Illustration by The Globe and Mail/Lauren Kyle M
Entrepreneur Lauren Kyle McDavid, owner of Kyle & Co Design and founder of Edmonton’s exclusive furniture store Trove Living, loves to paint any chance she gets. In between her various business ventures, the one-time fine arts student says mixing colours and picking up her brush brings her calm and creative joy – even if she has to use her Edmonton garage as a makeshift studio.
In this instalment of Joy Diaries, Kyle McDavid (hockey star Connor McDavid’s other half) explains her approach to art projects, and why sometimes you have to skip the plan and just wing it.
I’ve been painting since I was 10 or 12. I used to take classes at a local gallery and entered my pieces into a few competitions. I won once, with an interpretive piece of art about domestic abuse: a close-up of a girl and an inner look at her emotions. It was for an art competition for the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and they used it in their pamphlet.
For university, I went to UBC Okanagan for the Fine Arts Program. I always intended to go into interior design, but to get in, your portfolio required a certain number of art pieces. So I took my time and spent a year in creative arts to build up my portfolio. In those days painting was part of my day-to-day life.
I always loved painting, but I was never that interested in doing it as a career. Painting felt so therapeutic for me and I worried making it into a business would ruin that. I run a lot of businesses already, so my mind’s constantly full of things I need to do and get done, but I can totally shut off when I paint. I’m too busy mixing colours and figuring out where they should go that I get into a meditative state. I’m otherwise really bad at meditating.
Back in the day, I did some realistic photos and landscapes. My favourite of all the paintings I’ve ever done was a landscape commissioned by my uncle. It’s my favourite because it was such a challenge to make it as realistic as possible, or maybe because I worked so hard on it and it took so much time. I worked on it for about two months.
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I really wish I had more time for painting these days. I’m always picking it up and putting it down again, because other stuff comes up.
I was recently doing an interior design package for a client and there was something kind of missing in the space. I knew what the client liked, but we couldn’t quite find it, so I pulled out my acrylics and started experimenting. When I approach a new painting project, first I do a little planning, but not too much. I pull images that I like as inspiration, and then I lightly sketch a plan. It’s good to have a base, but really you have to just do whatever your brain is telling you to do. This painting took about four days, starting with big abstract florals in pastel colours to match the room. I thought that’d be it, but I ended up using water afterward to make a dripping effect. So I have a plan to start but then I just wing it.
I did all that in my garage in Edmonton, which isn’t the most ideal place. I’m always saying I’d love to have an art studio because I think I’d paint much more frequently if I wasn’t in the garage.
I have a vision for a future home, a bungalow, that would have a spiral staircase going to my art studio upstairs, encapsulated by windows with beautiful light coming in. The floors will be easy to-clean terracotta, and I’ll have lots of intentional storage for art supplies. The room will be just about art, nothing else. I’m getting inspired just thinking about it.
As told to Rosemary Counter
