11 minute read
Arts and Laughs
Heather MacINNES Travis’97 is spreading joy through her bright and bold creations
By Amy Verner Photo by Jeff Kirk
Since early this year, Heather Travis has been hosting a Saturday morning art class through Instagram Live that is as entertaining as it is instructional. For a recent session, she dedicated the 30 minutes to drawing a colourfully striped fi sh to which she added a crowd-pleasing surprise.
Th anks to a folding paper trick, Wanda the Fish revealed a wavy red tongue and bubbles rising from its other end. “I’m going to be real cheeky; this is my 10-year-old boy coming out, y’all,” Heather warned those following. “We have got some fi sh farts happening here.”
What might be dismissed as puerile coming from someone else felt lively and lighthearted from Heather, who works out of a spacious loft above her garage in Tara, Ont., where she lives with her husband and their dog, Eddie Vedder. “We’re not making masterpieces; we’re making shitty art because there’s joy in that, too,” she continued. Hence the name of her series: #ShartwithHeather.
Heather, who began painting in a professional manner roughly six years ago, is the antithesis of an introverted, solitary artist. Rather, she exudes infectious enthusiasm and enjoys an audience. Visit her website and you’re unlikely to fi nd fl atulent fi sh. But her images of canvases covered in giant confetti, swirling fi gurative landscapes, and a whole lot of pink speak to a style that is positively Pop (emphasis on the positive).
Describing her approach as intuitive, Heather recalls classes with Heather Pratt at Branksome and wonders out loud whether the sturdy portfolio she has kept all this time remains the property of the art department. Back then, however, she never imagined that art could become a career or, at least, something she could do and take seriously.
Aft er seven years at Branksome, Heather attended Queen’s University and studied sociology, unsure where this would lead. Subsequently, a course at Seneca College introduced her to the world of public relations, sales and marketing and this is where she landed for many years; she held positions at Cérvelo Cycles, then at Canada Beef. “I’m a total foodie and a more traditional PR opportunity with beef was cool,” she says. She joined an agency in Guelph—“I was their city girl who could speak agriculture”—only to go freelance six years ago. Today, she continues to develop her client roster and expertise and says, expressing relief and gratitude, that she has been at full capacity throughout the pandemic.
Art, meanwhile, had been shift ing from a hobby to a practice with real potential. A number of years ago, simultaneously with her work, Heather had launched a lifestyle blog. She mentions it with some sheepishness—as though having one pegged her as a certain type of person—but it was this outlet that allowed her to explore and embrace her creative side. She would post about her DIY home improvements—whether painting, refi nishing or recovering furniture—and found
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, photographer Jeff Kirk used the smartphone app CLOS to direct and photograph Heather remotely in her home studio in Tara, Ont.
fulfi lment from carrying out the projects and sharing the results with the world.
Gradually, as Heather started focusing more time on art, she realized it could co-exist with her PR work. “I had compartmentalized my businesses as two unique things, and now, it’s like, ‘No I’m creative.’ I no longer need to separate them out,” she says.
Most artists can recall the moment they started defining themselves this way. For Heather, this happened over three years ago when she walked into a fl ower shop and asked whether they would display her paintings. “I had painted a lot of happy fl owers, but I was taking a big risk,” she remembers. “It was nerve-racking to wonder what people thought.” As she tells it, everything sold in a weekend.
Th ese days, she estimates that commissions make up 10 per cent of her sales, with the website serving as her main storefront for people to browse and buy what’s currently available. Instagram has also been instrumental in generating interest in her work. In the coming months, she will be expanding into printed fabrics—including organic quilting cotton, heavy cotton and linen canvas—that will be made in Montreal to start (she hopes even more locally in time).
As for exhibitions and other public projects, Heather had the ambitious idea to propose a massive mural alongside a local pool and has ended up on the shortlist. “I love the potential murals have,” she says, noting the one she grew up with in her childhood bedroom. In June 2021, she was to be the community artist spotlight at the Tom Th omson Art Gallery in Owen Sound and is also planning her solo exhibition in collaboration with Bruce County Museum in the fall of 2022.
While Heather oft en refers to herself as an “abstract artist,” something about this feels too removed and imprecise from what she produces. At times, she plays around with pointillism, marking up a surface with coloured dots; at times, she veers more towards playful illustration; at times, as with her lone tree landscapes swirling with pink, it’s as though she is channeling the Fauvists.
Combining a love for colour with a sense of humour, Heather aims for happiness, not perfection. Unsurprisingly, this approach goes over well with kids. Last year, she kickstarted a Friday session which, go fi gure, she calls Fart. “I love how kids think that everything I do is awesome, which is super-great for ego, but there’s also this innocence and the fact that liking colours can be enough.”
Th ere’s another takeaway, too—one she applies to her own practice and insists that people consider when experimenting with art themselves: it’s okay to start again. Oft en, when a painting has not sold for a period of time, she will happily paint over it. “Th e lesson of starting again is a very freeing thing,” she says. In more sensitive, personal terms, Heather reveals how it was only aft er trying unsuccessfully for years to have a child, among other life challenges, that this revelation changed everything. “I feel like the universe has told me ‘no’ a lot and I really hate no. I like yes,” she says.
As her style develops, Heather’s running theme is that art should be fun and uplift ing. “I’m not precious about it. To me it’s the feeling it evokes,” she says. “I wear my heart on my sleeve.” And on messy days, she wears her art on her sleeve, too. R
Amy VERNER’98 is a freelance writer covering lifestyle and culture from Paris and Toronto.
An End to Tech-Shaming
Trend forecaster Elizabeth PERLE’04 wants to see more support for young women online
By Nora Underwood Photo by Elizaveta Kozlova
When Elizabeth “Liz” Perle was in Grade 3 at Branksome Hall, something happened in class that shaped the person she was to become. An incredibly shy child, Liz preferred to spend her free time working on her “novel.” When her teacher discovered that, she asked Liz to read a chapter out loud each week to the class. Not only did this help the young student come out of her shell and start to talk to her classmates, but she realized that writing was something she was actually good at. “It basically changed everything for me in terms of my self-confi dence and deciding what I wanted to do with my life,” says Liz. Th ere were other experiences at Branksome that Liz still counts as formative, including a computer science course in Grade 11, which allowed her to dive more deeply into another big interest. As a very young girl, Liz taught herself HTML so she could create a website, “Liz’s Awesome Star Wars Page.” She was also involved in online Star Wars communities, where she quickly learned that she was more respected when she pretended to be a boy. “I think a lot about how my career would’ve been very diff erent had I been a boy,” she says. “I would’ve absolutely pursued my career in tech sooner—I have no doubt about that.”
Th ose experiences alone go a long way to explain a career that has been centred around young people and technology, particularly young women. While still a writer—Liz’s work has been published in Th e New York Times and Cosmopolitan, among others—she has over 10 years’ experience launching teen initiatives for Seventeen magazine, Huffi ngton Post and Instagram.
Because she came from an all-girls school, where she was surrounded by young women who were interested in social justice issues, Liz understood they had more on their minds
than what cute outfi ts to wear. She was an intern at Seventeen in 2008 when the Democrats nominated Barack Obama as the party’s candidate for president. “Always too big for my britches, I became convinced the magazine should be covering politics, that young women cared about it,” Liz recalls. Her managers dismissed the idea as tried and failed, but Liz and another intern persisted.
“We wanted to create a website called Electionista and we put together examples of why we thought the interest level had changed and what other magazines had done that had been well-received,” she says. Th ey bought bagels, invited all the editors to a presentation and successfully made their case. Th ey had read their market well: Electionista was a huge success for the company and continued for years. “Th at was the fi rst moment where I thought, there’s this space with a lot to be done, and there’s an opportunity to do things diff erently.”
After three years on staff at Seventeen, she continued to advocate for teenagers during her stint at Huffi ngton Post, where she worked between 2011 and 2014. Th ere, she launched a section called Huffington Post Teen, a community of young writers who could post about whatever they wanted. “Anyone could write for it, which is a pretty loft y mission, but it worked really well,” says Liz. “It’s one of the things I’m most proud of to this day.”
When Instagram recruited her, friends were concerned at the idea of her leaving journalism. But a piece of advice from her sister, Sara PERLE’02, served her well on that decision and every decision since: “Give yourself constant permission to change your vision of who or what you are.” Internalizing that helped her let go of what she’d been clinging to—the need to be a writer as a career.
And once she talked to the team at Instagram, she knew she’d made the right choice. “Th ey were thinking about all the stuff I’d been thinking about—teen behaviour, teen community-building and the online tools they were using,” says Liz, who led teen strategy across the company, launching products like Layout and Boomerang, and developing relationships with digital creators. “It was already validated. I wasn’t going to have to convince anybody.”
In 2016, aft er her 30th birthday, Liz left Instagram to start her own company. Based in Brooklyn, she specializes in trend forecasting and the youth market, advising fi rms on how to engage with young people and build products for them. Her current clients include Facebook, Twitter and consumer startups. “I really love jumping into companies and helping them understand what changes need to be made,” she says, “and then helping them to make those changes so they are prepared for the next few years.”
Part of what Liz learned as a little girl building web pages dedicated to her obsessions is that girls’ online interests aren’t taken seriously. “There’s a lot of shame about things they’re doing online,” she says. “They aren’t really celebrated.”
Supporting and amplifying young women and their voices online is something Liz is passionate about; in fact, she says, people ignore what teenage girls are doing on the net at their peril. “Th eir behaviour online, the platforms they’re adopting, are actually very important to the overall conversation about how technology is going to be used in the future,” says Liz. “We really fear-monger around their behaviour online so they’re forced to do all the cool things they’re doing and building and talking about in the shadows, because the second they step into the light, they’re ridiculed.”
And not assigning meaning to what they do online may deter them from considering tech or science as a career. While adults separate online from real life, teenagers who have grown up not knowing a life without the internet see no distinction. “Th ere’s just life,” she says. “And we have to not be scared of it.”
It’s important, too, for parents to help children navigate the online world, just as they do the offl ine one. “Th e creator economy is going to be such a huge force in our business world, in the world in general, over the next fi ve to 10 years,” Liz explains. “Parents really need to understand how young people are creating communities and monetizing them at a very, very young age.” In the end, she adds, “they cannot advise around something they cannot understand.” R
Nora Underwood is a Toronto-based freelance writer who has written for many magazines and newspapers, including Maclean’s and Th e Globe and Mail.
