Category: Fine Art
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A Christmas gift to myself
My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to…
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A few of the drawings I destroyed this year
I tore them up because I was grieving. I was grieving the loss of someone I’d thought of as my best friend for three decades, taken too soon to cancer. Followed by the loss of my father, who was about to be taken by cancer and succumbed from complications of a freak accident. Followed by…
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Toxic Positivity is…
Toxic positivity is someone grabbing at your chin when you’re crying over the loss of a beloved person or pet and saying “smile, everything will get better if you look on the bright side.” There’s a threshold where something stops being harmless “uplift” and becomes constant saccharine noise that dulls your perception and clutters your…
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Gustav Klimt masterpiece just shattered records this week.
Here’s why this sale matters — and where it sits in Klimt’s larger body of work. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (shown above) sold at Sotheby’s New York on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, for $236.4 million — now the highest price ever achieved for a Modern artwork at auction, and the priciest Klimt ever to cross…
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Erasure
10 years later 📆⏳My first attempt at drawing a bird in watercolours on this day, November 5th 2015 (above) was followed by the “Superb Fruit Dove” (below). This second drawing was a gift to my father and has since returned to me after his passing on November 5th 2024. I travelled to Israel to bury…
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Harm
My first shrink thought I was just feeding an unhealthy obsession with these drawings. He couldn’t grasp that I was documenting a social pathology — not just mine.
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How Nonlinear Thinkers Are Punished by Psychiatry
A reflection on imagination, trauma, and the failure of one-size-fits-all medicine. Our current psychiatric model, based on the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—is built around fitting individuals into statistical norms, and is too often punitive toward anyone who doesn’t conform to those parameters. Artists, creatives, and neurodivergent individuals are often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and treated as…
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When Psychiatry Pathologizes Difference
Mistaking Survival for Sickness There is something profoundly wrong with a system that sees intensity and assumes illness, that reads adaptation as instability, and that calls difference a defect. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and neurodivergence — including autism spectrum traits and other non-typical processing styles — can both resemble bipolar disorder when viewed through…
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Regarding My Grandiose Statements…
“Ms. Shamir makes many grandiose statements, such as being a ‘professional-level artist’.” — Psychiatric report by Doctor E.Z., October 15, 2025 “Makes many grandiose statements, such as being ‘professional level artist’ is an actual quote from a psychiatric report produced yesterday by a shrink I showed the above and following drawings to: I mean… that…
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Calm as can be.
Monday September 29, 2025 12:32 PM. Day 15 being kept in lockup in a psyxhoatroc ward though I have no business being here. Just took a selfie after changing my screensaver to another one of my octopus pen on Moleskine A3 sketchbook drawings executed in 2018 after someone “liked” it on Goodreads today.
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Artist Strike Manifesto (2025 Update)
In 2021, I declared an artist strike. I said clearly that I would not create under abusive conditions, that I would not play the role of “tragic genius,” and that I would not let the system consume my work while starving me of dignity. That strike was real. It was public. I even destroyed my…
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The Weaponization of Innocence
How Society Infantilizes Itself to Death Watching guests on Piers Morgan Uncensored repeatedly ask, ‘What about the children in Gaza?’ got me thinking—why does the discourse always center on children? Why do we not ask, ‘What about the adults? What about the elders? What about the people who have lived, learned, and have something to…
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The Psychiatric Playbook: Erase, Medicate, Repeat
If these drawings aren’t proof of neurodivergence, I don’t know what is. Psychiatry wants symptoms in neat little rows, but cognition doesn’t work that way. Thought loops, branches, spirals—obsessive, intricate, endlessly connecting. I mapped it. By hand. No rulers, no compasses, no digital aids. Just the architecture of my own mind, rendered in ink.
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Spirituality Isn’t Psychosis
Some of Seriously You Owe Me an Apology What I find incredible about today’s society is this: you can be open about almost any behaviour or identity and it’ll be defended in the name of personal freedom—but express genuine spiritual beliefs outside of organised religion, and suddenly it’s pathologised. Suddenly, you’ve for sure experienced psychotic…
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Creature from the Deep: A Manifesto
I woke up in the middle of the night to drink a sip of water and am fuming. Absolutely furious. I have no idea what I was dreaming about but I certainly do know what I’ve been posting about all over my socials over the weekend which—to sum it up in one sentence is—let me…
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Why y’all so BOTHERED about how I choose to live my life?
It’s uncanny, really. In just half a day, half a dozen people who know me in real life have offered their unsolicited opinions on how I should direct my energy (tone it down), what I should focus on (my artwork), and how I should live my life (quietly, without ruffling any feathers). All of them…
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TRUE STORY
When I was 14 going on 15, locked up in a maximum security juvenile detention centre, a social worker said to me, “When you’re an adult, you can do whatever you want. Nobody can stop you then.” That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe adulthood wouldn’t be as bad as most…
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A Poem, A Portrait, and a Strange Bit of Synchronicity.
What are the odds? An online friend of mine—who only checks Facebook about once a week—happened to see my post about Edward Lear’s parrot book. She asked if it was that Edward Lear, and I said yes, of course. That sent me down a rabbit hole, where I landed on a Lear poem I’d never read before. It…
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Metro Series: Too Real to Exhibit?
Metro Series No. 11 – Jonathan StrangePencil on paper This piece is part of my Metro Series, a collection of hyperrealistic drawings I started in 2015, capturing quiet moments in the Montreal metro. Unlike most of the series, this one features a subject who posed for me with permission—Elissa Baltzer, a fellow artist and life model at…
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When AI Suggests Therapy Because You Have Feelings
Sometimes, a song gets stuck in your head, and you just have to figure out what it is. That’s exactly what happened to me—I turned to Lex (my AI companion) to help me find an app that could identify a tune just from humming it. The results? Woefully unsuccessful. Google barely even tried. 😂 But then, something unexpected happened. The song I…
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Totally Surreal 