The Novel That Inspired My Art Career
This, in a nutshell, is the universal problem of artists—artists are too often ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’—unless they’re dead. They are judged for creating art to please themselves, but if they create art to please other people, they aren’t original anymore. Artists are critiqued and judged by everyone, because it is the nature of an artist to be judged. That’s what they do. They create masterpieces out of nothing—but at the end of the day, the people decide whether a masterpiece has merit or not. The people who ‘get it' love them. The people who don’t understand feel uncomfortable. And at the end of the day, people live and die along with their opinions, while great art lives forever.
How did I become an artist in a world where art didn’t exist? It was a world where the beautiful was scorned and judged on a scale from unnecessary to sinful— unless the beauty was petunias. I went to a private Mennonite school, where an in-depth study of art would never have been church approved. Friendships with artists and aspiring artists escaped me. What I learned of art and artists came from books— old books. One, in particular, was a hundred-year-old novel.
This book inspired me to become a professional artist. Later, it became a sort of guidebook for the kind of artist I wanted to become—surrounded by flowers, lovely music, cynical, philosophical friends, and mere miles away from being completely and utterly cut off from the outside world. This became a fantasy, a dream when I wanted to escape reality—now, years later, it’s more or less my lifestyle.
The questions that book made me ask myself shaped my life in ways I can’t even begin to compute. What was I willing to sacrifice to make sure my art was true to myself? How far could I take my creativity? Could I take it so far that it appeared inspired? Was it inspired? At the end of the day, could I sit down with my art, stare it in the face, and see myself looking back? I always wondered if I had the strength to become an artist. Not an artist in the mere sense of being a creative person, but an artist whose art was them, whose art was so much of them that looking at it made you feel you knew them deeply. It was a terrifying thought. Infinitely more terrifying was the thought of never having tried. So I experimented for years, finding my voice through art, until it culminated into the life I live now.
The book even inspired my art studio. The fictitious art studio I’d read about became a blueprint in my subconscious for the perfect studio. It was overgrown with flowers. It overlooked a rose garden, and you could watch sunsets from the window. There was an orchard close by. Inside, the studio had lots of natural light, and best of all, it was filled with canvases and sketch books. In the summer you could open a window and smell the perfume of the flowers. It was so magical that it felt haunted. When I invite people to my studio and they invariably say, “It’s so magical,” I consider it a high compliment. I designed my studio with magic in mind— the magic I felt while reading that book, never dreaming I’d have a chance at a similar life.
Magical art studios aside, there were other things in the story that impacted me far more. The book portrayed its characters as products of their environment— they became what they consumed and surrounded themselves with. Intertwined was an allegory about popular culture versus nature, and the concepts and questions that come to mind when those two worlds are thrown together. What happens when you live surrounded by the natural world, versus being completely disconnected from it? What does nature teach, versus popular culture? Does popular culture promote individuality and thinking for oneself, or ‘group think’? Does popular culture promote living in authenticity, or building a facade to meet the status quo? Are great works of art ever accepted in the time of their creation? Is fame worth the cost of not creating work that reflects your true self? All these questions, and how they translated to my art, I explored through the pages of that book. At age thirteen, they became the seeds of a dream.
It wasn’t a dream of being a professional artist—not yet. It was a dream of being free in my art. I dreamed of breaking the rules and showing the world a different viewpoint. I dreamed of a life where I was free to look for the beautiful and not be judged for it, where a life creating beautiful things wasn’t seen as wasteful. I knew, even back then, that I would one day be free to live authentically. And I knew that when that day came, my art would become greater and more meaningful than I imagined.
Thirteen-year-old me never envisioned this, but I know she would be proud. I never thought my art would morph into a career. But the reason it did is because of her. Because her story and her viewpoint are important, and they are why I paint. Because she has a story that needs to be told, along with hundreds of others like her. If thirteen-year-old me hadn’t stumbled across an old novel that made me wonder what I would do to shed the layers of shame, guilt, and self-condemnation I felt for my love of beauty and art, chances are I wouldn’t be here.
When I launched my business, I did a photoshoot inspired by the book. These are the photos you see on my website. They will always remind me of when I was thirteen, reading about an artist’s life for the first time. Back then, I didn’t even have the courage to dream of the life I live now. Launching my business with these photos is an homage to the book that nudged me to look deeper and find out what I truly wanted. I’m forever grateful for it, and for the people who helped me along the way.
“The supreme and final test of any work that comes from your hand must be this: that it satisfies you yourself—that you may not be ashamed to sit down alone with your work, and thus look it squarely in the face. Not critics, nor authorities, not popular opinion, not even law or religion, must be the court of final appeal when you are, by what you do, brought to the bar; it is by you, yourself, the judgement must be rendered. And this, too, is true— by that judgement, and that judgement alone, you will truly live or you will truly die.”
-Harold Bell Wright, The Eyes of the World