EARLY ACCESS // fishbowl (Patreon)

This is a theme that I’ve drawn before, but I wanted to revisit it again! I sometimes talk a bit about my art school experience in Q&A sessions, and it’s been on my mind lately because last weekend I visited a city I used to live in: Gent (or Ghent) in Belgium. While walking through the streets of this city, it suddenly hit me that it’s been exactly 20 years ago since I started my college studies there in 2004! I studied animation in Gent for one year, but ended up quitting and switching to a different school because it wasn’t working out. 

That was a really strange time. I felt very isolated because my teachers strongly disapproved of my art and I had a hard time connecting with my classmates because of cultural and language differences. I felt like I was always in transit because I didn’t really develop roots in this place - I was always on a bus or train, thinking about being somewhere else.

On my drive home from Gent on Sunday, I was thinking about this idea I had painted in the past and why I was drawn to it. And I think it’s because travelling with a fish bowl is this impossible, precarious thing. It’s heavy, fragile, and there’s a whole little world inside that needs to be protected. And I think that’s what it was like in that first year of art school, trying to protect my creativity and inner world from all of the chaos outside that was threatening it. It felt impossible at the time but it did work out in the end: I found a place that gave me the space to really grow some roots and find out what I wanted to do with my life and my art. But I needed to go through this time of feeling lost to get there!