PARIS – Calgary speed skater Brooklyn McDougall, who struggled to understand why she fell into post-Olympic depression after her Games debut at Beijing 2022, has painted her way to better mental health, and a summer Olympiad.
Her striking portraits of three female gold medalists from Paris 1900, entitled The Trailblazers, is on exhibit at Club 24 Palais de Tokyo. McDougall was one of 85 Olympians from 32 countries to submit projects for the Olympian Artists programme, and one of just six whose work was accepted for display here.
“After the Beijing Olympics I was going through some post-Olympic depression and art helped me through that” the 25-year-old said on Thursday. “So the last two years, that’s where my creative expression really started to shine through.
“It’s something I have struggled to understand because I really wasn’t expecting to go through it. I was really excited to see what I could do in the next four years after my debut Olympics. I think it was just a lot of emotions that I compartmentalized in order to compete at the Games, and after I competed, that box was opened, and it was more of a combination of everything that I never worked through emotionally in my life that started to come up. The Olympics was just the catalyst for that.”
“All things considered, I am really happy the way it all unfolded, because I have learned so much more about myself after going through that difficult time in my life. It has led me here. I know who I am on a deeper and more emotional level. So I am really proud of myself for everything I have been through.”
She also credits a therapist for helping her, and owes a debt of gratitude to her late grandfather Wayne McDougall, an artist himself, for some sage words he offered over lunch in 2019.
“We were talking about art. He was saying ‘I really think you should get back into art and see where it takes you.’ I said yeah, I think you’re right, I think I should. And then when he passed away, that’s when I picked up the brush again and started to paint and it just kind of made me feel closer to him.”
When the call-out came from the International Olympic Committee to submit work for the artists program, McDougall was inspired and excited to get started.
“The first Olympics women were allowed to compete in was Paris 1900. Now, 124 years later we’re back in Paris and this is the first Games that has achieved full gender parity, so I thought it was quite a beautiful coincidence that this has all come together in that way. So I decided my art pieces would be dedicated to the first female Olympic champions of Paris 1900, because their victories then were never celebrated. It’s honouring those women who came before and didn’t get their chance to realize their victory.”
The three subjects are Swiss sailor Hélène de Pourtalès, British tennis star Charlotte Cooper and American golfer Margaret Abbott, whose nine-hole score of 47 topped a 19-golfer field that included her own mother Mary.
McDougall began work on the acrylic and oils project in October, skated at World Cups through November and December, returned to the easel in January and finished the paintings in March.
“Art is a little bit different than speed skating,” she said. “It’s a slower process to create the final product, but I think in a lot of ways sport is the same. You put in years of work to get to get to the Olympics. It’s not that one moment, it’s an accumulation of moments to get to that point.”