I Won Battle of the Brush 45 — And Here's Why It Matters for Your Wedding

There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with painting in front of a live crowd. The clock is running, the music is playing, the whole room is watching, and the paint either works or it doesn't. There's no fixing it later, no erasing, no slipping home to adjust things quietly in the studio. What goes on the canvas in those moments is it.

That pressure is exactly what I love about live painting. And on February 27, 2026, at The Pipe Shop in North Vancouver, my teammate Kayla Gowans and I walked into that pressure and came out on the other side holding the win at Battle of the Brush 45.

What Is Battle of the Brush?

If you haven't come across it before, Battle of the Brush is a live painting competition that's been running in Vancouver since 2009, and it's exactly as intense as it sounds. At edition 45, sixteen artists were paired into eight teams. Each team had 80 minutes, split into two 40-minute rounds, to create a complete original painting on stage in front of a packed audience.

The theme for this edition was Awakening.

At the end of the night, the audience votes. No judges, no panels, no insider deliberation. The crowd decides, which makes the whole thing feel genuinely electric. The winning team takes home a $500 cash prize and, more than that, the knowledge that a room full of strangers looked at your work and chose it.

The Painting We Made

When Kayla and I talked through how we wanted to interpret "Awakening," we could have gone in any number of directions. The obvious ones, the safe ones, the technically impressive ones. Instead we landed somewhere unexpected: a cow, suspended in a beam of light from a glowing UFO, rising upward into the night sky.

I know how that sounds.

But here's the thing about a crowd watching you paint in real time: they don't just see the finished image, they watch it become something. So when the shapes on our canvas started to resolve and people began to realize what they were looking at, there was this wave of laughter and recognition that moved through the room. You could feel it. People nudged each other. They leaned in. A painting that could have read as silly landed as something genuinely joyful and a little surreal, and the audience responded to it fully.

That moment, when a room full of strangers connects with something you made in front of them, is one of the best feelings in painting. It's also, I'll say now, not entirely unlike what happens at a wedding reception when guests start gathering around the easel.

Why Any of This Matters at Your Wedding

I've been painting live at weddings and events since 2012. Over the years that's taken me to some remarkable places, from the Shangri-La Vancouver and Fairmont Pacific Rim to the Rosewood Hotel Georgia and Palazzo Versace. Hundreds of events across North America, and a UBC fine arts degree that gave me the foundation to work in just about any style or setting.

But what a competition like Battle of the Brush makes clear is that live painting is its own skill, separate from anything you do in a studio. It's faster, more exposed, more dependent on reading a room and staying calm when a passage isn't working. You have to make confident decisions in real time, hold your focus when people are crowded around the easel asking questions, and do all of it while the energy of the room is moving through you rather than something you're trying to block out.

At a wedding, that's exactly the situation. I'm painting while the reception is happening around me. The speeches, the first dance, guests wandering over to watch the canvas take shape. There are always people nearby. There is always something happening. And by the end of the night, there's a finished original painting on the easel that captures not just how the room looked, but how it felt.

When I'm painting your first dance and half the room has come over to watch, I know how to stay present in that. I've stood in front of a packed venue with a clock running and a crowd voting on the outcome, and I've done it more than once. That capacity, to paint well under real pressure, in front of real people, on a real deadline, is exactly what Battle of the Brush tests. Winning it means something to me because it's the closest a competition gets to replicating what live event painting actually feels like.

If you're planning a wedding in Vancouver and want a live painter who knows how to work a room, I'd love to hear about your day.

You can get in touch with me at liveartbyolga.com/contact.