Facing your fears through art: Meet Toronto’s monster illustrator

This exhibition is featuring 50 of my best monsters, best pieces that I've created over the last 10 years. I have been drawing and painting monsters based on prompts from the audience. Tell me a little bit more about these monsters and these prompts. What kind of prompts are people giving you? It started with my kids giving me prompts because we were traveling and they were really bored and they saw me with a sketchbook they at the time I guess didn't realize that I could sketch so they asked me to draw something for them and they asked me to draw the monsters a lot of times people would give you visual prompts you know how many limbs like textures colors I have been given prompts by people who have had dreams like fever fever dreams and in those cases which is very memorable actually what's happened is that the person would describe a fever dream that they've been having for sometimes years. I have heard from people who said you have given my nightmare a face and I'm no longer afraid of it because it was in the dark and it all lived inside my head and now it's found a place where it exists with your help and then I can look at it and confront it and it's no longer a threat. As you can see my paintings are very whimsical and a little bit oddbally kind of and not horror based. Something about the gallery also you should know is that we only promote joy and whimsy. It's something that we feel strongly about and when I look at Ina's work and it makes me laugh, it makes us joyous. We have shows every two weeks. It sounds crazy but it works we don't have enough art spaces for artists in the city and I want to pack them in and basically we have. What do you hope people think about or talk about after they've come and experienced this exhibit? I hope that people feel encouraged to reach out and if they want me to make their own personal monster and I also would like them to believe that they you know we all have an imagination that's that's one thing we all have in common we have an imagination and so instead of saying I'm not creative I can't do I'm not an artist I can't imagine that's just not true we all can imagine and so I hope it opens people up a little bit to the possibility of oh you know I I guess I could be creative in the right environment because the my whole process is about co-creation which for an artist is very rare. My art can only exist with you with your participation so that's the best part is that you sort of come to a very vulnerable place where we imagine together it's a very intimate exchange and the result is a very tangible piece of art that has both you and me in it. On the surface it looks very silly and just kind of frivolous oh you know anybody can draw a monster but it is that sort of emotional and intimate engagement that makes me come back to it and I and I just hope to bring more people into it if I could I would draw a monster for every single person out there okay so when I was little I was like really scared of tornadoes so if I could summarize that into five words tornadoes hiding in the basement that's That's perfect, so I'm just going to give him pants, okay? I could see how this could alleviate my fear of tornadoes because he has feelings too. That's right, he's got locked up in the basement.