Fake It Till You Make It: The Unglamorous Truth About Building an Art Career

Nobody tells you this in art school: you will spend a significant portion of your career doing things you have never done before, figuring them out in real time, and hoping nobody notices.

I call it the sacred art of winging it, and I am not embarrassed about it anymore. It’s a skill to allow the medium to guide you.

In Sacred Pulse, I write about the years I spent building a mural career in Atlanta with more confidence than experience:

"As my career grew, I was painting indoor murals for various clients in Indianapolis, discovering applications and techniques that worked as I went, and doing what many artists sometimes do: wing it, fake it till you make it."

That honesty matters to me. Because the polished version of an art career, the one that looks good on a website, leaves out all the messy, crucial middle parts. The part where you say yes to a commission before you fully know how to execute it, then go home and figure it out. The part where you roll a fresh coat of paint over a section that isn't working, at midnight, before the client arrives in the morning.

My first hundred-foot mural came through a money mindset workshop, of all places. A local veterinarian was in the workshop, too, and we started talking. She offered me the job. I write about that moment:

"Weaving between Drum Cafe facilitation and art team building on canvas in corporate settings, ecstatic to get my first significant payments for this mural, with more zeros on the check than I had ever seen before—thrills-ville!”

That mural put me on the map with Atlanta muralists, not because I had a perfect portfolio or the right connections, but because I had said yes before I was ready, and then I got ready. I believed in me!

This is how most creative careers actually work. Not in a straight line, and not necessarily with a plan. In Sacred Pulse I describe my career arc this way:

“My body, heart and spirit are all-used tools for exploring. Painting, woodworking, drum making, then back to painting, to book making and non-traditional book making, to woodworking, back to painting, back to a mural, then sculpting. Dizzying indeed. It became a calling: round and round through all the processes, leaping, heart forward into public art and community building."

Dizzying, yes, but also very much alive. Diversifying, and every pivot taught me something the previous medium couldn’t, every leap forward required me to be a beginner again, and beginners, it turns out, discover things that experts have stopped looking for.

If you are waiting to feel ready before you say yes to the next big thing: stop waiting. Say yes, and then preparing, step-by-step, without over thinking. In the being, became the doing, and it all began to align beautifully.

In the getting ready, again and again, in preparing, I evolved as a public facing artist and facilitation expert. Community building with art became my focus, and changed my practice. Environmental education became the path, and the path I follow today, that is deeply personal.

Sacred Pulse: A Journey Into Art & Shamanism is available [here].