The Joyous Art of Natasia Taylor
Her thick sketchbooks intrigued us. She said they act as a scrapbook of where she was in her life at that point.
Sitting in a circle of local artists at a show-and-tell event Natasia Taylor had what looked to be two homemade books in her lap. It was near the end of the event. She said she didn’t have to show them if participants would rather go home, but everyone was curious. And she didn’t disappoint.
When we met her, Natasia was an intern at the Cape Breton University Art Gallery working on a six month program
The books were, indeed, homemade with covers made from pizza boxes, her very first one being from an authentic Italian pizza pulled out of her neighbours trash in Milan, no less, where she was doing a university co-op work year.
That first sketchbook was an assignment from her college professor. The requirement was that it had to be handmade and “we had to fill it by the end of the semester.” “It was just kind of a lightbulb moment for me because I had always had sketchbooks. I wouldn’t leave the house without a sketchbook. But I didn’t realize that a sketchbook could be anything you want.”
She calls them sketchbooks but they are more like carefully crafted and curated scrapbooks.
They contain detailed drawings, portraits of LEGO figures and other toys, whimsical characters she’s developing, collections of shiny letters, stickers, game cards, found objects like beer labels that intrigued her, pages that unfold like origami, maps, city scapes. Parking tickets. Anything significant that is in her life at any given moment.
She says they act like a scrapbook of her artistic life but it seems more than that. Looking through them you feel like you’ve been invited into her imagination.
She Was Always the Art Kid
Natasia says, “I was the art kid all throughout school.” But really, she’s been making art for as long as she can remember. “My aunt used to babysit my brother and me from a really young age. She is an artist, so, she always had us painting and drawing and doing all sorts of projects like that. And I just really clung on to it immediately.”
She’s from Hamilton, Ontario, which is a steel town, and not a place that immediately suggests art, but she got as much out of the city as she could. “I went to the closest thing we had in Hamilton to an arts high school,” she says and then went to Sheridan College in neighbouring Oakville.
It was while enrolled at Sheridan that she did two co-ops one summer, one in Milan where she worked on textbook graphics and one in Bassano del Grappa where she did instructional illustrations like assembly guides.
Then two weeks after graduating her program the hugely popular YouTube channel Crash Course, reached out to her. “It was very rare to get an opportunity that quickly.” She designed graphics and scenes in a 2D art style for all the episodes for the series Crash Course Religions.
Cape Breton Was An Accident
“Getting to the CBU Art Gallery internship was itself an unplanned detour. After Crash Course, Natasia had been going non-stop since she was sixteen and needed a break. She came to Cape Breton for the first time last summer — her family roots run deep on the island, with both sides of her family from the area. Her father is one of seven siblings, and, other than him, almost all of them stayed. ‘My dad doesn’t understand why I love it here,’ she laughs.”
She fell for it and decided to try to make something work. She applied to galleries across Canada through Young Canada Works and got the arts internship at CBU. The internship runs from September through March of 2026.
The work is more varied than people might expect. Yes, she greets visitors and talks them through the exhibits. But she also handles graphic design for the gallery’s promotional materials — invitations, brochures, a book for one of the current shows. She’s involved in installations and events that happen outside the gallery walls too. And a couple summers as a house painter, of all things, turned out to be a genuine asset. “Painting and repairing walls was a surprisingly big part of the job.”
Art That Does Something
Look across everything Natasia has worked on and a pattern emerges that she’s only recently started to name. In Milan she was making infographics about building and planning sustainable futures. At Crash Course she was 2D style art for a series on world religions. At the gallery she’s connecting students — some of whom have never set foot in an art gallery before — with the work on the walls.
“Throughout the jobs I’ve had, this one included, I’ve realized that I love jobs that meld art with education,” she says. “It’s an intersection I really enjoy. And it’s all come together now.”
That doesn’t mean her personal work is didactic. If anything, it’s the opposite. She calls her drawing style “doodles” and means it as a compliment. “I try not to take it too seriously. The stuff I really have a lot of joy in is this kind of work. Joyous art.”
Her LEGO portraits are a good example. She’s drawn to older sets — simpler, from the 70s through the 90s — and has been collecting them too. The same pull toward a certain kind of warmth shapes her other influences: Fisher-Price toys, vintage finds from antique malls, the old Canadian computer game Club Penguin. “I gravitate towards things that have happy faces,” she says. She also drives her pickup around Cape Breton sketching buildings she finds interesting — old houses in North Sydney, local cafés. The island keeps feeding her content for her scrapbooks.
Commission work has been part of her story from early on. Years before the gallery, she painted a mural for a client’s home — a pair of cowboy boots with a hat leaning on top — and he loved it so much that when he added an extension to the house, he had it cut out of the drywall and re-framed in the new section, with a small light mounted above it. She tells the story with a mix of amusement and pride, the way artists do when a piece lands exactly right with someone.
When you ask where all of this is headed, she doesn’t reach for a five-year plan. “I see myself happy,” she says simply. “It’s an organic process.” The through-line she’s found — art that reaches people, that teaches or delights or makes a community feel more like itself — seems enough of a compass for now. The pizza box sketchbook on her lap at the show-and-tell is almost full. A new one is already waiting.
Author details
Elaine Mandrona, in addition to being a writer, is a painter and sculptor. She moved to Cape Breton permanently in 2021.
Author details
Archie Nadon, writer and photographer, left Ontario in 76 dreaming of living by the sea. In 2021 it finally happened.
