Black Sheep Fine Art Print

The latest work from Louie Gong (Nooksack), Black Sheep Fine Art Print is about drawing power from past experiences— even traumas. “It’s about self-care,” says Louie. “I’ve been thinking about the term baggage, and it’s all wrong,” says Louie. “When we think about our past experiences as something we can just put down, we can’t actually heal. The real pathway to becoming stronger and more confident versions of ourselves is to learn to live in symbiosis with our past experiences.”   The Black Sheep’s body is composed of Louie’s signature wolf-mouth motif, which he uses here to symbolize negative past experiences. It is painted loosely to indicate the frequent movement of and the idea that our past experiences are living parts of us that we can’t simply set down as if they were “baggage.”  By contrast, the Black Sheep’s face is composed of highly structured Coast Salish design elements to indicate the self-confidence drawn from the understanding that past experiences make us better equip