 Part of making art is very much an attitude and a perspective towards ideas and materials. And I think this certain honesty to where you're from comes through. My name is Etienne Zak. I live in Los Angeles, and I'm an artist, I make paintings. I never thought that there would be a possibility to make a living making art. It's hard to navigate the art world. There's a whole business part, there's a whole writing part. It's a very complex world, and so you need to navigate and keep making the work. I think the amazing thing about having gone to Emily Carr is that you have a community there. It's a place for dialogue, it's a place to be challenged. I think Emily Carr is a really sort of versatile place where you can really explore if you want to explore, but you can really focus on a medium if you really want to as well. And I think there's a good structure to do whatever you want to do. And there's people there that you can kind of tap into. When you come out, you're so changed by everything that you need to find yourself again. The sort of sediments kind of slowly sort of fall. There's certain things too that you've embodied that you might go come back to that you're not aware of. Making work is a very hard task when you can't sleep because there's so many ideas coming in and constantly filtering these ideas. So I take notes. The notes contain the real skeleton behind the painting. The painting part is maybe the easier part. It's where the ideas sort of come to rest finally. Paintings I'm making now, to the most basic, they're stacks of paper. There's something written, there's texts on them, and they've been organized in a certain way architecturally, so they become very physical. I'm interested right now in ideas of manufactured history. And that documented history is a redacted history. And so these are sort of simply the ideas I'm dealing with right now. The work I do, it comes from a world of ideas and reading and writing and thinking. So the conceptual part and the thinking part became more and more awakened in me at Emily Carr. It was a great environment to learn and to start thinking about what I was making.