 Since I've been little, I wanted to do art. It was always part of my school and high school. Later on, I thought maybe I'd do some kind of creative job. I just didn't know what. I think that's why I tried a lot of different things at Emily Carr. I did a lot of performance, art, video, installation. Now, definitely like painting. I'm Andrew Datson, and I'm an artist. I really wanted to go to art school and applied to a few different ones, but Emily Carr was always one that I really wanted to go to. In the year that I graduated, I had a show at the Helen Pitt Back Room and then got to meet the curators at the Helen Pitt and was offered a show in the front room, which was a big deal. I had my first show with Galleria Franco Nguero out of Turin, Italy. And we got to meet. He was in town. Franco saw something that he liked, or he has sort of a passion about it, and I got to do a show quickly after meeting him. I've sort of developed a practice that's now heavily centered about the things that I like to do, like being in the studio, painting. I keep pretty regular business hours, nine to five. It's my job. Sometimes creativity doesn't just come naturally every day, so we try to make this place feel comfortable and a place to hang out, a place to bounce ideas off and experiment. I'm working on an upcoming show for Galleria and Zurich that I've been working on where a bit of a new approach. They start off like paintings, wet paint, drippy paint. It moves like paint in a fluid way, and then as I'm working on them, it sort of hardens, and I like to think of it as a slow cementing process or something that takes many months. And then as the paint hardens, they become more like sculptures and still the same ideas that I'm working on now sort of were developed at Emily Carr. It has to do with the landscape. I'm interested in the way the landscape is always changing, how the city is changing, and I was always drawn to those areas. Experiment to try a lot of different things that the school offers. You have to really want to keep making art to try to find your way or find your niche. And to allow yourself the time to be creative, be in the studio, I think that's when good ideas can happen.