Artist on a mission

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This article was published 16/11/2019 (1622 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It took Alex Plante until her late twenties to find a job she feels truly good at — full-time digital artist.

You may have even seen her colourful, radiant illustrations online without knowing the name or the face behind the art. Many of her depictions are of local landmarks — idyllic, whimsical portrayals of The Forks in the winter, Donald Street during a Winnipeg Whiteout street party, Shaw Park during a Goldeyes game — among others.

“It’s kind of the art version of ‘write what you know,’” Plante says as she nurses a soy flat white at a sun-drenched Seasons of Tuxedo coffee shop on a recent weekday afternoon, as to why she creates so much city-centric art.

There’s much more to why, of course. When she was in Australia prior to coming to pursue a degree in film from the University of Winnipeg in 2013, she realized she was telling those who expressed interest in Canada that they could just “skip the prairies, there’s nothing all that interesting.”

“After a few months of that, I was like ‘why am I saying this?’” The artist born in The Pas recalls asking herself. “We have a lot of truly amazing things.”

Plante sees her art, which she creates on Photoshop using a MacBook and a Wacom Intuous tablet with a stylus, as a counterbalance to the negative perceptions Winnipeggers often have of their city.

“That’s kind of been a bit of an artist’s mission for me is to help everybody see how good it actually is here,” she says. “There’s a lot of beauty, there’s a lot of humour, the people are really amazing. I just want to share that and make it so that (Winnipeg) is not so looked down on anymore.”

Plante’s splashy style radiates positivity and often drips with local lore. Take her Winnipeg Whiteout piece, almost an “I Spy” of local references and in-jokes that would be lost on most non-’Peggers.

For example, you can spot the fan who’s attended games dressed in drag as Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen’s Guard that accompanies him, the Bhangra dancers who whirled and twirled at Portage and Main in their Heritage Classic jerseys and a guy with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken — in reference to Kyle Connor’s nickname — among much more.

“How many jokes can I fit in here?” she remembers asking herself while planning the piece.

Much of Plante’s art is inspired by memes or trends. One such example is her piece depicting Cheryl Lashek, who went viral a few years back for her signature… ahem… signature on elevator permits.

More recently, a series of drawings she did of Cinder-Block — an obese grey cat that captured the internet’s attention for its unwillingness to exercise on an underwater treadmill — gained huge traction on Twitter.

Plante says she doesn’t try to go viral, but the attention she got from the latter drawings — which she did just to break through an artist’s block — is rather a byproduct of “being tapped into people and trying to respond to the world around (her.)”

“I really, truly believe that if you’re doing what you are meant to be doing, success will find you, as long as you’re working hard on it,” she says.

She’s excelling doing what she likes to do and what she has fun doing, which includes commissions from many different clients. After the interview, she was going to finish off designing Christmas and Hanukkah cards for the St. Boniface Hospital Foundation.

However, her route to a career in art was a circuitous one — even more winding than her childhood that took her from her Northern-Manitoba hometown, to Dauphin, Lloydminster, Ab., and Brandon.

For the longest time, no matter what job she working, Plante felt she was “treading water, but (not) swimming.”

“I’m alright at most jobs. I can pull off most jobs but I’m not great at them,” she explains. “Once you hit a certain point in a career trajectory, people want you to be great… it got to the point where it was like ‘I should leave before they ask me to leave.’”

That’s in reference to her “solid, stable” full-time gig as a social media manager and receptionist at Total Wrapture Spa in St. James that she left last June to strike it out on her own.

“You always read in autobiographies about artists and actors and musicians, they’re always talking about how trying to work a regular job is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole,” she says.

“I’m just not really cut out for the average job, and I wish I was. Life would be a lot easier that way, it’d be a lot simpler,” she admits.

Working for others just didn’t work for her. Her free-spirited streak is evident.

“What do you mean I can’t just go to the game tonight?” she asks. “What do you mean you’re going to tell me how to live my life?

It was the freedom, ultimately, that made me leave.”

She says the choice to eschew the financial security (and job benefits!) Total Wrapture provided was terrifying, but says her beau Matt Cheung was supportive of her choice.

Plante presented her partner of four years with her plan: she would continue to work at 103.1 Virgin Radio as a part-time radio host but look for a new full-time job if she couldn’t make the art career work in three months.

She hasn’t had to consult any want ads.

“All of my friends were like ‘oh, finally!’” Plante recalls upon telling them her plan. “Even my old teachers from high school were saying… ‘we’ve been wanting you to do this forever.’”

Plante loves the flexibility digital art provides compared to working on paper or canvas.

“I like the ability to work on different layers and change colours just by scrolling a wheel,” she says. “Working with clients, it makes it a lot easier to change things on the fly.”

From larger works to one-scene cartoons, much of Plante’s work celebrates the mundaneness and warts of everyday existence.

Not afraid to poke fun of herself, her comics often make light of her own life’s plights, from struggling to find a piece of yellow clothing she actually likes to wear, to being afraid of moths, to not knowing what to talk about while behind the microphone at Virgin.

“I think it’s very important to make fun of everything,” she says.

“When you’re in the thick of a s—-y mental-health day, it’s really hard not to just cry,” says Plante, who struggled with anxiety and depression in her twenties.

“So I feel like big things, small things, I think it’s important to laugh at them all… I like to have fun with everything, wherever I can. I think it’s the healthiest way to be for me.”

Plante says she gets a lot of messages from people who relate to the struggles she depicts.

“In my past, I’ve found a lot of comfort in seeing other people laugh about their own struggles or talk about the hard things they’ve gone through,” she explains.

“I don’t want to think that I am so important that me making jokes about things will have that a big of an impact on anybody, but on the off-chance that it does, I don’t want to deny that comfort to somebody.”

Plante believes both horror and comedy are rooted in things “extremely true to the core.” She chooses to embrace the “comedy side of life.”

“The truer it is, the funnier or scarier it is,” she says.

While there’s always risk of falling out of love with a passion after turning it into a career, Plante hasn’t.

“I am shocked that I love art more than ever now,” she says.

“Obviously you’re always going to have to take on projects that play well and you’re not super into,” she acknowledges, “but I try to keep them as few as possible… actually I haven’t had to do too many because most of the projects people approach me with generally are fun.”

Plante says being a full-time artist hasn’t burnt her out. The worry that taking a hobby she enjoyed and turning into a job would be a “recipe for disaster” dissuaded her from doing art full time upon graduating high school. Better late than never, they say.

Despite her successes and knowing people enjoy her work, Plante still experiences feelings of imposter syndrome (though less often now) and sometimes gets jealous of other digital artists’ skills.

To combat feelings of inadequacy from popping up too often, Plante simply looks back at past pieces.

“If you look back at your old pieces, you have two options,” she says. “You’re either like ‘OK, this is really good, surprisingly it holds up,’ or ‘this does not hold up, this is garbage, but wow I have learned a lot and come much further than I thought I did.’”

As for whether she has any regrets in leaving the nine-to-five life behind and if she’d make the same choice in retrospect, Plante is unequivocal.

“Oh my god, none at all,” she says. “I would make it 100 times.”

To see Plante’s art, you can visit her website or follow her on Instagram and Twitter.