Why Me
I’m never accused of being shy with my words, when they are the written variety. It’s hard to put who I am into an “about me” blurb, so I decided to get some words down, to humor myself, and to share it with another someone who might want to know what makes this rekindled, southern female abstract artist tick. I can tell you with every confidence that I still don’t know what makes me tick. But I can tell you, writing it down, and painting it out, bring me one step closer every day. Perhaps, practicing this exercise may help you in reflecting on your own personal journey.
I grew up in rural Spartanburg, South Carolina, without a lot of other kids around for much of my childhood, and often the only ways I had to entertain myself were to play outside, read, or make art. We lived in a small home on a street with mostly farm-related properties nearby, though we had nothing to do with farming, ourselves. I had two brothers, and the only other kids in the area were boys that lived on the farm across the street.
My time outside of school was mostly spent roaming in the acres of woods behind our home, sometimes with sketchbook in hand, sometimes with only my imagination. I grew up in the 80s and have come to realize as an adult that I could be described as having been a free-range child. We kids would be expected to go out after breakfast, not come back until lunchtime, and then out again. While I remember feeling bored, in retrospect, I don’t really think that I was that bored. I remember making hidden forts out of sticks and mud, and spending time hunting for snakes, salamanders and crawfish in the stream behind our house.
If I wasn’t outside, I had my nose in a book, or otherwise pointed towards paper, usually drawing. I took for granted, at an early age, that I’d be an artist when I grew up. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. I sold my first art when I was about seven or eight years old, at an art fair. My mom was volunteering at the art fair, and I went with her and set up an extra table, and drew pictures of horses, and sold them all day long for 25 cents each.
Besides art: My love of reading definitely persisted through my school years and is still a huge part of who I am today. Art and reading take up the majority of my meager leisure time, now. As a child, I would make a biweekly trip to the library in the summer with my mom. Typically, the stack of books I’d select would rival me in height. Once, there was a substitute librarian who looked disdainfully at my stack of books and told me and my mom that there was no way I could read those books in two weeks. My mom laughed and said, “you don’t know my daughter”.
In high school, I became even more full-on art oriented, and attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts at Furman University after my junior year. At the time, it was a summer program, now attendees are lucky to go for an entire school year. I became deft with a pencil and continued forward with a plan to continue art studies in college. I attended Winthrop University as a fine arts major. I got my first taste of life drawing there, and it quickly became my favorite. The challenge of drawing live bodies was so different from the still life setups and photographs I’d previously drawn and painted from. I admit, it was also a bit of shocking fun to bring home a rendering of a full frontal male nude to show my parents. I dabbled with painting and ceramics, but didn't get far enough to gain a real fluidity of technique. The ability to analyze and translate life with pencil/conte/charcoal in hand was what resonated with me the most. I’ll come back to that thought later because my later years have relied so heavily on my analytic abilities.
An old news clipping from my university newsletter - the picture is me handbuilding a large Raku vase which I still have. It’s been broken twice and glued back together.
One of my favorite art studies in college was an independent study term where I did a semester drawing and painting from life while living/working at Yellowstone National Park, which I did for two summers. Mostly, I drew and painted a lot of trees. I maintain that there isn’t much I enjoy more than being in the presence of a grove of un-landscaped trees. It was definitely a time where I came to appreciate the impact of small moments. Time stands still when sitting in the woods drawing. One day, a moose meandered through the meadow where I sat on a log drawing a stand of trees. She looked at me and wandered on. It's difficult to appreciate the size of a moose from a great distance- I was glad I appeared to her to be a non-threatening meadow inhabitant.
This is me with my dad as we road tripped across the country to get to Yellowstone. This photo was taken at Mt. Rushmore.
Despite my solid, life-long desire to be an artist, something I completely and utterly didn't analyze, at any point while in college, was how I would actually be an artist once I graduated. No one seemed to be hiring artists unless they had a background in graphic design. When I inquired of my assigned collegiate advisor, she told me if I really wanted to be a professional artist, best to go off and get my master’s degree, so that I could be an art professor to support myself while painting. More school to a senior in college sounded exactly what I didn't want to do. I graduated and set off to do something, and figured I’d make art in my free time.
If I’m digging into the surface just a little, I can also say that, as a 20 year old young woman, I really had no idea what I wanted to say with either my life or my art, and I’m certain this played into that particular life choice. I learned a lot of technical art skills in college, but wasn’t left with a solid concept of who I wanted to be as an artist. Art business is not really something that was taught at the time. I don’t blame my education though, because I know that my voice, or lack thereof, was also tied up in a confidence issue. I didn’t believe or realize that I had something of value to say. That’s a blog post for another day, after some more internal work on myself.
Fast forwarding to the reality of post-collegiate existence, little did I realize that I’d be working 2 jobs to make ends meet, and really have no free time in-between, to make art. Sadly and rapidly, my dream and plan seemed frivolous. One of my jobs was waiting tables, and the other as an entry level corporate clerk, which involved sorting papers in a mailroom. These were the sort of jobs one could get if one was utterly absent in connections, and lacking a degree in something technical or business-like. While waiting tables over the summer, another waiter mentioned he was only there for the summer, because he was about to start law school. I thought to myself (in a festering, months long sort of way) - I find it hard to believe that this fellow waiter is any smarter than me.
Post-festering, a few months later I took the law school test (the LSAT), the basic prerequisite to getting into law school, and I did well. I had the educational credentials I needed to apply to law school, so I thought I would just apply to one law school, and if I don’t get in….it wasn’t meant to be. I was accepted, so I felt the fates were telling me where to go next. I followed that trail and attended the University of South Carolina School of Law, in Columbia, South Carolina. I was definitely the only art major attending law school there.
This was the beginning of the end of my identity as an artist until approximately 2020. I’ll pick up where I left off and reveal what ultimately got me back to where I am now, which was a really long distance from the place I’m leaving off here. But, the thread is there. You’ll see it, I think. I’ll tell you all about how I got my artist identity back and what path I took to build my skills. Bookmark and visit again soon because you might find this valuable if you are figuring out something similar for yourself.
In the meantime, I’d love to know if something dissuaded you from pursuing your art journey early in life.