Art Didn't Ask My Permission: On Being Chosen by a Creative Life

There is a question I get more than almost any other: How did you become an artist?

I used to search for a tidy answer. A turning point, a teacher, a moment of clarity. But the honest answer is messier and truer than that: I didn't become an artist. Art claimed me, and I spent years catching up to what it already knew about me.

In my new memoir, Sacred Pulse, I write about this directly:

"As a professional artist, we do not choose art, art chooses us."

I turned down a full college basketball scholarship because something in me already knew. I double-majored in graphic design and painting, overachieving as a way of trying to keep pace with the pull. I broke the rules constantly: using words in fine art, attaching half-burned candles to canvas, sewing driftwood into paintings, and being punished by the “rules” it often landed me B's and C's for it. And I kept going anyway, my art, my way, because the alternative was unthinkable.

What I know now is that being chosen by art is not a romantic notion. It is demanding. It I can be financially terrifying at times. It asks you to show up when you feel empty, when the work is bad, when no one is buying and the voices of self-doubt get loud. As I write in the book:

"The echoing voices of 'not good enough' or 'unworthy' begin poking, then screaming, backing an artist into a corner of self-doubt and sabotage. That is where the artist chooses to stop, or trust the process and push through."

That choice, to push through is the real career. Not the résumé, not the gallery shows, not the grants. The daily return to the work, the practice, the process. The willingness to be in it even when it isn't going well.

My first real art job was at the Stutz Building in Indianapolis, painting art to match the couch. I could turn out fifty paintings in a week. I became, as I write in Sacred Pulse, "an art machine." It wasn't glamorous, but it built a foundation in realism I could not have gotten any other way. Every job taught me something. Every failure refined something. That is the nature of a creative life, it wastes nothing.

If you are an artist reading this and wondering whether to keep going: the fact that you can't stop is your answer. That pull you feel, well, it is a calling. Trust it.

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