I really don’t remember what first drew me to painting. I think someone gave me an oil paint set and a canvas board and I just dived in. At sixteen, I remember sketching a boy asleep on the subway during a visit to New York and painting him when I got home. I took painting lessons in high school—from Henri Masson for two years, and years of night classes at the Ottawa Technical High School.

I desperately wanted to go to art school in Montreal instead of university, but my father decreed that writing was an intellectual, worthwhile pursuit, art its flighty, frivolous younger sister. So I graduated from university with an MA in English Literature, married, had four children, and for a number of years painted in my decreasingly available spare time.

 When I was nearly forty, I finally went to Concordia University and got my fine arts degree (it only took me seven years!). Art school opened my eyes to the infinite possibilities of art beyond mere painting. and I began a thirty-five-year career as a printmaker, papermaker and sculptor.

I’ve also written since childhood. When I was twelve I won a city-wide essay contest sponsored by the Ottawa Humane Society. “A Walk With my Dog” recounted my trek from Ottawa to Montreal with my dog. In fact, I had never walked anywhere near that distance and I’d never had a dog. So much for writing what you know. When my first poem was published in the Northern Review when I was nineteen, I was hooked. I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing, winning prizes and getting published.

My early paintings and pastel drawings were landscapes, portraits of friends and family, and still lifes. Initially, my printmaking covered the same subject matter, but I soon turned to my family for inspiration. One series of etchings became a family memoir when I printed images of my husband and children on cotton and sewed them into a quilt, embellishing them with embroidery and appliqué. Another series came about when I was a substitute art teacher in my son’s grade three class and photographed drawings done by the students. I transferred these photographs to light-sensitive metal plates, printed them on Arches paper and hand-coloured them.

When my children were young they loved my bedtime stories about my own childhood and I began to write these down. As time went on, however, I noticed that they started to take on a more serious tone. They were no longer wistful, pretty tales of my halcyon childhood days, but had become complicated by layers of nuance and portent I hadn’t originally intended. They were now leading me on a quest for answers to events in my life that demanded sanction and explanation. I turned to writing about my adulthood, and that of my siblings, and the deaths of my parents, searching for explanations as to why my life turned out the way it did.

And then my husband fell terminally ill, and for five years I stopped writing. I stopped making art.

But ultimately painting and writing, together, saved my life.

Three years after my husband’s death, a month after moving to Toronto to be near my children and grandchildren, I began to paint again, for the first time in thirty-five years. You can lose yourself in painting, which is what I needed to do. I began to write again soon after that, when I joined a memoir writing workshop.

I paint in my solarium, a glass-enclosed balcony with a tiled floor and a breathtaking view looking south down Avenue Road that is filled with all the things I love—a stereo (I paint to Mozart and Beethoven), a rattan chaise and table, geraniums in full bloom, my easel and paint box. And since painting, unlike writing, can be an inspiring group activity, I also paint with a delightful group of very good painters two-thirds my age, one of whom is my oldest daughter—a special joy.

At first, using old photographs for inspiration, I painted my family in its early years, memoirs of my parents and husband and children when they were young. Now I paint people and places from my current life—the cafés of Paris, the countryside in Prince Edward county, the streets of Toronto, my children and grandchildren. Painting seems to have carried me beyond memoir, enabling me to look at the present with equanimity and the future with confidence. There’s an immediacy to painting. It’s a tactile basic act that offers instant results with none of the labour-intensive, technical preparations and delayed gratification of printmaking and papermaking. (I sold my printing press and all my silkscreen and papermaking equipment, when I could no longer manage them physically.)

And so I’ve come full circle, back to where I started. There’s a difference, of course. Years spent practising other forms of art, and life experience, have sharpened my skills and brought something new to my painting.

Now, when I paint, I have absolutely no idea what will happen once I sit down at the easel. I choose the subject—either from life or a sketch or a photograph that I take myself and draw the image on a prepared canvas, but after that I go into a sort of fugue and paint furiously until the canvas is covered. A week later, when I’ve had time to study it, I start the second phase of the painting, working out a colour balance, considering proportion, perspective and tonal values. I allow a week between successive paintings, propping the canvas up where I’ll see it every day, thinking about its faults and good points, listening to the painting as it tells me what it needs.

When I write, I use a similar stream-of-consciousness technique, writing anything and everything I can think of on the subject. I then spend many, many hours rereading the work, cutting, shaping, rewriting and polishing those random, unfocused thoughts into a finished piece of writing.

To me, writing and painting are each a means of exploration—an attempt to find meaning in my life, which now boasts a past considerably longer than its future. Both media are excellent avenues through which to explore life and memory. Writing, however, allows me to investigate depths of character and circumstance, to explore philosophical and psychological nuances that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in a painting.

Nevertheless, there are conventions employed by painters to produce a reaction in the viewer: colour, perspective, composition. In a portrait I painted of my mother, I position her to the side of the painting, with pictures of her family on the wall behind her. She is clearly a widow, still mourning the husband who used to sit in the now-empty space beside her on the sofa during their decades together. She is dressed in red and purple, evidence that she is still a proud, vital woman, yet her twisted hands betray her arthritic fragility. Most telling of all is the sweet smile on her face, which belies the glint of tough intelligence in her eyes.

TILYA GALLAY HELFIELD is a writer and multimedia artist. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Fiddlehead, TV Guide, Viewpoints, Monday Morning, Winner’s Circle Anthology, and  at www.theoccupiedgarden.com.  For several years she wrote a weekly humorous column for Montreal’s The Sunday Express and The Suburban, which is now being enjoyed on her new blog Take It From Tilya. She recently completed a collection of creative non-fiction stories titled Metaphors for Love. Born and raised in Ottawa, Tilya lived for many years in Montreal and now resides in Toronto.