For 28-year-old Nicholas Wannamaker, art is a lifeline.

“I do art because I’ve never gotten mental health help, so basically everything I do is me dissecting a part of my soul that’s been fractured, damaged, and it’s basically an exploration and representation of the healing I’m trying to do,” the Lawrence and Warden Avenue area resident said.

But Wannamaker, who bounced around in foster care throughout southern Ontario, didn’t come to art naturally. He was never presented with opportunities for it growing up. His only constant companion and mentor as a kid was TV.

“My dads were Jim Carrey, Leonardo DiCaprio, any big actor from the ’90s.”

It was when he became an adult and got out of the foster care system that he reached the darkest moment of his life, not knowing how to live.

“I was broke, alone, broken, in an apartment that I owed too much money on,” he said. It was at that moment, when he had nothing else, that he started creating art.

“It’s literally a cliché. I literally had nothing and was going down, but then it just inverted. Once I started creating, I started coming back up.”

He enrolled in Seneca College’s fashion arts program, which is how he ended up living in Toronto. He now creates one-of-a-kind clothing, which he sells through his underbellysociety label. Plus he paints, illustrates, writes, hosts a podcast, performs in a hip hop group and more. He also advocates for WoodGreen Community Services’ Free 2 Be program, which supports people exiting the foster care system, and hosts art workshops for clients of that program. He said creating art is therapy, which is why he teaches it to what he calls “veterans” of the foster care system.

This January, Wannamaker’s artwork will be on display at a TTC subway station.

That’s because he, as a VIBE Arts emerging artist, participated in that organization’s year-long RBC Desire Lines mentorship program, which culminates in the participants’ work being displayed in the system, thanks to a partnership with Pattison, the company that handles advertising on the TTC.

With financial support from the RBC Emerging Artist Program, the seven artists on the project got paid for their time. A second cohort of the program will take place in 2020.

The program includes mentorship for the artists. It tasked them to create and deliver arts programming for young people within their communities, and then to create artwork that will be displayed on two large advertising panels at the stations, plus a third featuring their bios. Which stations will display the art has not yet been finalized, but they are expected to be close to the artists’ homes.

Jason De Mata, mentorship co-ordinator at VIBE Arts, said the intention of the program is to help the artists share their skills in their communities, ideally in small group settings.

“We want it to be a meaningful program for the youth that do attend the programs,” he said.

The artists celebrated the end of the year-long project with an art show in November.

For 21-year-old Vicky Wang, a lifelong Willowdale resident, getting to display in the subway system is a great opportunity.

“It’s really quite exciting. The panels are huge,” she said.

Wang is a visual artist and singer-songwriter who goes by the stage name Earlybird. She plans to release music in 2020 and performed her music at the exhibition.

As a visual artist, she does blind contour drawing and teaches that style of drawing. The idea is that the artist does not look on the page until the work is finished. The artist also doesn’t lift the pen off the paper until the drawing is complete. The result is art that is quite abstract.

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“It’s the only way that I’ve drawn that allows me to feel free,” Wang said. “What I love about blind contour is there is no right or wrong. It’s just what it is.”

She tends to sketch people and places while she rides the TTC. Her art panels will essentially be a collage of her sketchbook.

Fellow participant Jason Julien, a 30-year-old who was raised in Jane and Finch but now calls Little India home, said he was happy to share his skills with others.

“It allows you to skill share with someone else and then even if you don’t take it as seriously as the person who’s teaching you, the small amount of information you’re giving the next person might spark something huge,” he said.

Julien sculpts, sketches, paints and sings. Even before joining VIBE Arts he held art workshops in parks, which he called Art Vibes. He recalls turning someone toward the arts through this effort.

What VIBE Arts has done for him is offer support from people like De Mata, as well as financial assistance that has allowed him to focus on art and not worry about how much it costs to create it.

“Of course, I still have to work and pay my rent, but having that added security allows me to be stable at home and in my mind,” he said. “It allows me to purchase art supplies I probably couldn’t dream of buying because of financial reasons.”

For Mimico’s Keisha James, who grew up near Victoria Park and Danforth avenues, participating in Desire Lines has allowed her to, for the first time, take the spotlight.

The 27-year-old filmmaker, who has a degree in film and media production from Humber College, has always helped other artists on their projects and been happy to do so, but has never displayed her own work.

“It’s nice, kind of taking the centre stage for myself for once, because this is what I want to do.”

For the project, she created a film called “What They Don’t Tell You”, but her TTC display will feature stills of the film. The film was screened at the Desire Lines exhibition. It’s about grief.

James lost her mom when she was 19. She said VIBE Arts gave her the artistic freedom to create the film she wanted to make, something she hopes to do in her film career. She also wants to create a welcoming atmosphere for the Black community in film and television. She said she’s often the only Black woman on film projects and has even turned down projects because they lacked diversity and inclusivity.

She admits it doesn’t help her career aspirations to turn down jobs, but, “I value my integrity a little bit more so sometimes I have to make that sacrifice.”