The four days of Nov. 14-17 will mark the third Eastside Culture Crawl for Surrey-based artist Leslie Martin, who says she enjoys the annual festival that sees artists open their studios to the public.
This year's Crawl features more than 500 artists in 55 buildings located in East Vancouver.
"It's so much fun," Martin confirmed. "My art in particular is very much about mental health and talking about my story and learning about other people's stories, and just opening a conversation. So, events like this are excellent for meeting people and being able to talk to them about my art instead of just being in the online presence."
Martin's Bubble Fight Club profile on culturecrawl.ca reveals that she's a bipolar artist who cares a lot about mental health and, at her 19th-floor apartment in Guildford, paints with watercolour soap bubbles.
"I also have a studio in East Van called Vancouver Hack Space," Martin noted. "They have an industrial laser-cutter machine, embroidery machines and all this awesome stuff that I can use for my art. So I generally paint at home and then I take it to the Hack Space to cut it up and engrave stuff and other work there, on Venables."
The Bubble Fight Club name riffs on the Fight Club movie, with a twist.
"The first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club, but the first rule of Bubble Fight Club is to talk about mental health," said Martin. "I like to call it a club as well because I'm trying to create that sort of club atmosphere but with everyone."
She won't be demonstrating her bubble painting at Eastside Culture Crawl, "because I'm sharing space with other artists, and my bubbles get everywhere."
Originally from Ohio, Martin moved to Canada in 2018.
"I came up with this (bubble art) technique in grad school when I was living in Texas," she explained. "I was in a class called Generative Art, generally a collaboration between a human and a computer and the human writes a code in the computer will make art based on the code and some sort of element of randomness. And so we had to come up with an analog generative art process before we were allowed to get into the coding. And so we had to come up with our own element of randomness.
"I was like, 'I like blowing bubbles and I can't control those at all. Let's see how that looks.'"
Her first attempts were with food colouring, which she put in a soap-bubble solution and blew onto a canvas. Pleased with test results, she transitioned to water colours mixed with clear Dawn dish soap, glycerin and distilled water.
"I make my own solution," Martin said. "The glycerin helps the bubbles retain their shape longer so that they don't just sort of pop in the air, and it keeps them more moist. And the distilled water is because sometimes the tap water has impurities.
"There are different chemicals added that will change the composition of the bubbles chemically and it'll make them even less predictable. I like having them be predictable in that I know it's actually gonna blow a bubble, right. The unpredictability of it is how it's gonna pop, if it's gonna graze across the paper and leave a little streak, or if it's just gonna sort of splat, or if it's gonna hit the paper at all. Like, I cannot control the bubbles and I love that, because I'm a perfectionist, and I have to give that up when I'm painting."
On twitch.tv/bubblefightclub, Martin demonstrates her bubble art technique in weekly live-streams done in a shower stall, now on Tuesdays.
