It looks like I’ll need to update my previous blog post, because I recently discovered one more postcard painting from my 2024 series, “In the Spaces III”. This is actually the first of these paintings I ever did, and it was done at this time back in 2023, when I first got the postcard watercolour paper that I would use for the project while I was visiting Sophie Labelle in Finland. This painting depicts the view of the bridge from an island on the river that runs through the town of Joensuu. It was on this outing that I first coined the inside joke I share with Sophie of me yelling at her in public “I’m robbing you! I’m robbing you!” Hilarious!

I had thought I had sent this one off to my mom while I was still in Finland, but apparently I just stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it! As the first in this series of paintings, and as a painting that was done while I was still completing In the Spaces II, this one isn’t as developed as others in the series, or even as those done after it as part of ITS #2, but I find its looseness and simplicity charming in much the same way as my earliest paintings.

I am going to be honest and admit that I’ve never really liked my art. I actually initially went into comics and cartooning in part because I didn’t think I was capable of the artistic skill required to make beautiful works of art like paintings – an utterly ridiculous belief to still hold after 20 years of pursuing cartooning and comic art and learning how deep of art forms these are. I think there was a good amount of “gender” going on in this attitude, as there is I think a kind of “surrogate dysphoria” that goes into my general dislike of my art; an ingrained sense of “I categorically dislike myself, and anything that comes from me” learned over decades of untreated gender dysphoria.

But from when I first began painting back in 2023, I found a new sense of beauty in my art that I had been unable to see previously. My early paintings were less clearly defined. They were loose and tentative, with soft, translucent colours barely built up upon one another. It is here the name In the Spaces originated, for the image wasn’t being fully laid out in literal, descriptive detail, but was instead being implied with loose, often unconnected brush strokes, with room for one’s imagination to fill in the literal gaps. I, myself, have a very active imagination, so this approach may just appeal to me more than others, but for this same reason, the problem I had with my comics art and pen and ink illustrations was the literalness of my line-work. While I would improve over the years, I too frequently get caught up replicating details, and no matter how much I labored over a work, it would never look exactly like it would in my mind (or perhaps, more accurately, how it felt in my mind). So regardless of how good it may or may not have been, *I * certainly wasn’t ever going to like it.

When I first transitioned, I was at a point in my life where I had seemingly moved away from visual art in favor of fitness and martial arts, and I made an intentional move back towards visual arts also out of a gendered sense of values. Not only did I learn in transitioning that things I had previously thought impossible (i.e. transition) were, in fact, possible, and so I figured I might as well try to go two for two on fulfilling my dreams and try to become an artist as well as a girl, but I think I also held in my mind’s eye a vision of myself as this kind of feminine, aesthetic, artist girl. A very hetero-normative vision of transition, gender, and professions. I wanted to both be beautiful and create things of beauty. While I strove to improve my skills and expand my repertoire, for years, I was resigned to my art always being “my art”. Meaning, it would always be the idiosyncratic, ugly line work of my comics. While this style would change over the last 10 years, it really wasn’t until I broke through that other ‘impossible’ barrier I was still holding onto in my mind and tried painting that I first made any art that I felt fit that category of “beautiful”.

I find it rather ironic that I would achieve this gendered goal of creating beautiful works of art as I am once again shifting my focus in life and moving away from visual art and back to martial arts. I’m known as Buff Aunt Bria these days and my muscled arms don’t exactly paint a picture of the delicate, artistic girl I envisioned myself becoming in 2015. There is a push-pull with this. I think I overall like being a muscle lady, but it can be hard to feel feminine at times, especially since my training usually leaves me covered in scratches and bruises, and my fingers coarse, calloused, and often taped up. Having cute nails is nice, but having strong fingers is important to me, too!

As I put in my 2021 graphic novel, Coming Out Again, we don’t just come out once, but many times throughout life. We are continually evolving and our relationships with things like gender are forever changing. Just as I am a very different person from who I was in 2015, we are also living in very different world from then. From the way we talk about transness and gender, to the current political prospects for trans rights in society, a lot has changed that might affect how a trans woman presents herself and what she prioritizes in life. I no longer feel obligated to perform the kind of cishetero-normative femininity that I felt was required of me when I transitioned in 2015, and I additionally feel quite unsafe in the current political environment and want to be able to take care of myself and my loved ones.

This might be upsetting for fans of my work to read, but I’m actually not entirely certain I even like comics anymore. My neurodivergent brain has big swings, and often I either love something or I hate it. These days, I find myself hating the smirking faces of cartoon characters. I’m certain this has more to do with a sense of disillusionment with making comics for a living than an actual hatred of cartooning as an art form (you know, the art form I worked at for 20 years of my life). Unlike most comic artists, I got into making comics not out of any long-standing love of established comic brands and characters, but because 20 years ago, the art form was wide open for newcomers to tell new, original stories within. Today, there’s more original stories being told in comics than I could have ever dreamed of back in 2005, but big business now has its fingers in everything more than ever, I don’t know if there’s much room for someone like myself to make a living without having to cater to corporate practices and online trends.

I am not saying I’m quitting comics. The future is always uncertain, and regarding all things I always say “Never say never.” All I know is that, when I paint a landscape, there’s no bullshit. I am making a beautiful image meant to evoke the feelings I had when I visited a specific place at a specific time. There’s no message, no joke, no news item I’m referencing, no high-minded artsy concept, not even a depiction of any variety of person. I’m just making a beautiful thing that makes me feel good, and the only person in the picture is the person looking at the view. As a transgender person who has mostly been known for political work, I feel irresponsible for making work that isn’t speaking out about what’s going on in the world. But I also feel resentful that as trans person I’m not allowed to ever have peace. We must always be fighting, the cis people refuse to leave us alone. They want to empty us from the world, and they want to make the world into something ugly. Well, in my landscapes, there is nobody. Everybody has been emptied from the world, and this trans person can finally have a moment of peace. I can just exist, the land can just exist, and I can make and be something beautiful, solely for the sake of something beautiful.

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