Liane Varnam had spent six years industriously working toward a double major in animal science and zoology when she received news of a death in the family.
"When my grandmother died I went, 'Screw this, I always wanted to be an artist,'" she recalls.
Years after her time studying at Emily Carr, Varnam's voice is filled with the passion that first pushed her to the easel.
"I was never so happy as the night before I started my first day at art school," she says. "I couldn't sleep. I was just lying in bed going: 'Oh my god, I'm going to art school tomorrow.'" Varnam is one of more than a dozen artists filling the walls of the Seymour Art Gallery for Start With Art, perhaps the only exhibition where the paintings are hung a few feet lower than usual to accommodate the gaze of children.
Varnam is an obvious choice for the exhibition, as her work seems like a collection of beautiful illustrations for a book of fairy tales still waiting to be written.
Her paintings are often dreamlike renderings of animals, but in almost each case the animal has a destination that lies in the world beyond the frame.
"I feel like I'm always in the middle of the story," she says.
Much of Varnam's work lives on the bridge between realism and surrealism.
The dimensions of a certain bird seem perfectly life-like, and so do the dimensions of the small boat flying through the sky.
There is no word in the Balinese language for art. The theory goes that the concept is woven so deeply into the culture that the word is superfluous.
It's a concept that might resonate with Varnam.
"I think everyone is creative," she says. "There's no such thing as an uncreative person.. .. Cooking is art, gardening is art, writing is art. The whole best parts of being alive to me are the creative parts."
Exhibition artist Sean Karemaker's entry into the world of comic book art seems like a fluke.
Karemaker's father was a barber. Todd McFarlane's father was a client.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s McFarlane drenched the comics world in Spider-Man's finely detailed webs and created his own hero: the vicious Spawn.
"We got a lot of those things for free when they first came out," Karemaker says.
The comics fueled him to create his own superheroes.
"I started drawing my own comics," he says. "That's what basically got me into art in the first place."
Karemaker makes time for the North Shore News during a lunch break at Smoking Gun Interactive, a Vancouver based video game company. For Karemaker, a break from work is usually the beginning of his own work.
His eye for composition is reminiscent of Norman Rockwell, but his sensibility leans toward the insane and the honest.
There are dreamlike images of three-handed women and mines in Poland that would curl Salvador Dali's waxed mustache into a smile.
And then there are the unvarnished works: the hands of a homeless man, the preoccupation of a drifter.
Karemaker's background as comic book collector has resurfaced in autobiographical comics about his own life.
Karemaker said he didn't find much encouragement in his own school. However, that may be why he enjoys teaching children so much.
"A lot of adults think that art is this mystical thing that they can't do, and kids don't really have that yet," he says.
That lack of childhood inhibitions served Varnam well.
Before she was in kindergarten, Varnam was grinding stones into pigment powder.
"I grew up in a household where there was no art," she says. "I'm kind of a pine tree from the fir forest."
Schools should be doing more to nurture the imagination and the impulse to create, according to Varnam.
"That really important human expression of play and creativity is getting neglected and suffocated and dying on the vine, and I think that's one of the reasons I like the Start With Art program so much," she says.
