#yycLCL December 2018

A photo of a painting sitting on a work top with tools surrounding it
#yycLCL Photo of the Month | Photo: Gina McKinnon

#yycLCL December 2018

My favorite part about painting is the “magic hour,” where everything starts to line up and the piece solidifies into something beautiful. The struggle is all worth it when the thing in your hands becomes something more than canvas and paint. Those magic moments are what fuels my drive to create.

For me creativity doesn’t just appear when I have a paintbrush in hand, it is a constant practice. An important part of that is finding beauty in things that are not obviously beautiful. Seeing something in moments of pain, in destruction or in the mundane and routine. Not seeing those things as something that can be made beautiful but instead as things that already possess their own inherent beauty. So even when the painting on my table looks like a chaotic mess, I know that the magic isn’t far off, I just need to look for it.

Gina McKinnon is an abstract artist from Calgary who is currently obsessed with high flow acrylics. Find her at flowwestward.ca and follow her on Instagram at @flowwestward.


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