New and improved process video and remembering.

 

    I worked on this video until I felt complete with it. I like it much better now. I did want to share a little bit of my own personal story alongside the process video because it feels important to me to do that. I want to show up in my fullness and for that to be entwined in my business as an artist and not separate from it. Because it is entwined. That is the truth. The way that I have come to make art and the subject matter that I paint has everything to do with my journey. My journey of healing from an abusive childhood has completely and 100% informed how I make art today. I think that story is too long for one blog post, but it feels so important to me to start little by little to speak about it and incorporate it into how I present myself as an artist. I, like many other artists, took many classes as I was growing up, in drawing and painting and I majored in studio art in my undergrad at Wheaton College. By the time I was a young adult, I was burnt out. I didn’t want to make art anymore, I thought I wasn’t good at it etc. etc. etc. Just like so many others believing the message our culture feeds us about what art is and what it means to be an artist and how it “should” be done. Then I began my healing journey from the abuse that I experienced in my childhood. It was a long and arduous journey, and I was depressed for a long time. As I began to reconnect with my heart’s guidance again I noticed that something was very much missing from my life. There was like a gaping empty space. I knew that it was my art. So I began, little by little to pick up the colored pencils and a tiny sketch book and just draw, not to be “good” at it or for any particular end result, but just because I knew I needed it. I could feel, with each stroke of the pencil, that gaping hole begin to fill. It was so beautiful and powerful. This is the magic of art. This is the magic of listening to our heart. I was hungry for it. I was starving, and I began to sketch all the time. And I would get these little “signs” that I was on the right track. Someone would walk up to me after I had been sketching in a coffee shop and say, “Thank you.” Just because I was drawing. A musician I had been sketching came up to me after the show and told me how beautiful it was to watch me draw and offered me a CD in exchange for a drawing from my sketchbook. Another person offered to pay me to draw his house when he found me walking around his neighborhood sketching. I just took all these things in as little confirmations, but the real confirmation was the energy I felt in my own heart. How I suddenly felt I had meaning in my life again. That feeling is not replaceable with anything else other than the thing we really deeply want to be doing. It is true wealth. This is why it doesn’t matter what the end result is and why I need to be drawing. There is nothing else that can fill that void. What I found as I did this, was that there were nuances in what I drew and that when I drew faces, I felt most captivated and enraptured, which is how I became a portrait artist. And now, here I am, fanning the flame of my little tiny spark of an art career. Blowing slowing and steadily, adding dry birch bark and having plenty of tinder by my side.