more than fifteen years, though writing has often occupied the foreground of my creative life. Painting has lived beside it, constant and continually evolving.
When it came to my writing, I was a dog with a bone. Deeply determined. Industrious and relentless. There were stories I needed to tell. Painting became the place I returned to when the work of writing felt heavy. It helped me leave the page and let it breathe. It filled my tired heart after the long days inside difficult stories.
I needed both.
And slowly, something in me has since shifted.
Writing will always be part of me. It has shaped how I see, how I listen, how I construct meaning. It has transformed my life and my entire being. But increasingly, I feel a deeper desire to expand my creative practice through painting. Not as a departure from writing, but as a widening. The work in the studio has been asking for more space. More time. More of me.
As I shared before, this new collection of oil paintings is deeply connected to my storytelling. To my love of children’s literature and the emotional literacy I continue to explore within my writing. For a long time, I resisted painting faces because I felt vulnerable sharing them. Now I understand that is precisely why I must.
Painting requires a different kind of devotion, a surrendering. Like writing, it demands courage and trust. And the themes that have shaped my work for years, such as identity, loss and becoming—have found another language through paint. However, painting is much more physical and happens through the body, with no distance between instinct and mark, and no place to hide. The figures I paint are children, but the themes are not small. They speak to memory, belonging, and the inner life we carry long after childhood has passed. Their presence is not about audience, but about origin.
Living and working on an island offers me silence and solitude. Now, I’m ready to share in a much larger room. And, preparing to exhibit at the Artist Project in Toronto marks an expansion for me —not just geographically, but creatively. It signals the beginning of the next chapter of my painting life.
This new series reflects a deepening, not away from one identity, but toward a fuller one. I often think of the painters and writers who came before me, those who needed more than one artistic language to feel whole. I lean on their example as I take these steps forward, toward where my art is calling, and I’m so excited about what is emerging, and about the new work already taking shape in the studio.
If you’re in Toronto or the surrounding area, I would love to meet you in person and share this new collection with you at the Artist Project.
If you’re not able to attend, I look forward to sharing the experience with you here when I return.
I hope you’re also making space for creativity in your own world. Let it rest when it needs to, but don’t let it sleep for too long. There are things only you can create.
Love, Danielle xox
