Trust me,

life is not as ordinary as you thought it be.

There are wonders in this world if you train your eyes to see.

Slow down your pace and look,

REALLY look

at this world.

Leaves change colors before you knew it,

and a whole season could pass behind closed blinds and computer screens.

Rainbow has way more than seven colors

and the sky is a different shade of blue day by day.

There are new sprouts growing through the cracks in the pavement,

resilient and waiting to bloom.

The wind carries scents of memory

and when the rain comes,

don’t focus on the cold,

hear the sound

that the world makes.

There are beauty waiting to be discovered,

let yourself soak it all in,

let your mind wander and get lost.

And when the night falls,

look up at the sky.

When was the last time you watched the moon?

Let its stillness sooth you,

then fall asleep under the peppermint moonlight.

Alice Cao - Biography

Alice Cao is an interdisciplinary artist, illustrator, and educator from Surrey, Canada. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Education (in Visual Arts) from UBC. Her work ranges from whimsical children’s illustrations and surreal paintings to dreamlike sculptures and film photography.

She is inspired by her imaginative daydreams, nature walks, poems, stories, and dream journals she has written throughout the years. Alice is experimental and playful in her approach and enjoys working with a variety of mediums to discover new ways of thinking and making. She is particularly interested in watercolour due to its beautiful unpredictability and the lively ways that it moves and interacts with each other, which allows her to explore the tug-of-war between conscious control and manipulation and the act of letting feelings and intuition take over, between the comfort of predictability and the discomfort of the unknown. Alice would compare her artistic process to the way she writes a poem: There are no instructions or steps; the work unfolds and expands as it goes, like a story coming to life.

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