It wasn't easy for Ray Fortin to discover he was an artist and it isn't easy for Ray Fortin to be an artist today. That has nothing to do with his talent. It is as obvious as the tail on a tiger.
"I kinda got into a bit of trouble, my first time," he said. "It was in Grade 8, I think, and we had to draw something for the assignment. When I did it, my teacher thought I'd copied it. So I had to show her. I did another one, with her there watching. And she was so amazed."
Fortin went to school in the last days of corporal punishment in the classroom. In Grade 4, he remembered, a student who got seven mistakes on a test would get seven lashes with the strap.
"I feel like I lost my education because of that," he said, because he quit school early "to escape the abuse."
He went to work instead.
He worked on a farm in his home area around Hearst, Ont. He was skilled at hunting and trapping. He drifted west, arriving in Prince George in 1979 at the age of 19. He worked on the railroad and he worked construction jobs like drywalling.
What could never be suppressed was his urge to draw.
"The positive affirmation I got for art was the only happy reactions I can remember getting from an adult in school," he said, and that pushed him onward into that form of expression and communication.
"When I get going, I can't stop," he said. "I enjoy doing it so much. It's a passion of mine."
Flip through the below slideshow to view the Alphabet Project art and a link to each artist story:
He has grandkids and a 14-year-old son Gerricko Felix who is also interested in art. Fortin never feels prouder than when he and his son work together on an image, or his son comes to him to show him his next youthful art project. It was his son's interest in art that actually inspired Fortin to reawaken his own drawing pursuits after letting the art habit relapse.
He wanted to mentor his boy.
"He's better than me," Fortin said. "It's like he has a photographic memory. He can look at something once or twice and that's it, that's all he needs to draw it out perfectly."
Art is also the pastime he enjoys most in his own life. He tends to do it most in the evening, after work is finished and family time is waning for the day. He tends to use photographs as his base inspiration, but more and more he is conjuring images solely out of his own imagination.
He has worked with watercolours, acrylics, but his go-to medium is coloured pencils.
Fortin was not initially drawn to the Alphabet Project, but a friend and fellow artist twisted his arm. The project is a collaboration between The Citizen and the Community Arts Council in honour of the newspaper's 100th anniversary. Twenty-six artists were commissioned to each draw a randomly selected letter of the alphabet, in deference to the written language being the primary medium of a newspaper but artistic symbolism and culture being underlying foundations of the business.
The friend, Victor Morris, believed Fortin was capable of being one of those 26 and the assumption was correct.
When Fortin got the letter T as his assignment, the image of the tiger persisted, so it became the dominant device, but he was delighted to let his pencils and mind wander over all kinds of other visual territory as well.
"This is a new experience for me. I've never done anything like it before," Fortin said. "I'm so glad I got this chance. It's a good project. People are going to look at all these pieces of art and think 'this is my city, these are the talented people who make this place happen, where I live.' A place gets known by the artists who work there. Now the world knows who we are in Prince George, because you can't deny what you see with your own eyes, with this art."
