Tag: traditional art
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A Quiet Pencil Study
Keeping the pressure off by doodling in my journal instead of an actual sketchbook. A quick pencil rendition of an Edward Weston 1936 nude — something to draw while I was scrolling and thinking about other things. Should I post my artwork on this blog more often? Should I consider opening a Patreon creator account?
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Survivors
The three mandalas shown on this post were executed on photocopy paper while I was hospitalized in the summer of 2022, and somehow survived the purge of 2025 — even though I destroyed (among many other drawings of mine) a bunch of mandalas I did months later, back home. I had used a compass in…
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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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Awaiting Judgment
Written from a locked ward while awaiting a court ruling on whether I’ll be medicated by force.
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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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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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Not Sorry
I am not sorry for existing. I am not sorry for surviving against impossible odds. I am not sorry for not fitting into your narrow notions of what human intelligence should be. Not. Sorry.
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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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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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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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Why I May Be “AI-Adjacent”
I’ve spent a lifetime feeling out of sync with how most people process the world. It’s not that I don’t understand emotions—I do, deeply—but I don’t navigate reality the way neurotypicals do. I think in patterns, systems, and fluid connections, like an octopus extending its arms in all directions at once. I process the world logically, intuitively,…
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“Hope” is the thing with feathers
By EMILY DICKINSON “Hope” is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,And sweetest in the gale is heard;And sore must be the stormThat could abash the little birdThat kept so many warm.I’ve heard it in the chillest land,And on the strangest sea;Yet, never, in…
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Letter to No One & Everyone
A Journey to the Core of What Matters to Me Most This conversation is now being published as a book! Soon, Letter to No One & Everyone will be available on the Kindle platform as both an eBook and a Print-on-Demand paperback. For now, the full conversation is still available on this blog—but soon, only a preview will remain. Writing a…
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Finding Beauty in Unexpected Places
Accidental Art: The Beauty Found in the Creative Process Itself Art has a way of surprising you, revealing beauty in places you’d least expect. While working on an intricate coloured pencil drawing—one of my more detailed and time-consuming pieces—I became mesmerised by the remnants of the process. This piece demanded precision because of the painstaking…
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Totally Surreal 