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.”

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!”

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.”