🖤The Stories That Shaped My Heart

Writer: Cheryl Quejada Canning, Sydney 26 June 2026 a 2-minute read

Excerpt:

My art began in the pages of the books I read as a child — stories of courage, metaphor, memory, and meaning. I still paint the way I was taught to read: slowly, carefully, with attention to what lies beneath.

Cartographies II (Artwork No. S01584)   Exhibited at the Incognito Art Show, Carriageworks 24–26 June 2026 (Exhibition) 27 June–5 July 2026 (Sale)

The Stories That Shaped My Heart

I didn’t realise it when I was young, but my life as a painter began long before I ever touched a brush. It began with books — heavy, complicated, symbolic books that shaped the way I think, feel, and interpret the world.

My mother, a schoolteacher and an English literature teacher, believed that children should read stories that build character. She didn’t hand us fairy tales. She handed us lessons. She believed reading was a form of training — a way of learning how to understand people, choices, consequences, and the quiet moral threads that run through every life.

At school, we were drilled in reading comprehension. Not the simple kind — the deep kind. We were taught to break down paragraphs, identify themes, understand tone, and follow the emotional logic of a text. Because of that, even at twelve or fifteen, I could understand what I was reading. I wasn’t intimidated by long books or complex ideas. I was trained to enter a story and find its meaning.

When I was twelve, my mother bought me War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk. It was the first serious book I ever read. I didn’t grasp everything, but I understood enough: that stories carry weight, that human decisions ripple outward, and that literature is a mirror that shows us who we are and who we might become.

Around the same time, she also bought me and my sister Edgar Allan Poe’s Great Tales and Poems. We were far too young for the darkness of it, but we loved it anyway. Poe taught me something different — that atmosphere is a character, that emotion has texture, and that the human mind is its own landscape. Even now, when I paint shadows or quiet tension, I can feel the echo of those early readings.

I had the privilege of being schooled by my parents in a private school where literature was treated as a serious discipline. We didn’t just read stories — we interpreted them, dissected them, lived inside them. We studied José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, learning how satire, symbolism, and moral courage could be woven into a nation’s story. We analysed Florante at Laura by Francisco Balagtas, where metaphor and emotion were crafted with precision. We read Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Biag ni Lam-ang by Pedro Bukaneg — the epic of my own ancestors — and Paradise Lost by John Milton. These were not optional readings; they were part of our formation. They taught us to read deeply, to question, to interpret, and to understand that literature is never passive. It demands attention, empathy, and a willingness to see beneath the surface.

By fifteen, my curriculum had me studying Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. But we weren’t just reading them. We were taught to interpret them — to break down stanzas, trace metaphors, identify symbols, and extract moral lessons. We learned to ask, what is the author really saying, what is the symbol doing here, what truth is being revealed, and what moral tension is unfolding

That training didn’t stay in the classroom. It became the way I saw the world. Every moment became a stanza. Every memory became a metaphor. Every experience carried a lesson waiting to be uncovered.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of my artistic process.

Today, when I paint, I still think like that fifteen‑year‑old girl reading Homer and Dante. I look beneath the surface of things. I search for the emotional architecture of a scene. I ask myself - what is this painting really about, what memory is speaking, what truth is hiding here. and what moral or emotional thread is present.

A flower on the ground is never just a flower. A colour is never just a colour. A moment is never just a moment. Everything carries a story. Everything carries a symbol. Everything carries meaning.

This is why my paintings feel like narratives, and why my blog reads like quiet reflections. I paint the way I was taught to read. I write the way I was taught to interpret. My mother’s voice — “Anything you think of you can do when you put your mind into it” — still sits at the centre of my practice. She wasn’t just teaching discipline. She was teaching me to trust my inner world.

The books of my childhood didn’t just entertain me.

They trained my eyes.

They shaped my thinking.

They taught me how to see.

And so, in between paintings, I return to the same quiet practice — reading the world the way I once read those books. Slowly, carefully, with attention to meaning. It is the same habit, just a different medium now.

And so, I return to the canvas carrying all of this with me — the books, the lessons, the way of seeing. In between paintings, I keep learning how to read my own life a little more clearly.