As a city councillor, Mike Salisbury is used to being in the spotlight.
But it was a different kind of spotlight that had the second-term Ward 4 councillor stressed out on Tuesday morning.
Salisbury was preparing for the first public showing of his unique art later that day in the lounge of a friend’s business on Cork Street, a showing he has called Emotional Scribbling.
He calls his drawings “infinity line art,” where the image is created by one continuous line. The pen only leaves the paper to be changed for one of a different thickness, then the continuous line is resumed.
Each work is based on a photograph and Salisbury has to map out the piece before he starts or risk running into dead ends.
“It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes you have to double back,” he said.
It all started with some idle doodling noticed by his daughter.
“I used to sit there scribbling on a pad and one day my daughter said to me ‘that looks really cool,’” says Salisbury. “So I did a self-portrait for her.”
He has concentrated for the last year on creating enough pieces to show. The end result are 15 works, including 12 portraits of faces depicting various types of emotion that he calls How Are You Feeling Now?
Those are based on a poster used in therapeutic settings where people struggling with mental health and emotional challenges can point to pictures showing various facial expressions that best suits how they themselves are feeling.
“It’s been really, really hard to do. There’s been a lot of self-doubt. A lot of ‘why are you doing this?’ and ‘’it’s not good enough,’” said Salisbury.
Three other drawings are about lost relationships, which was a therapeutic work for Salisbury, who lost his wife Ruth to a fentanyl overdose three years ago.
“It’s amazing how cathartic producing art is in terms of what’s going on inside,” Salisbury said. “We were married for 25 years. We met when we were 13.”
It has taken a lot of encouragement from family and friends to push him forward, including his two grown daughters.
Salisbury, who briefly attended the Toronto School of Art after high school before graduating from the University of Guelph with a degree in landscape architecture, owns a landscape design company that specializes in naturalized play structures and areas.
The portraits, other than the one he did of himself, are generic. Motivated by photos downloaded off the internet of people showing the suitable emotion he was looking for.
That doesn’t stop people from thinking it is someone recognizable.
“It’s abstract enough that people see what they want to see in it,” Salisbury said.
Some day he would like to show his work in a gallery.
“I’m interested in exploring the medium and seeing that technique evolve,” he said. “But it would be a real accomplishment to have an exhibit in an art gallery.”
The work can be viewed on Instagram.
