Artist’s Dream

Art and I have always known each other. One of my favorite, earliest memories of ‘making’ art is when I was 9 years old, around the time my family had moved from upstate New York to a small country town in Tennessee. On a hot summer day, barefoot, outdoors, enamored with the bright magenta color of elderberries, I collected a handful of them. I smashed a few berries with one end of a twig, and crafted a paintbrush by fraying the edges of the other end.

Using a gray stone as my canvas, I experimented with slathering my homemade elderberry paint onto the rock. But the bright color, my favorite part of this endeavor, immediately faded as the stone absorbed it into its medium tones. This might have been my serious first lesson from nature: Bright colors need light-toned backgrounds to pop!

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In early 2023, I turned 40. I had worked in corporate for years, and had focused myself intensely on building my skills and growing my career. Suddenly, the inner artist within me, who’d been in hibernation for many years, arose with a fervent loud bang on my internal door.

“Hey! What about me? When is it my turn? You’re 40. If you don’t don’t make the decision to make art now, you never will.”

A few months later, I quit my corporate job and set off on a new adventure: Build my own design business, and fulfill an old art school desire to paint and sell my work.

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