During the Oakville Art in the Park show, one of the patrons asked me about more specifics to my description in my bio about being referenced about being influenced by Japanese anime. I could’ve expected that this kind of question would’ve been asked.

That said, it made me wonder what exactly my work drew from the influences that I knew I had grown up with. My immediate thought was Studio Ghibli, the makers of Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro. However, it was hard for me to pinpoint if there were actual indications of the anime studio within my paintings.

For instance, my paintings don’t have a lot of characters with in it. A lot of my recent work is of scenery and the persons are accessories.

Growing up with North American Anime

That said, there’s no doubt that anime art has influenced me. I grew up drawing Zelda characters and later branched on to develop my own character design. Like any North American child, I grew up watching Pokémon, Sailor Moon, and the occasional “real anime” like Visions of Escaflowne and Dragon Ball Z. I still create fan art even today.

It is these times in our teenage years when we are the most impressionable. I think back to the book called Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, where the author insists that everyone can indeed draw. There is an an original drawing portrait that each student creates. It shows the level of skill that that artist has originally as a benchmark. Sadly, each of those drawings also are monuments to the time in that person-child’s life when they were discouraged from drawing. They gave up at that age.

I too stopped drawing at one point. I went to university and as good grades were my currency, I focus on those rather than my creative pursuits.

Anime art online provided me with art mentors

But before even that I had support. In my teenage years, there were instructional websites where I learned how to draw in an anime style. These were critical to my formation, given that anime art is drawn with a more realistic style with someone proportional, drawing of figures.

There was one site called Baka Neko (“stupid cat” in Japanese), which had anime art tutorials. There were online web drawing platforms and forums, where you could submit your art that you draw, and others would be able to provide (usually) kind feedback. The encouragement from anonymous strangers online saw me through my art.

I then had created personal websites coded by my own hand where I had put on my artwork. I had folders on my computers that contains artwork that I had collected, scoured online. These were my true inspiration to become like one of these artists. I still remember a computer illustration of two children in the sunset, looking upon a world of a jungle, and the delight in their eyes caught on the glistening sunlight. That to me, was the epitome of what I wanted to create. (Does anyone know what this is? It had a name like “Kurogimi” or something like this).

Art found a way to sneak back into my life.

Montreal shaped me daily with modern and Renoir art

Later on when I moved to Montreal, I kept coming across on my daily walks to school the art store Deserres. Montreal also has a thriving art scene. I absorbed the art through my pores for every gallery that I visited, every Nuit Blanche, that I attended, every random scene in the mall that had an art installation. Galleries of impressionist paintings like Renoir were available for free.

We had to study Renoir in our high school French class. For some reason, perhaps by chance, Pierre-Augustus Renoir was the one that we were assigned. I love the flow of his brush strokes. There was a print in my childhood dentist’s office of the Ball de Moulin de la Galette. Every time I had to sit there in the waiting room, I looked up on those strokes, and the gaiety that was within the scene of the woman in black in the front.

When does an art style become one’s own?

At some point one’s influences becomes one’s own. It is for every artist to take what they have been influenced by and create something new. It is interesting for me to declare my own influences. When I read about every musician, they tend to have some other musician that they have in mind as their own influences. It is almost as if my own art becomes part of the whole art stage, and as that quote by Shakespeare, I am a player.

I hesitate in calling myself a “mere player” as the true saying goes. In fact, I likely believe that I will only ever be a mere player, but I am content in that.

I suspect my art isn’t really that distinct a style, but I have heard from others that there is something that is able to distinguish it to be my own style.

Maybe it’s like being a fish in water. I can’t really tell myself of my own style is, just like I can’t tell my own accent in speaking. But it exists. There is something to my own work that comes across and at some point, hopefully it becomes its own.