about

My Story

I grew up in a working-class family, the only child of an immigrant and a high school dropout out. I spent much of my life adapting to new situations and moving between different worlds. Over the years I worked in kitchens, warehouses, construction sites, film sets, sales offices, and countless other places. I wasn’t following a plan. I was chasing a big dream. I was paying attention.

Alongside all of that, I was writing. Creating my weird art. Poems, notebooks, fragments, observations. Later came collage, drawing, and painting. Art was never something separate from life. It became a way of making sense of it.

In 2016, at the age of twenty-six, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Like many difficult experiences, it forced me to slow down and reconsider what mattered. It deepened my appreciation for attention, presence, and the fragile beauty of ordinary life. The diagnosis became less of an ending than a turning point.

Today I live in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia with my family, where my wife and I steward a small farm and event venue. Much of my work is created between the rhythms of family life, gardening, animals, and the countless responsibilities that come with caring for a piece of land. These experiences have shaped my understanding of impermanence, memory, devotion, and the passage of time.

My paintings and collages are not attempts to deliver answers. They are invitations to look more closely. I am interested in what remains beneath the noise of contemporary life: attention, mystery, longing, beauty, grief, wonder, and the strange fact of being alive at all.

I work primarily with oil stick, paint, spray paint, found materials, and collage. The materials themselves often carry histories of their own. Scraps of paper, discarded images, marks, stains, and fragments are gathered and assembled into something new. In that way, the work mirrors life itself—broken pieces becoming a whole.

More than anything, I hope the work creates space. Space to pause. Space to feel. Space to encounter something that cannot be fully explained.

Thank you for spending time with it.

 ©️ Santino Dela