Well hello there.

My name is Justin Forsyth, or JF if you please. I’m a 36 year old Canadian born man, currently residing in Melbourne, Australia. I’m a man that wears many hats – a jack of all trades if you will – but the hat I love the most is the creative hat. Since as early as I can remember, I’ve always been drawn to art. I’ve always had a very vivid and healthy imagination, and the desire to make my visions into reality. As a child, this first manifested itself into the world of drawing. I have very fond and very early memories of sitting with my Aunt Sheila and a Chuck Norris colouring book (Yes, you read that correctly), learning colouring and shading techniques, while she did water colour paintings next to me…and I loved it.  As I got older, I began to draw on my own, releasing my imagination and slowly fine tuning my skills until I was quite proficient at it.  As it turned out, this was a skill that carried me through to college and beyond.

In my youth, I pretty much drew on everything. There was never a notebook or a binder or any other item that I didn’t make my own in some way. I always had the need – the urge –  to make things my own. It didn’t matter what it was, or even how I made it my own, but at the end of the day, it had to be unquestionably mine. 

I remember my first electric guitar I purchased when I was 11. I never used it much until high school, when I decided to strip it down and Jackson Pollock the hell out of it with latex house paint. Needless to say it ruined the guitar, but hey, it looked really fuckin’ cool, and that was all that mattered.

When I was 17, I wanted to do a big art piece, but had nothing to use. So at 2 in the morning, I decided to spray paint my closet doors silver and design a black tribal mural on them with black oil pastel – With no ventilation, and no concept of aerosol paint’s ability to coat all surrounding objects in a fine mist of silver pigment. The Parental units were not pleased. It’s this sort of stuff that encapsulates the energy of my relentless creative drive.

But this drive wasn’t restricted to visual arts…it began bleeding into music, design, photography, and most relevant to this situation; writing.

I discovered the joy and beauty of writing at age 11, when I was first introduced to poetry in a 7th grade english class. After a brief session on some famous poems and basic rhyming structures, we were tasked to write our own poem and hand it in the following day. Everyone else seemed to hate the idea, but I went absolutely mental for it, and the creative door opened up even more. I fell in love with the power of writing, and from that point on, there has never been a time that I haven’t had a pen and a notebook nearby. In my teens I amassed a significant collection of journals that I would write in constantly (a small obsession that I still continue today). Some would have writings about life and what I was going through, some would be poems and lyrics, and some would just be nonsense ramblings and ideas and drawings. There was a feeling that wielding a pen gave me that nothing else could; an unrestricted freedom where I could say what I wanted to say, and be who I wanted to be without the harsh eyes of outsiders over my shoulder.

It was this freedom that carried the most impact for me, as I suddenly found myself with a voice I didn’t realize I had. An internal voice that could say what I was thinking and feeling without the frailty of my external voice getting in the way. I found my ability to speak on paper was far more adept than my ability to speak in person, so I began to write even more. Eventually my writing led to many productive things including articles, songs, and many blogs over the past 20 years. And to this day, writing remains one of my strongest and most cherished outputs of creativity…even if no one ever sees the majority of it.

But while writing helped my find and refine my voice, it was photography that cranked it to a new volume. And believe it or not, it all sort of happened by accident. But since photography is the main focus of this blog, I’m going to save those stories for other posts 😉

Ultimately, Who is JF? is simultaneously a very simple and a very complex question to answer. It cannot be summed up in one answer, or even one post, if it can be summed up at all. All I can really say is I am who I am, and all I want to do is create something beautiful. If you’re curious to find out more, answers are littered everywhere among this site, so feel free to have a look around.

If there is something from this story you’d like to learn more about, please let me know in the comments below, and I’ll write more about it! And if this story bored you, thanks for reading anyway!

Enjoy the site, and stay chill my friends,

Until next time,
JF