Discipline Category: Drawing

Natalie Mark 麥月明 is a local Winnipeg/Treaty 1 illustrator and cartoonist.

In 2023-4, Natalie received an award for emerging cartoonists and made a comic for CAKE Chicago. They have also facilitated various community and public art projects for Winnipeg’s Chinatown, and run many art and comics workshops in Winnipeg and beyond including the Snoopy and the Red Baron traveling exhibit from the Charles M. Schulz Museum, at VanCAF in Vancouver, and MICE in Boston.

Natalie’s comics are somewhere between a reflection of life and small curiosities. Their work plays with myth-making and whimsical fantasies projected onto social realism. Storytelling is Natalie's primary tool for understanding themselves and exploring the world around them.

When they are not drawing, Natalie loves going to their local library, playing TTRPGs, and going on picnics! Visit their site: https://nataliemark.ca or follow along with their art journey @floodkiss across the internet.

Olivia Cassie (she/her) is a local multidisciplinary artist whose work touches on self exploration, acceptance and making peace with the past. Growing up undiagnosed autistic, biracial and queer, Olivia often felt like an outcast and internalized these feelings into her adult life. In 2023, she connected with an artistic practice that allowed her to safely explore these feelings and the other traumas from her youth. Through portraiture, her work depicts raw emotions of loss, sorrow and bittersweet hope which helps her feel kinship with others. Olivia hopes that, through delicate displays of feeling, she can gain a better understanding of her own inner world and find her place in the world moving around her.

Grant is a Canadian visual artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and was short-listed for the Manitoba Society of Artists 2024 Open Juried Competition and Exhibition.  “My main artistic expression is painting.  However, I’ve done print making, sketching, photography, wood carving, and furniture making.

“I have always viewed the world around me in pictures, images, colours, shapes, sizes, patterns and ideas.  My love of nature and the outdoors led to a strong interest in the Canadian art movement pioneered by Tom Thomson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven artists.  Viewing the Tom Thomson sketches and Group of Seven paintings at the National Gallery has had a significant influence on me.  In my childhood, living beside renowned artist Ivan Eyre, provided an up close glimpse into the life of an artist.  I am grateful to my art teachers for their instruction, direction and encouragement.  Methods and techniques from those classes are evident in the creative process of my art making today.”