Crystal Gilson, 58, retired from her job as a tech researcher a few years ago to become a full-time artist and competitive swimmer.
Now, the hallmarks of a good day means she gets to dip into the pool or a set of paints anytime she wants.
And she has an important message for the rest of us: reclaiming your life means letting go of expectations and leaning into community.
Also? Art can help you get there.
“I’m here trying to find or create meaning, hopefully in a way that’s honest — intellectually, earnestly honest,” she wrote from her home studio in West Fargo where she works on her abstract expressionist-style creations. “When I retired, I wanted to try things I started as a kid, or reclaim parts of my life I lost to the traumas of the world.”
Gilson has become known for her community-based art classes at West Acres Shopping Center. She feels most herself these days when she has free reign on her own senses. Whether it’s in or out of the pool, creating art in mixed media or traditional watercolor, her personal reclamation started years ago when she found herself facing mental health concerns and wondered what the next chapter of her life would entail.
Although her future contained many unknowns, it included something probably nobody one else had: a smoking cat.
Enter ‘The French Smoking Cat’
“After a particularly frustrating time when I couldn’t find words to express how I was feeling, I turned to art,” Gilson said. “I sat down, drew a circle, a few triangles and used colors that represented the problem at the time.”
The image that came out of it was a simple cat, which didn’t satisfy her need to understand what was happening underneath. Simple cat needed to have more of a personality. Depth.
“So I put a clown hat on it, popped a cigarette in its mouth and there in front of me was The French Smoking Cat,” she said. “Which somehow visually described my feelings and eventually made me laugh and laugh. After that, I couldn’t stop creating ‘clown cats.’ ”
Gilson said the artwork she produced during that unique time of growth provided her with a visual language for the challenging feelings she’d been experiencing.
Tactile, textural, touchable
Since then, Gilson has worked primarily in acrylics and abstract expressionism, intuitively building surfaces by collaging with repurposed materials like bits of trash, ripped pages from journals, torn cards and letters.
“As I work, I’m reacting to how I’m feeling, about a song I might be listening to, a conversation I had with a friend, or what’s going on around me, in my local community, or even in the world,” she said. “All of it influences the materials I use and how I use them.”
Composed of many layers of paint, ink, pencil, graphite, pastels and collage, Gilson’s pieces mix shapes and texture, giving the viewer different ways to explore and experience her art.
“Most people are surprised to find out that most of my work is touchable,” she said, adding that it’s her hope the tactile elements of her work give people more of an entry point into her artistic mind.
“The marks I make in my pieces are often highly textural, visual representations of my emotions,” Gilson said. “I pass my hands over my art as I work, feeling the lumps and bumps of the layers, the raised, rough and interrupted lines next to smooth areas of evenly applied paint. Why not let others feel that, too?”
The healing magic of art
Gilson is also drawn to helping others understand how art can help them overcome mental health issues.
“I firmly believe that art can heal communities. It’s an outlet for feelings and can help us make sense of what’s going on around us,” Gilson added. “And it often doesn’t matter what’s being put down on the canvas. What matters is what you’re sorting out in your head.”
As a featured artist at West Acres in October 2023 and December 2023, and an artist-in-residence in 2024, Gilson leads community art sessions where all walks of life and ages make marks or glue artifacts onto canvases.
The idea is to create a highly collaborative environment that encourages co-creation through textural and visual creativity. Sometimes the results surprise even Gilson, who said many of the canvases take on deep emotions: grief, anger, conflict.
“For a brief moment, complete strangers come together and find a common thread in what they are visually expressing,” Gilson said.
For her, that kind of interaction sparks conversation, which leads to group problem-solving, and possibly encourages inward and outward healing.
“There’s an honesty to art. There’s a pureness in the conversations that happen when people experience any form of art together,” Gilson said. “That may sound idealistic, but people calm down, the rhetoric calms down.”
This summer, Gilson is exploring her art from a different angle and keeping an open mind about where that might take her.
“Right now, my art is bigger and darker, more graffiti-like,” she said. “And messier. I find myself grappling with things that I believe marginalized members of our community have been telling us about. That our one-size-fits-all justice system isn’t working, that innocent people are experiencing trauma either being incarcerated pre-trial or unable to grasp any sense of normalcy while waiting for the slow wheels of justice to turn.”
Gilson said she’s turning to her art to understand these feelings, though it can be difficult.
“A friend of mine said, ‘Isn’t this what artists do?They grapple with the big stuff and say something through their art?’ I said, ‘Sure, artists can do that, but so can everyone else.’ ”
‘Perfectly imperfect’
So where does all the swimming fit in?
“For me, there’s a mental game in swimming. Like with my art, while swimming I can distract myself from intrusive thoughts. So I use my senses that I trained in doing art. When I paint after I swim, everything my senses pick up goes into one of the layers in my paintings,” Gilson said.
She’s often asked why competitive swimming? Why in her 50s?
While “isn’t that for kids?” is a common question Gilson gets from adults, from her perspective as an artist and athlete that’s not her objective whatsoever, which is to show others a vibrant, highly textured life is possible at any age, at any ability level.
“In other parts of the country, there are people swimming competitively into their 90s. That’s an incredible mark to make. And, of course, artists are doing their thing well into their senior years, too,” Gilson said. “I think the reluctance comes from doing something uncomfortable or a little different, or to stop worrying that you’re not perfect. I’d encourage everyone to embrace their inner child and be perfectly imperfect.”
