Vasiliki Quinlan began her artistic journey studying at CMU College of Makeup Art & Design, where she discovered her love in painting and sculpture during the Prosthetics and Animatronics portion of the study.
This led her to attend The Toronto School of Art for a three year diploma program, to which she won two awards and continued on for an additional year to perfect her craft. Finding that Conceptual Art, which came in the third year of schooling, was her favorite (because the school taught all form of art making).
She navigated everything she learned in art school in her studio that was planted in Mirvish Village for the years to follow. While (still in art school) doing Makeup in fashion being experienced in runway, photoshoots and Indie film.
In 2007, Vasiliki attended a Work Study Summer program building Wigs and doing Makeup in the theatre department at The Banff Centre. Discovering and learning all across the disciplines that made the theatre run, through sharing techniques and workshops between departments.
In 2008 Vasiliki returned to Banff to take part in the same experience as the year prior, only to fall into a manic episode which lasted a week, resulting in her hospitalization and return home.
When in years to follow she tried to reapply for the position in Banff and not getting in, she shifted her focus and performed a Residency at The Toronto School of Art, trying to gather new ideas into painting, collage and mixed media.
After that, for years she fell into what she coins "The Void" but she still had her studio in Mirvish Village in the Annex, where she spent the majority of her time. Only to find her craft and gifts had vanished. With this being the case, Vasiliki could only perform well with Paint By Numbers, but she used her own colors, that was the catch. She used pastel and bright paints to color in the child designed Paint By Numbers which is what is influencing her work now. The prompts she currently creates is very reflective for her of this time, where she hopes others can be able to navigate such a chance that she found she had by the designs of the Paint By Numbers ease, direction, patterns and open play. (But Vasiliki's work on the prompts she creates is still unfolding in design as we speak...and so the final product is still under research and development)
She didn't know if it was from the medications she had been put on or it was something that would never come back.
However she managed to come up with living in her creative space while the frustration of her lost talent was real to her existence.
In 2012 she experienced a second Manic Episode, this time lasting four months to which the majority of her time was spent in CAMH. Asking the family to bring all her art supplies and receiving only her books. She practiced a bit of art in the art room at CAMH on the Fifth Floor but nothing came out of these creations, while what she produced in her home studio she still has been influenced by and made adapted to her art forms now. Vasiliki no longer had her studio and worked from a home studio. While she wasn't in CAMH, she spent all her time roaming the streets and creating art in the rooms available to her in her studio.
Once recovered, again finding life less real to her than what happened in psychosis, years followed with trying to heal through creation.
Later she trained as a Peer Supporter and volunteered in that role at Hope + Me - Mood Disorders of Ontario on the Warm Line, In Group Sessions and One on One Peer Supporting.
The weight of being a person to help others in life was taxing on her as she felt a sense of responsibility strongly and so after a year and a half she resigned from the volunteer position and tuned back to "The Void" she had always experienced after mania. A lost sense of purpose held her captive to herself.
Slowly she began to create again, only in ways that she didn't know how to showcase. In the build of her artistic expression she practices now took years of posting, deleting, frustrated, in love and round and round she went until she found the work she practices now.
Currently, she works in her studio from home. Crossing lines between creativity, art, mental health influenced work and expressing her voice, ideas and suggestions for others to be able to exist creatively from the general place that she works to give offerings. This gives herself that sense of self. And provides these elements online as examples and samples to be able to experience the gift of life we get.
Vasiliki uses her mind for the product line she creates which is called "Revolving Imagery" in a series that will shape and transform from one Volume to the next.
As someone who has crossing the lines of reality and being with her able mind through years of being an artists, she does believe her sense of living in the making of things has interesting concepts and perspective to identify with. Take what you want and leave what you don't want, there is no influenced definiteness or absolute truth to what she offers to the public, only what comes from her years of study and practice. In how she expresses the fine art work she does now, it builds her own language and practices which she applies to her life to remain self entertained, while she dreams for it to find those who want what she provides and to tantalize the curiosity we all get the chance to experience.