Art Windsor-Essex

SESSION 38: Challenging our Perception & Choosing the Champion with Shelby McAnsh

In this session, we challenged the participants to try something new! Illustrator/Artist Shelby McAnsh will share the challenges she has faced as a visually impaired artist and her journey to discover her sense of self along the way.

In this session, we explored the power of mindset! Learn how Shelby has used the phrase “perception is reality” as a basis in her life and work, and how this provides opportunities to observe one’s reality with acceptance and gratitude. Become inspired by the different ways of viewing and seeing the world, with an open mindset.

Shelby led us through her process in digital character development. If you would like to follow along and give this art form a try, see below for the digital app she uses. If this art form is not for you, use whatever you have accessible to you! Using basic shapes and drawing principles, we will create our own characters that support this positive mindset. Join us for this inspiring and insightful session!

Suggested Materials:

Paper
Mark making tool
Any material that feels novel, new, or challenging for you!

Optional:

Digital App: Sketchbook [This is what Shelby will use while sharing her drawing process]
*If you do not have these items, no need to worry! We can work with whatever materials you have at home or are inclined to use!

Check-In Activity: The Dot Challenge

Using a mark-making tool, draw a dot in the centre of a blank piece of paper.
With your pencil, makers, or paint, transform the dot into something else.
What can you add? How can you change the dot?
Remember: this is a plaayful and meditative process.

Art-making Process:

Use your art-making tools to create your Inner Critic and your Inner Champion characters.
What do your characters look like? What are their likes and dislikes? What colour or shape are they? What do their features tell you about their personalities and vice versa?
Challenge yourself by trying something new! If you are going to make mistakes, make it easier on yourself by not taking yourself too seriously.
You may want to try:
- Using your non-dominant hand to draw
- Using the blind contour method (do not look at your paper while drawing!)
- Draw with your paper turned upside down or cover one eye with your hand.
Focus on process-based art, where your intuition guides you. With this approach, you become a necessary and needed part of the journey!

About Shelby McAnsh, Artist

It’s a sentence that you would never expect to hear; “I’m a local illustrator and I’m visually impaired.” But this is often how I introduce myself when I exhibit my artworks with CNIB (the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.) On other occasions, however, when I’m talking to the general public, I wait until later on in the conversation. This allows me to make a great first impression before the eyes of the person that I am talking to become too focused on mine. I’ve had more than enough encounters with people who see my white identification cane and start talking to me like I’m deaf or unintelligent. On the contrary, people who are visually impaired are capable of much more than the average person expects. My artworks are just one example of this.

By this point you probably have a few questions, so I’ll try to answer some of them for you. If you were to look through my eyes you would notice the colour, shading, and forms of the things around you a lot more than you normally would. You wouldn’t notice fine details like the words on your screen, the funny slogan on that guy's t-shirt, or whether that traffic light is actually red or a death trap in disguise. Because of this, my work focuses strongly on the colour, shading, and forms that I mentioned earlier. I also like to use a lot of details in my illustrations, not because I can see them very easily in real life, but most likely because I don’t, and that makes things interesting for everyone.

As one can imagine, I have come across many challenges as a visually impaired artist. However, the most difficult challenge I face has nothing to do with being visually impaired at all. The most difficult challenge for me is to determine who I am. For an artist this is defined by our job; the one we assign to ourselves when we step into this field.

As artists, we have the power to change our viewer’s perception of the world. Fortunately, I am a firm believer of the phrase “perception is reality” and I would prefer to bring a pleasant reality into existence.

Taking Care: Where Art Meets Wellness is supported by the Solcz Family Foundation and by the Ontario Trillium Foundation