I’m Not a Real Artist… I’m Just Creative: Becoming an Artist Through Playfulness, Creative Risk-Taking, and Following Desire

"I'm not a real artist... I'm just creative!"

Or at least, that’s what I used to tell myself.

At Toronto Pride this year, I was commissioned to create a framed enlargement of one of my most popular prints, Three Dancers. I took the opportunity to make an enlarged canvas version for myself, too!

I wanted to share the finished pieces with you—but I also wanted to tell you how Three Dancers came to be, and how this digital illustration I made years ago continues to inspire my handmade linocut practice today.

Back in 2019, before I started Queero Gear, I hadn’t made art regularly in almost seven years.

When I was younger, I was the kid who couldn’t stop creating: painting, drawing, and building paper-towel-roll sculptures with duct tape and googly eyes. But as I got older—and heard again and again that art wasn’t a reliable career path—I began treating creativity as more and more of a hobby.

At university, I took introductory drawing classes that I loved. I also became enthralled by my courses in visual culture, the history and philosophy of art and beauty. I was particularly drawn to the ways we could learn about ourselves by engaging with art.

I struggled to find a consistent artistic style that felt like my own, and my perfectionism—my need to "get it right"—often kept me from taking creative risks.

Eventually, I determined that I was better equipped to talk and write about art than I was to make it.

I’m creative, I told myself. I’m even artistic. But I’m not a real artist.

Then, in 2019, I began my PhD in Sociology. To help with note-taking, I bought an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil. Technology has always fascinated me, so naturally I began exploring everything this amazing machine could do. I downloaded ProCreate and started drawing portraits of friends and queer historical figures I considered heroes.

Something about the digital format pulled me in. I could draw a line and hit undo. I could build multiple versions of an image using layers. I could experiment with colour and form without having to start from scratch—or paint over something I already loved.

Suddenly, taking risks felt easier.

More importantly, I was having fun making art again. The playful creativity of my childhood felt like it was returning.

As a PhD student struggling to pay my bills, I had also begun hearing a lot about “passive income.” So, I opened a print-on-demand Etsy shop selling digital portraits of queer heroes — and Queero Gear was born!

I plugged away at the Etsy shop for a while without much success. Then one day, I decided to make something just for me—something that followed my desire.

By desire, I mean both what I wanted to create and the sexual desire I had for men: the same pull that had eventually led me into my own queerness.

This exploration began as a study of male ballet dancers—their strength and poise—and of a softer masculinity that felt closer to my own than the brusque, awkward, and aggressive forms of masculinity I had grown up around.

I drew dancer after dancer, working from hundreds of reference images. And as I drew, the forms became simpler and simpler.

I was making art now. Surely that meant I was an artist… right?

But it still felt as though I were pretending. At any moment, I imagined, someone on Etsy might message me to say that digital art wasn’t really art—or that print-on-demand was the epitome of capitalism’s devaluation of creative work.

It was then that my background in art history and visual culture returned to remind me that artists have long wrestled — or played — with the commodification, reproduction, and mass circulation of art. They haven’t only been trapped by those forces; they have also used their work to examine and disrupt them.

I thought of Andy Warhol, one of my artistic heroes, and the way his soup cans, repeated images, and use of screen printing blurred the lines between fine art, consumer culture, and mass production.

These two explorations—following my desire and thinking through commodification and reproduction—came together in Three Dancers.

It became my most popular digital illustration and remains one of my bestselling prints. But its impact on me goes far beyond sales. Three Dancers continues to inspire and inform my work, even though I no longer create digital illustrations.

Its popularity gave me the confidence to try vending at local artisan markets, including the Toronto Queer Market, after the COVID-19 pandemic. The success I found there eventually allowed me to buy my own large-format Epson printer and the supplies and tools I needed to transition to linocut printmaking.

As a printmaker, I could keep exploring the repetitive, production-line quality of linocut—but now I could also get ink under my fingernails. I could feel the soreness in my arms after pressing print after print. Repetition and reproduction were now something I could feel in my body.

The full story of my transition from digital illustration to printmaking is a story for another day, but nearly seven years after launching that Etsy shop, I’m still approaching my art with playfulness; I'm still taking creative risks; and I’m still following my desire. My work continues to explore queer forms of masculinity, and my medium forces me to wrestle with permanence, imperfection, and the commodification of art.

There are still days when I don’t quite feel like I am an artist in that existential way I always imagined. But by holding on to playfulness, being willing to take risks, and attuning to my desire, I have made art-making a routine part of my everyday life.

I daresay that may just make me a real artist.