Rick Rogers

Many of my favorite memories from my youth are about creating images and objects - finger painting, colouring books, pastels, my spirograph, watching spin art created at the fairgrounds, and even creating that box covered with pasta and spray painted gold that my mother probably still has today.

Despite these memories, it wasn’t until I was traveling weekly for work in 2006 that my away-from-home-boredom drove me to find a course at the local college near my work site.  I took an introductory course in drawing in anticipation of later trying my hand at watercolour painting.  The instructor of that drawing course was wonderful and the experience was joyful.  I began carrying my sketchbook everywhere, even stopping on the highway on the drive home to sketch.  I was hooked!

I knew by the end of that ten week course that I wanted to be serious about creating an art career.  I enrolled in the Fine Arts Certificate Program at the University of Alberta the following summer, and also began to experiment with other media and read almost obsessively about art on my own. With commitment, new capabilities have developed.  And with enthusiasm poured into many hours of art-making, my vision as an artist has grown as well. 

My background as a systems architect and scientist has been leveraged to experiment with various media, researching existing techniques and developing my own, and evolving my own processes for creating art.  This experimentation with media is almost as enjoyable as creating images!  To some extent it is all play, and while it takes me back to those memories of my youth, it also leverages all of the skills I’ve developed as an adult, and it affords the opportunity for many more years of developing skills and evolving as an artist.