A Passion Story
My apologies for the lateness of this post. Nothing has quite worked out the way I had planned this week. From yet a new plumbing problem and further demolition being planned to the sad yet exciting news that my assistant and keeper of lists, Sydney, is moving on to work with a business helping people with eating disorders to the graduation of our teen, setting up for the next issue and our vacation preparations, it has been beyond busy here. I wrote this on a plane to Australia and still am not sure when I’ll get to post it.
The craziness of this week, has, however, had its moments of clarity and calm, at least enough to have a couple of conversations on a subject that is very dear to me … passion. So I thought I’d share my thoughts and, perhaps, get you thinking about your passions and your voice. But, alas, I can’t do the usual research in my present situation, so I am going to tell you some stories about me instead, just a little view of a life driven by my passions and need to be creative and expressive. My apologies for the lack of photos. I’ll make up for it in the coming weeks.
This text is actually from a talk I gave with Dan Cormier and Tracy Holmes at Eurosynergy in Malta in 2014 titled Finding your Artistic Voice. My story isn’t purely about polymer art though as writing has been the larger part of my creative journey.
My journey as a writer started when I was very young. I was writing stories in my head from the time I had language enough to do so. I wrote my first book at age 9 and, encouraged by an insightful teacher who saw something in this fearful, quiet, and intensely shy child, I became determined to be a writer. I was lucky to find a passion as a child as my voice developed at an age when I did not think about having to please anyone besides myself or follow what others did. I still try to return to a childlike state in my mind as much as I can—the child mind is so unencumbered with little or no critic, less of a need to ‘fix’ what they are doing, and seeing the world as still new and intensely interesting.
Because of that, my journey as a writer has been very organic and relatively unencumbered. But it did have its challenges. My undergraduate college work was in art but I went back for my Master’s in Writing in San Francisco, the birthplace of beatnik poetry and a lot of great but very edgy & alternative writing. I concentrated on poetry but I wrote for the average person. I wrote about normal things—nature, everyday struggles, and just things I saw out my window or on a walk.
I was heavily criticized by the other students for not doing something “different”. Sure, most all my subjects have been written about thousands of times but they were not written by me and they were not filtered through my eyes. Back then, it never occurred to me to give in to criticism because my writing was so ingrained in me and I grew up just writing what I wanted and didn’t question my subject choices. As a result, I think my work had a recognized honesty and my writing was well received by my professors and department heads. I was nominated for a number of awards and I continuously published for nearly 5 years. Half the other students in my master’s program couldn’t say that.
Eventually, and somewhat ironically, I stopped publishing because I ended up spending more time at readings and shows than writing and I wanted to focus on the writing more. Although the creative writing efforts didn’t go where I had hoped, that focus allowed me to build a career in writing as a freelancer, although it was non-fiction magazine articles and training materials. But in these, I found my passion for teaching and sharing knowledge with others.
Visual art, although an intense passion now, was a long time developing. I actually didn’t see myself as a visual artist at all until I was in my late teens when I accidentally ended up in an advanced Life Drawing class and couldn’t get out of it right away. However, being forced to do the initial assignments, I found that visual arts came quite naturally to me. But with writing being my “thing”, I just thought of art as something fun to do. I was eventually convinced by two different professors to change my major from writing to art, my eventual reason being that I felt I had a lot more to learn about art than writing.
In art school, I was still able to draw on my childlike wonder and sense of exploration, probably because I had kept it alive in my writing all through my younger years. After art school, I worked in charcoal and fiber as well as mixed-media but wasn’t driven to make a career of art until polymer found me nearly 18 years after art school. My polymer journey was quite different than my previous creative treks. I found that I had lost a lot of my childlike tendencies and was out of practice having taken years off my creative endeavors to work and take care of family. But, like many of you, when I found polymer, I became obsessed. I quit my writing career so I could be a full-time artist and so, obviously, I geared what I did to make a living but that gave me a very different focus to start with than I had when I started writing or when I started art school.
My dual drive—to make a living as well as explore this fascinating medium—pushed me to learn as much as I could in 4 months and then I started doing shows, so from the start, my polymer art was about selling it. Although I was initially making art that made me happy, it was not long before I was making art according to what I thought would sell. That resulted in some gimmicky things that were more for and about the market than me. I sold well enough for a while but I slowly began to dislike my work and when that happened, coincidence or not, my sales started to slow.
Eventually, I went back to freelance writing part-time in order to allow myself to start making what I wanted. Not having to count on my art alone to pay my bills was very freeing. Strange thing though … I sold a lot more for better prices when I just did what I wanted.
What happened? For one, I think I was happier with my work, finding so much more joy in what I was doing, and I think it showed it came through in the work, making the art more desirable. I returned to combining other mediums in my work which allowed me really explore the medium in ways I had not done before. I was back to selling out at nearly every show, was invited to teach classes and spoke at shows in rooms so packed that I was often moved me to bigger rooms to accommodate. I believe my success at that time was due largely to my passion showing rather than external pressures driving what I did.
Eventually, though, my passions changed (they will do that!) as I was missing the broad sharing of knowledge that writing allowed, so I started a magazine, thinking it would give me time to develop my art in new directions. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot of time for my art since then but only because the magazine was such a success. I am still pondering my passions though and what I’ll do next. That’s part of what I want to do on this trip. Consider where my passions truly lie these days and decide if the changes I’ve made recently are feeding them or might there be more changes in the near future?
I’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks and I’ll get photos up then too. Thanks for being patient with me while I travel and think about your passions and what you are doing in the meantime identify what you love most about what you do and whether or not you are feeding your true passions.
(Apologies for typos and odd grammar. I’m not going to have time to proof this very well and my dyslexia is out and causing havoc with this jetlag! I hope you enjoy my story nonetheless.)
