On Being An Artist. Period.

In August, I bedazzled a porcelain cat¹, designed and embroidered an image of my husband’s favorite lighthouse onto an LL Bean bag as a birthday gift, created a midcentury lodge-inspired logo for our house as an inside joke, photographed landscapes at a state park, and started sketching for another visual project I’m hoping to bring to life by the end of the year.

Am I craft crazy? Do I have too many hobbies? I prefer to think of it as a month of unfettered creative output.

Because I’m an artist. And I’m actively trying to let go of my hangups on how to monetize or niche what I’m compelled to create.

Would I love to be paid fairly for my art? OF COURSE I WOULD! But there’s constant tension and disconnect between art’s innate value vs. its perceived exchange value, and capitalism does not support art for art’s sake.

As Thea Lim wrote in her essay “The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age”:

If there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights.

A few years ago, a well-meaning acquaintance introduced me to her neighbor, an illustration agent. Our phone conversation was also well-meaning but highly deflating to my Manifesting Generator flitty-butterfly desires.

To even be considered, to squeeze your foot in the door on your way to maybe being taken seriously by any potential client, she told me, you need 40 to 50 pieces of illustration work in the same style in your portfolio. The same type of watercolor. The same ink-and-wash. An assembly line of Your Defined Style. No deviation. This is who you are and what you produce.

Naturally, I rebelled against this idea. Not because I couldn’t produce that many drawings/paintings, but because I didn’t want to.

Why would I restrict my creativity to one medium or style to the exclusion of all others?

I love working in both analog and digital ink-and-wash, to be sure. I created my entire Maine Ingredients book in that particular method and understand the aesthetic value of a project with a cohesive visual style. Duh.

But Maine Ingredients also featured another of my artistic passions, hand-lettered typography. And I don’t have a degree in graphic design…ish (though a lot of my coursework did involve design elements, proving my educational bonafides is the opposite of the point here).

At a recent community art open house/sketch night, I was futzing with my midcentury lettering on the iPad amongst artists sketching with pencil or ink on paper. One of them asked, “oh, are you a designer?” when they saw what I was working on.

Well, no, not really. I mean, I am a designer in a way. But it’s not the be-all and end-all for me.

I’m absolutely not saying that calling oneself a “graphic designer” or “illustrator” is a lesser title or a sell-out definition. I simply refuse to constrain my personal artistic output.

My art encompasses:

• my illustrated books like Maine Ingredients
• individual and deeply personal commissioned pet portraits, which give me so much pleasure to do — I swear I cry drawing every single one
• Yeti tumblers that I’ve customized with stickers (and soon with sparkle paint when I’ve got a free block of time to start that project)
• photography as documentation of my travels and adventures
• hand-embroidered flourishes on my clothes, like the Matisse cutout shapes I added to an old hoodie this summer
• fun designs for my friends, like the Disneyland Hotel-inspired name logos I made for my Disney gals, the title pages I’ve done for my husband’s baseball presentations, or the (iconic?) Stripey Jerko Club logo I made for Lenny and his brother from another mother, Cliffy
• the curation and arrangement of other art and books and plants and talismans and surround me and inspire me daily — my own artistic ecosystem
• this website, a digital road trip through my world
• and yes, regular old watercolors or ink drawings whenever I feel like making them

As Michelle Pellizzon likes to say, it ain’t that deep. Does it scratch a creative itch? Then I’m going to do it.

And when it comes to public perception about what I’m putting out, all I need to remember is this:

1. The porcelain cat has what I think is a funny story: When my in-laws moved back in 2021, the cat ended up with us as a discard. My initial plan was to take it to their new house at some indeterminate point in the future, far enough out that my mom-in-law had forgotten she once owned it, and hide it until she noticed its existence. Maybe she would never notice! And that would be funny too.
   But as the cat hung out with me in my office, it started to grow on me like a foster fail. It started to remind me of one of Nick Cave’s Rescue assemblages or the crystal cloud in *Until,* a found object transformed and transcendent with baubles, crystals, and chains.
   So I started Nick Cave-ing it with a necklace I no longer wore, then decided it needed more sparkle. And when my library scheduled an event for interested parties to watch movies and bedazzle stuff as a group, I saw my opportunity! ↩︎