Basically, I am a small town girl with big city wishes. I have worked long and hard to get to where I am today and beat all the odds against me. I have dreams of owning and running my own art gallery and retiring to a desert retreat to paint and listen to classic music. And I always believed that if you could dream it, you could do it. So I guess I am going to do it, right?
I was born November 29, 1970 in Sudbury, Ontario at the General Hospital, first child/grandchild. My parents, Marion and Rob, had my sister, Kristal, in January of 1975.
As children, our family moved around Canada a lot... from Ottawa to Sudbury, to Stewart, BC and Grand Cache, AB. We averaged 1 year per city until I was 14. We then settled down in Val Caron, ON... about 20 minutes East of Sudbury. I attended Confederation Secondary School until grade 11, which is when I left the Sudbury area, returned to Ottawa and gave birth to my daughter, Aimee Megan Bastien, on April 3, 1987... I was 16 years old. Needless to say, things were not easy for us. I did have tutors while I was pregnant, and continued with correspondence courses after to complete my high school. I have always known how important your education is.
On March 19, 1998, my baby sister Kristal was hit and killed by a car... I returned to Sudbury to be the best daughter I could be to my parents. And to try and be the best possible mom to my daugher. I worked as a waitress, bartender, office clerk, executive assistant, photographers assistant, enclycopedia salesman, all while I was finishing my high school. Once I did that, I took a Drafting course, thinking I wanted to be an architect... but that plan lost interest quickly. So, I wasn't sure what I should do.... some people I worked for had made me promise to go to college, as they said "you are too smart not to go". So I did.
I have to apologize for my somewhat "Ten feet tall and bulletproof" attitude, but graduating high school, let alone college and university after becoming a mother at 16 is quite a feat, as well as beating cancer....twice. It leaves you with a very strong sense of being.... a sense of accomplishment like no other. Currently, I am working too much... aside from trying to get my paintings done, I work as a secretary during the day, I am an on-call clown who paints faces and makes balloon animals, I am responsible for signing new musical talent and all art direction for a recording/management studio, and I have just opened up my own creative services company called "Crayons". Check the links page to see those aspects of my life.... As for influences, artistic or not.... I have so many. Artistic influences stem from a painting I saw as a child by Lawren Harris, one of the Group of Seven...continuing on through such artists as Salvador Dali, Georges Seurat, Paul Gaugin, Albrecht Durher, Edvard Munch, Kandinsky, M.C. Escher, H.R. Giger, Georgia O'Keefe, Henri Rousseau and most recently, Claude Thiberge. I guess I am an abstract meets impressionist kind of painter....all I know is my passion commands me to do this. I hope you enjoy my creations as much as I did creating them. |
