When it comes to transformational educational experiences, it’s hard to top that of Sie Douglas-Fish. Prior to arriving at UVic, they had never even left their 2,000-person hometown before — but now, as they graduate with a BFA in Visual Arts, they’re not only already living and working in a city of 4.2 million but also had their art featured on national TV and have a piece hanging in the Montreal offices of Amazon Web Services. That’s pretty impressive for a person who was roundly mocked in high school for simply wanting to be an artist.
“I grew up being told that my art was a waste of time and that my style wasn’t something people would want to buy,” Douglas-Fish recalls about their high-school years in the small BC town of 100 Mile House.
Dragon’s Den calling
But that didn’t stop them from choosing UVic as their degree destination and following a creative path that eventually saw their work featured on a 2023 episode of the national CBC TV show Dragon’s Den . . . on their birthday, no less. “Here’s these multimillionaires holding a piece of my art and saying, ‘Wow!’ It felt very validating to be acknowledged like that — and on my 21st birthday too.”
Not only did their time at UVic exponentially expand their creative, technological and entrepreneurialhorizons, but it also increased their confidence in their art, career and themself.
“The advantage of going to a university is that you have access to all these other experiences,” they say. “I had never engaged with other people about art before, let alone experienced an in-person critique of my work or had a life-drawing class. The first time I was actually able to see my own potential was at UVic.”
One of Sie’s pieces seen on Dragon’s Den
Sie officially graduates as part of UVic’s fall convocation ceremonies on November 13, which you can watch live here.
The future looks robotic
Hired straight out of school to work at Acrylic Robotics in Montreal — the robotic art company where they interned remotely during their final year of studies and also created the set of portraits seen on Dragon’s Den — Douglas-Fish is now doing things they never imagined they could. But their current path is a natural progression from both the digital art and graphics they did during three years as design director for UVic’s Martlet student newspaper.
Being at UVic also allowed them to gain experience as a freelance artist: not only by contributing art for the children’s book Sharks Forever by Writing instructor (and Fine Arts alumnus) Mark Leiren-Young, but also by setting up their first “artist alley” display at Victoria’s comic con — something they’ve since continued to do at other in cons in Calgary and Toronto. “I’m getting to the point now where I can travel to do them,” they say. “They’re really long days but are a lot of fun!”
Now based in Montreal, Douglas-Fish is currently seeing their art going out on a global tour with Acrylic Robotics and Amazon Web Services. “We’re taking one of our large robots to a bunch of different cities across the world: San Francisco, London, Seoul . . . my art is going to be seen in South Korea! How cool is that?”
As a full-time internal artist at Acrylic Robotics (a 10-person tech start-up whose motto is “Helping Robots Paint with Humans”), Douglas-Fish both creates original art and works with other artists to robotically reproduce their own pieces in sizes both small and large.
“We work with global companies like hotels where they need a duplicate of the same painting in every single room — like 500 of the same 20 paintings — or individual artists who want to create identical limited-edition paintings, kind of like what you’d do with prints,” they explain.
“I work with Adobe Illustrator and either create an original design or recreate the work of another artist . . . but a big part of my job is also preserving the artistic intention of the artist. There’s a lot of trial and error, but also a lot of artistic intuition: it’s fascinating!”
Showcasing their work at Toronto’s comic-con
They’ve also released their own collection with Acrylic Robotics, two pieces from which are now part of the permanent collections for both the American LGBTQ+ Museum and Museum of Art & Design, both in NYC.
Building on their skills
Looking to the future (as only a robotics artist can), Douglas-Fish can see themself pursuing art direction in tech or maybe with a video game publisher like Ubisoft. But as a former high-school mentor and a three-year volunteer with UVic’s Peer Support Centre, they also like the idea of working with emerging artists.
“I can see myself teaching art at some point,” they conclude. “Maybe because I didn’t have an art community and nobody really cared about art in my town, it’s important to me to be in a position where I can support other artists. That was just something that I never had growing up.”
Sie’s work seen in the 2024 BFA exhibit