Art Herstory

*This is an entry that was originally written on 11/16/2017 but was forgotten in drafts! Happily, with a few minor tweaks and updates, it still applies.

I've been told from time to time, throughout my life, how fortunate I am to have been aware of my passion from an early age. People seemed to feel that I had my destiny all sewn up neatly from the start. While I don't take my lifelong passion for granted, it's not that black and white.

The gray area has been the time and energy [well] spent experimenting my entire life with all the many different iterations of being an artist, fine-tuning my direction. When I was a kid, there was a wide, exciting world of drawing, painting, sculpting, building, and more that stretched out in front of me, waiting for me to choose. I was largely self-taught, so I went through various self-guided phases. One year, all I seemed to do was draw clowns and princesses in poofy dresses. 

a tiny clay cup I made

Another, I was super into making miniatures and was building tiny spaces and sculpting the furnishings to go in them. Still another year, I had moved on to more intense human anatomy, focusing mostly on perfecting eyes and hands. In middle school, the first career I seriously considered was fashion design, as I had a budding love for clothing. So by high school, fashion illustration was my passion. 

some of my old sketches 

I was filling pages with lithe, stylized models in threes and sketching out concepts for classmates' homecoming and prom dresses. 

But by junior year of high school, a [well-meaning?] guidance counselor cautioned me off fashion design, telling me to choose a more certain path. So in college, I majored in graphic design, believing it to be the concrete path that would allow me to be creative without starving. I'm SO thankful that the required foundation for my major at art school was fine arts based. I'm also thankful that, while I didn't go on to pursue a career in graphic design, I gained some design skills and insight that come in handy in various aspects of my work these days. For me, part of the journey has been to learn what kind of creating comes naturally to me, what I'm good at, and how I enjoy creating the most. Those were especially important where earning a living was concerned. My long-term goal has been to be excited to get up and get to work every day. And most days, I am, lol.

Today I carry the self-appointed title of Multimedia Artist. I live to create in (and often combine) a number of different materials. 

       

I love the unique path I'm forging for myself as I piece together my creative puzzle. I've occasionally been told that I should focus on just one thing. But every day I still choose the variety of colors, textures, and moods afforded me in more than one medium. Which is now reaching further than I imagined, with content creation (like YouTube and other social media) around my work. And I'm good with that.