Getting here from there

For as long as I can remember, I have been a workaholic. I had my first job at 15 years old and by 18 I had doubled up with work and have pretty much working like that since. To date I've probably worked over 30 different jobs in the following fields: restaurant/food/hospitality service, acute care within the clinical psychology and psychiatric field, health insurance management, quality assurance for retail sales, and classroom education and instruction. I've also successfully freelanced for both visual art and marketing/branding. What can I say? I LOVE to work. I really do.

A little more than a decade ago I was crazy enough to start my photography business.  Nowadays everybody has a photography business but way back when? It wasn't so easy to just start such a business. Digital photography wasn't nearly so affordable OR technologically advanced, photoshop was but a funny sounding word, and you had to know film and the actual functions of manual cameras and periphery equipment in order to create an even halfway decent image much less one that someone might be willing to pay you for. Still?  I had a gut feeling that venturing into the world of professional photography was something I was supposed to do.  I believed that I didn't need an actual studio in order to produce professionally recognized work. I believed that my skill and artistic voice could, should, and would be heard and I just needed to let it rise above the whisper it had been within myself.

Today I am amazed by the trajectory of my career path.  I just did an update on my official website and at this point my body of work and portfolio representation is so immense that I can't possibly even think about including half of it because there are just so many images. I am really having to pick and choose what should be cut out and replaced with newer images and it's awesome to look at the "throw away" pile and see that all of them are still really great pieces of work and are only being put out because they just aren't current enough.



I wish I could have a conversation with my younger self while she was in her school-age and college years and reassure her that telling people she wants to be an artist when she grows up will be something that really actually can happen and absolutely and honestly WILL happen. I wish I could tell her to not let others take the wind from her sails and call her endeavors lofty or pipedreams. I wish I could let her in on the seemingly secret thing that seems like the greatest key to success and happiness (but really it isn't) that if you truly do go forth and do what God has called you to do, He will provide every provision to catapult you forward and straighten every path you will find yourself walking. Even the ways that seem like they are taking you away from your dreams? Sometimes the road not taken by everyone else is actually a bit of a shortcut to the place that you couldn't believe actually existed.

Today I'm so happy to not have to "fake it until I make it" and also to know better when it comes to boldly and confidently going in the direction of my dreams. I'm still classically a workaholic with plenty of irons in the fire...

I write for Fuel Your Photography

I founded and maintain an art enrichment blog that provides lesson plan ideas and also an archive of my fine art pieces.

My precious creative endeavor that might be one of the greatest career risks for me ever but one that I cannot bear to give up despite the naysayers and accusations of pipedreaming.

When I was working a thankless office job without windows and going to meetings that seemed neverending, I dreamed of a life that was being a working artist and my art mentor encouraged to me do the things I felt and the money would follow.  I did just that and I will tell you that I am STILL doing exactly that. It's the one and only sure thing I know no matter how many people might tell me I'm crazy.