Once Upon a Time there was an Artist Named Garry Sanipass…

The Tension Between Starving and Thriving: A Struggle of Art and Identity

I’ve always believed that art should come from the heart, from a place of raw emotion, vulnerability, and authenticity. For years, I clung to the idea of the “starving artist”—the tortured soul who suffers for their craft, embracing a life of sacrifice, isolation, and a rejection of the commercial world. In this ideal, art was pure and untouched by the outside pressures of sales or success. It was about sincerity, about being true to my inner vision, no matter the cost.

But here’s the thing: I’ve injured myself in this pursuit. The very ideal that I once held up as a banner of purity—this grueling, extreme way of living, as though suffering somehow made me a more authentic artist—has left me physically broken. The idea of starving myself for the sake of creation has become a kind of self-inflicted prison.

And now, I’m at a crossroads. I need money to fix what’s broken—literally. I need to build safe stairs so I can continue working, so I can continue creating. The reality is inescapable: I can no longer afford to romanticize my pain, and I can no longer ignore the business side of art.

Enter the Catapult program, where a group of artists, including myself, are being taught how to sell, market, and navigate the realities of making a living as a creator. I’ve been thrust into a world of marketing strategies, branding, and spreadsheets—things I once despised because they felt like an intrusion into the sacred space of art. But I’ve realized that I can’t thrive in the extremes. I can’t just be the starving artist, nor can I only be the business-minded entrepreneur.

This is the tension I find myself in: a split identity between the starving artist and the businessman, each one pulling me in a different direction. One says to sacrifice everything for the sake of art, to suffer and struggle until the work is pure. The other says to build, to expand, to make art sustainable, and to embrace the realities of living in a world where success can—and should—be earned.

To embody this internal conflict, I’ve begun to work with two colors: black, made from charred moose bone, and yellow, created from rocks I hunted and processed myself. The black symbolizes the suffering, the pain, the destruction of the artist willing to burn everything for authenticity. It is the dark side of the starving artist—the part that sacrifices health, safety, and even happiness for the sake of the art itself. The yellow, on the other hand, represents something more grounded and enduring: the earth, the foundation, the life that must be lived in order to continue creating. It is the opposite of suffering—it is the light of survival, of growth, of balance.

Together, these colors represent the push and pull I feel within myself. The struggle between survival and sacrifice, between authenticity and success. I am trying to hold both—acknowledge both—without letting one consume the other. And that’s the tension I am embodying in my paintings: the conflict of being both an artist and a person who has to live in the world.

I don’t have answers yet, but I’m trying to honor this tension. I’m trying to find a way to reconcile the part of me that wants to burn for my art with the part of me that knows I need to live, to heal, and to thrive.

In these new works, the black and yellow are not just colors—they are symbols. They are the very essence of the battle I’m fighting inside myself. The starving artist. The businessman. Both are necessary, both are real. And, for now, I’m holding space for them both.