2/ The Story of an Artist: Longing, Separation, and Wholeness
Expressive mark making / 2003
I’ve always been an artist. It’s something I feel and do. Even when I didn’t feel like an artist, I still was. Even when I didn’t do art, I was still an artist. My story as an artist has been one of discovery and limitation; longing, separation, and wholeness; expansion and exploration; and reconciliation and now integration.
This is Part 2 of 4.
LONGING
I was grateful that in every place I had lived I always had the space to do my art. A big desk and a spot for my art supplies was all I needed, and my nights and weekends were the time when I could create. But I longed to be a working artist full time, though I didn’t know how to make it as an artist. I was financially struggling and my day job was critical.
I started to feel terrible that I was trying to force my art into something that was to support me financially. Every time I tried, it failed to materialize, over and over again.
By the late 90s I finally made a decision. Rightly or wrongly, I decided to separate my art from money, my art from my livelihood. This way, I could be free to create whatever I wanted without pressure or expectation. It worked for many years, until it didn’t.
SEPARATION
Along the way, I also separated from my identity as an artist. I began to believe that real artists were those that were prolific and made money from their art, whether as an exhibiting artist, an arts educator, or a fine craftsperson/artisan. I was always secretly jealous of artists that made it where I hadn’t. I had a professional job with its own successes and which paid well, but that didn’t matter.
In the early 2000s, after a divorce, a move, and much loss, art became my healing. I was living in an off-season house rental on Martha’s Vineyard with my roommate, a fine arts abstract painter and publication designer from New York City. She had her painting studio in the old barn, and I had an entire room dedicated to my studio – a first!
But I didn’t feel like a real artist, I told her. She assured me, almost adamantly, that I was absolutely a real artist. The fact that I express myself through my art was enough. It was everything.
Slowly over the course of months, and ongoing conversations with her, I could feel the walls of my own false beliefs begin to crumble. I had let other people’s definition of artist – one that was limiting, controlling, and part of institutionalized structures – cloud my own feeling and identity.
As I worked in my studio that year, I began to heal. I rebuilt my identity out of a failed marriage and became whole again. I became an artist again. It was my most prolific and expressive time.
WHOLENESS
With that wholeness, I had reclaimed being an artist. Even so, that long-ago decision to keep my art and livelihood separate was held firmly in place, and by this time deeper into my subconscious.
That wholeness gave me renewed self confidence. I wanted to explore my expanding interests. In the mid 2000s I went to graduate school to study international non-profit management, and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan and Romania.
By the early 2010s I was newly remarried and we moved to Washington DC. I continued to create art, as it offered expression and release from a very intense day job with an area non-profit, Empowered Women International. I submitted artwork to several area group shows and got in!
I met other amazing artists and creatives, many of whom balanced day jobs with their artistic pursuits. I came to understand that was a norm, not a personal failure. They were all artists, even with their day jobs.
In 2013 I was invited to have my first solo show at the opening of Studio Pause, a new studio about art, stories, and community founded by Sushmita Mazumdar. It was incredible to see a collection of my expressive mark making and written drawings on display at the opening for others to see, share feedback, and even buy.
