In 2009, Fiona Ackerman created a painting titled Distraction. In it, a man and a baby sit at either end of a brown sofa, staring accusingly at the woman who is depicting them. The man is Ackerman’s husband and the baby is her son, then six months old, and together they embody the challenges that still face women when they take on the triumvirate of marriage, motherhood, and career.

Competing with the unforgiving expressions of spouse and offspring is the painting within the painting: one of Ackerman’s works is depicted hanging on the wall above the sofa, clear evidence of her vocation. It’s evidence, too, of the way her art examines and even deconstructs itself. Her canvases and works on paper alternate between abstraction and representation, and range from depictions of artists’ studios to mashups of biomorphic surrealism.

Seated at a worktable in her Parker Street studio, Ackerman is talking to the Straight about her life and the intertwining of family and her art practice. Family in this context extends backward to her mother and father, as well as forward to her husband and son.

Ackerman grew up in Montreal, raised and inspired by her “courageous single mom”, the writer and theatre-company director Marianne Ackerman. The younger Ackerman attended a fine-arts high school and a couple of years of CEGEP before enrolling at Concordia University to study painting. Initially intending to be an architect, she was invited to attend a summer painting academy in Italy when she was in her late teens, an experience that changed the course of her life.

“Once the painting bug bit, I completely forgot about everything else,” she says.

The summer academy was led by her father, Berlin-based abstractionist Gregor Hiltner. “I didn’t know my father growing up,” Ackerman recalls, adding that he has since become her mentor. “He is very concerned with composition, space, colour—the organizational side of painting that really attracted me.” Ackerman arrived in Vancouver in 2000 to do an exchange year at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and, without planning to, stayed. “I married a Vancouverite,” she says simply.

In 2002, when she graduated from Emily Carr, she felt unfinished, a condition perhaps anticipated by Hiltner. “My father is a very tough teacher,” Ackerman says. He warned her that she would have to paint for 10 years before she could do it well. “I went underground, I didn’t look for exhibitions, I just set up a studio and kept working,” she recalls. Eventually, she emerged into the art world and, since 2005, has taken part in some 30 solo and group shows, from Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal to Düsseldorf and Nuremberg. (Locally, she is represented by the Winsor Gallery.)

Reviewing her work on her laptop, she stops again at the 2009 image of her husband and son glaring at her from beneath her painting. “I’m not sure what is distracting which,” she says. And smiles.