I don't think I'm an artist, and maybe that's fine

I went to art school. I can draw a realistic face; shading, proportion, the whole technical toolkit. And I still catch myself saying the sentence in this title, quietly, to no one, most weeks: I don't think I'm an artist.

Here's the part that took me a long time to admit: art school didn't hand me that confidence. In a lot of ways, it took some of it away. I was taught to stay tight. Color inside the lines. Follow the instruction in front of me instead of whatever quiet pull was happening in my own hands. I got good at technique and lost touch with intuition and I left before I finished my degree anyway, when family needed me more than my classes did. And let me just state that it is very difficult for me to admit out loud, even 30 years later. 

So here's the strange truth I'm still making peace with: the style I actually love - loose, free, abstract, a little wild, is nothing like what I trained in. It's almost the opposite of what I was taught "good art" was supposed to look like. I haven't attempted real realism in twenty years. When I try now, I know exactly what I want it to look like, and I can't get my hands to close that gap, and it makes me want to throw the whole page away. That gap between what I can picture and what actually lands on the paper is where I still live most days. I compare. I finish something and immediately hate it. I start pieces I never finish because perfectionism or comparison gets there before completion does. If I'm honest, some part of me still wants the things I don't say out loud: to see my work somewhere bigger, to be known even a little, to actually sell what I make instead of just making it. And most days I don't have the courage to reach for that.

I used to think all of this disqualified me from the word "artist." Now, over fifty, an empty-nester, I think I had it backward. You don't need art school to be an artist. You might honestly be better off without it, closer to the childlike freedom that no one ever told you to color inside of. You are not late. You are not undone. You are not disqualified. You are returning to something that was never actually about the technique in the first place.

I don't know if I'll ever fully make peace with the hating-my-work, the comparing, the wanting to be seen. But I've stopped needing to solve all of that before I let myself sit down and make something anyway. Begin exactly where you are; trained or untrained, tight or free, twenty years out of practice or never practiced at all. That's allowed.

If you've got that same soul begging to come out and make something (the one that doesn't care what your training says you're supposed to make), I'm building something quiet for exactly that. It's called Soul Pages, and the waitlist is open now if you want to be the first to know when it's ready.

I'm genuinely so excited about this one. It's a little course for the women sitting right where I've been sitting in that strange, in-between space of life where you feel a bit invisible, a little lost, not quite sure where you went. If that's you, this is the jump start. Not to become an artist. To find the creative soul that has always been there.