About Arts Grants

Working constantly and often sacrificing security, leisure and even family, Canadian artists subsidize Canadian culture through decades of unpaid labour. Except for the Trinidad project and the education work, all of the labour on this site was performed by me without payment.

Artists' efforts are placed in public where they can be viewed for free. Paid workers: from film, fashion, television and advertising designers to real estate agents, benefit from the ideas of fine artists. We improve our neighbourhoods: often leading to the loss of the homes we created for ourselves in previously neglected areas. We give kids something constructive to think about and do. These are only a few reasons why a few clever business-people encourage a healthy arts sector.

Each grant requires days of work to apply for. So if you worked a week to buy a lottery ticket, won between $500. and $30,000. and had to use most of the money for expenses to do an interesting job, receiving an arts grant would be like winning a lottery, with odds ranging between about one in twenty and one in thousands. But we try anyway, because a grant can enable an artist to pay expenses to keep working, to create enough artwork for an exhibition, or try something especially ambitious. The few artists who regularly receive grants are highly deserving, for they must demonstrate to a jury of professionals that they have accomplished significant bodies of work and (just as difficult and nearly as much free labour) exhibited widely. Jurying is a very difficult task, because there is only enough money to award a grant to a small percentage of the talented, deserving applicants.

In the case of the International Residency programs, the artist's presence in a country becomes a part of her nation's international profile. It's important to reflect that we know other countries and historical civilizations by the arts they produce, and that an absence of such evidence is called a Dark Age. But enough! On to my wonderful story...

On to Trinidad!