This week we dive into Season 2 of the podcast and I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Canadian artist and muralist Heather Travis to the show as my August co-host! This week, we’re getting to know Heather the artist better but in the coming weeks we’ll be diving into bigger business topics and putting Heather’s PR and communications background to work.

Editor’s Note: If you missed listening to episode 20 then you may not know that there have been some big changes here at And She Looked Up. The biggest one is that my co-host and friend, Lisa Bolton, has decided to step back from And She Looked Up due to some personal commitments. She will be greatly missed but, she will still pop up from time to time as a guest host and she knows she is always welcome stop by. You can listen to episode 20 here where I go into more detail.

Heather Travis is a communications professional as well as a painter known for her large scale canvases and mural work. Recently, she has also gone mini with several old dollhouse restoration projects! We talk about the art community in her rural Ontario town, where her creativity comes from, the business of her art and what it's like when both you and your spouse are self-employed. There's lots in this jam packed episode as we start profiling more creative Canadian women.

Listen To the Episode

Here’s a direct link to Episode 21 - or you can listen via the players below:

Heather Travis currently calls Tara, Ontario home. The picturesque little town is located just outside of Owen Sound - part of Ontario cottage country with nearby lake views and the wide open great outdoors to explore and paint.

Heather and her husband Brian and dog Eddie have slowly been migrating their way out of downtown Toronto to smaller locales further out. While her husband has opened his own bike shop where she helps out when needed, she’s been working from home splitting her time between her freelance PR and communications work and her art. In fact, one of the motivations of moving further outside of Toronto was the opportunity to have more space to create. In her new home, she’s been able to create a full studio loft that’s all hers. Now she has the room to spread out and create the large, joyful canvases that she’s know for.

If you’ve met Heather in person, you know that she’s as bright and bold in real life as the artwork she creates. She’s exuberant and friendly and oozes confidence. She’ll equally rock a stiletto heel or a pair of flip flops (her first blog was called “Heather in Heels”). And while she’s not afraid to go after what she wants, she’s also one of the most generous people you will meet - she has gone out of her way to quietly support and promote other Canadian female creatives behind the scenes for years.

Heather Travis in her loft studio with her trusty companion, Eddie Vedder.

The Early Days…

Painting and creating are things Heather has done her entire life. A photo of her Baba on her wedding day holds pride of place in her studio and it was from her that Heather learned how to sew before she hit double digits. Her original goal from the ages of 8-14: to be a fashion designer - complete with a high rise New York apartment, a pet cheetah, 5 inch heels and an unmade bed (something that signified to her young self that she had “made it”!).

Around the age of 8, she found a can of orange spray paint in her mom’s basement and decided to spray paint her Converse high tops. And she’s been painting ever since!

She sold her first painting to her grandfather - the man who taught her how to draw. It was also him, along with her dad who showed her how to use power tools and make things around the house. Recycle and reuse are at the heart of many of the projects she takes on.

But she never saw herself as a “artist” who would make a living from her art. After watching her brother build a career as a professional musician, she knew what a hard path being a professional artist of any kind would be. Instead, Heather thought she was going to be the stay-at-home mom who made the best chocolate chip cookies - with the picket fence, the three kids, dogs and a husband she sent off to work every day.

But life had other plans. It was while working full time in PR and trying to get pregnant (a process Heather has been quite open and frank about) that she launched her blog, Heather In Heels. It was there that she put her painting and power tool skills to work sharing home DIY projects with her growing audience. These were things she had always done (and continues to do on her Instagram channel) but sharing them on the blog became a therapeutic escape while going through a very difficult personal period.

After coming to accept that children were not in the cards and realizing that there would be other life opportunities to pursue, she put the blog to bed. As is the case with many blogs, it had served its purpose and it was time to move on. She was ready to put all that energy into her art.

Having friends who actually wanted to buy her art and hang it in their homes, having Brian introduce her as his wife the artist and then having people she didn’t know buy her art, resonated deeply with her. It’s a feeling most artists can appreciate!

Since moving to Tara, she has fully embraced being part of the vibrant art community. Owen Sound is home to multiple art galleries, including the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, as well as an artist’s co-op and a centre for the arts. Southampton, Ontario, where she is currently having her first gallery show, is also home to the Southampton Arts Centre, one of Canada’s oldest art schools. It’s a community she’s found to be very welcoming and supportive and it’s made the process of putting herself and her artwork out into the world easier than she expected.

Going Even Bigger….

While she’s always loved creating large scale canvases, in recent years Heather has gone even bigger, experimenting with mural work. She started out using her own home as her canvas (the laundry room in the new house they’ve been in for just 18 months has already hosted three different murals). She next moved on to her husband’s bike shop and now she’s starting to do murals for other local businesses. It’s an artform that suits her bold, colourful style.

Bike shop murla.jpg — A Heather Travis original mural.

Since the pandemic started, Heather has begun hosting weekly FART Tutorials (Friday Afternoon Art Tutorials) for her friends’ kids via Zoom. So far they’ve made comic strips, bubble letters, doodling and… one week she helped them all design “mini-murals” and sent them all back to their parents with the goal of convincing mom and dad that they should be allowed to paint their mural somewhere in the house! (and all of them succeeded!)

And Then Going Small…

While Heather does tend to see the world through big, bold canvases, recently she has gone the other way - to teeny tiny! After deciding to pass on her childhood dollhouse (that had been in the family for generations) to her niece, she gave it a makeover. And that has led to more dollhouse makeovers - in true bight bold Heather Travis style.

Here are a few other tidbits from our conversation:

What’s It Like Living With Another Self-Employed Person?

Heather loves that her spouse is also an entrepreneur and is grateful for the conversations they’re able to share because they’re both self-employed. Having the added trust factor of being able to share business challenges and successes with a spouse or partner who appreciates the nuances of running their own business adds another layer to their relationship and provides an extra support system.

And while she appreciates that they’re both self-employed, she admits that from a financial perspective, it was her original, steady and secure 9-5 job that gave them ability to open Brian’s bike shop at it’s original location. But now, several years later, it’s the bike shop’s success that has allowed Heather to go out on her own and give her more freedom to pursue her art as a career.

While the two of them are able to provide a much needed support network to each other that can be harder to find when your partner doesn’t necessarily understand the challenges of being self-employed, they’re both quite happy that at the end of the day, they run separate businesses and don’t need to be in each other’s pockets unless they choose to be!

Do they worry about the financial implications of both being self-employed? As Heather says “all day every day” but, they love that they are in control of their own destiny and when one thing doesn’t work (or a global pandemic strikes), they have the freedom to pivot quickly and try new opportunities or… create new opportunities for themselves.

Finding opportunity?

Finding and creating opportunities is something that Heather is a pro at. Her latest project is one she’s actually doing for free - because it’s creating opportunity for her in ways that are just as valuable to her as the paycheque she gets on other projects. And that’s one of her favourite benefits of being self-employed: she gets to make the decisions as to what’s valuable to her business in terms of financial compensation, opportunity and both personal and professional growth. It’s a freedom most of us wouldn’t have in a traditional 9-5 job. (we explore working for free and deciding what has value to our businesses in more depth in the episode!)

Learning The Value of Negotiation Early

Like many women who don’t want to appear to be aggressive or firm, Heather started her career shying away from negotiation. It wasn’t until the CEO for the company she was working for at the time, pointed out to her that she didn’t get something she wanted because of a “failure of negotiation on your part”. It was a lesson she took to heart.

Since then she’s learned to ask for what she wants but… she’s also learned that building relationships is key to getting what you want when you ask for it. As we’ll see in future episodes, relationship building is at the heart of Heather’s work ethos be it as a PR professional or an artist.