An Artist Emerges

Can an artist's medium be "life"? Can one be an artist of Life? I think it is impeccably possible. I strive every day to be an "Artist Of Life"! To live with passion, conviction and the ability to rise above the darkness that inevitably arrives in everyone's world.
I am an artist. I have secretly called myself an artist since I was five. I said it quietly, or even silently to myself. Never wanting to admit it, as if it were somehow "wrong" to be one. To this day, I do not fully understand why I felt that way, but there it is.

I had always drawn, sketched, doodled, played around in high school art and the like. I was the one who was always being asked to do the posters for the high school plays. I loved it, but it was somehow a dream I did not allow myself to reach for. It was too high, too much, too wild a notion! So instead I got into acting and theater. (Hush. I can hear you choking back the laughter through the computer!) So, somehow in my warped teenage brain, acting was okay to want. Theater and all its trials was hard but doable. This all sounds so odd when I write it out...

Fast forward many years: I have just begun my business with my husband. He is a special effects makeup artist and we begin our own home based special effects makeup business with dreams of making it into "something more". I go to the bookstore and stumble upon a book, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. I bring it home and I can truly say this:
I have never seen the world or my life the same way again. I gave myself permission to say, OUT LOUD: "I am an artist." I wrote voraciously every day, I bought acrylics and painted, I drew, I sculpted. I was tasting life, MY life for the very first time! None of it was of any high artistic value, but time flew by when I created. I felt like I was in some odd, fugue state. Suddenly three hours were just gone. And, I was happy. This was who I was meant to be.

Then, a few years later, a let it slip to my husband, that though I was indeed a newly-self-proclaimed artist, I wanted to learn to paint in oils. Y'know, the hard stuff! I wanted to have an easel, and paint someone's portrait! But this again, to me was beyond any skill I possessed. I let it go.

That Christmas, my husband gave me an amazing gift: he bought me 3 months of study at a wonderful atelier, an easel, a palette and some brushes. He went to the school and set it up with the artist/instructor and paid it all in advance. (He knew me well: if he had not paid it all up front, I would have backed out in complete fear!)

So, at the ripe old age of 38, I became a painter. Not without struggle, tears, stopping and starting, and other self-imposed roadblocks to my artistic destiny.

This was my very first portrait. It is of my niece, Brianna. She was four at the time. She had such a range of expressions and such a redheaded personality! I would love to paint her portrait every four years for her whole life!

Now, at 45, after a self imposed break from painting (life had become HUGE and I needed to let myself off the hook of seeking artistic perfection), I am back in the studio. Ready to learn again. To see the world through an artist's eyes...