MY JOURNEY TO SAN FRANCISCO IS NO MISTAKE

Packing up to hit the road for San Francisco Art Market 2023 i.e. Procrastinating by writing a blog because this may be the last time I see these pieces which will be very bittersweet.

On April 19th I will hop into my car loaded up with seven original fine art pieces to drive 337 miles north and meet the art world head-on. The anxiety that comes with ADHD has a good hold of my imagination of how things will play out at the prestigious San Francisco Art Market but I know that it’s “about the journey, not the destination”. Whomever said that has clearly never been to Ireland, but I digress.

So before I turn the key into the ignition, I thought I’d look back and see how I really got here. The road is unfamiliar, the people along the way are complete strangers, the cargo I carry is my very soul plastered on canvas and naked for the world to see… to judge… to accept (or reject). **Breathe** I rarely look back as it tends to cause a spiral of doubt but there’s something different about this road so I fight back the fear, take in a deep breath and turn.  Huh. I’m further down a road than I remember traveling and I never truly imagined going down this road in the first place!

Always being a free-spirited child dabbling in various arts: singing; dancing, painting, drawing, writing, acting, you name it, I wanted to do it (and probably did). It was clear that art was in my soul no matter the form. Nothing gives me more joy than hearing an audience laugh when I am on stage acting in a comedy. Or when I receive feedback on a screenplay I wrote hearing, “These characters are so real! I cried!” Or having fun jamming out on the dance floor or singing on stage as the audience claps and sings the words back. Wow… It would be extremely difficult to remove the smile on my face in any of these instances but growing up in a strict household in a decade where the motto was “The boy who dies with the most toys wins”, during a government regime that was cutting arts programs left and right, having an artist life was never a consideration. Art was something children did at school or in the basement to keep them busy while grown ups convened upstairs. In my day art was divisive, not a form of expression. 

My Mom on the other hand was similar to me, art was a part of life. Necessary as breathing. She taught me how to paint flowers on a piece of wood she found on her way home from work one weekend. She crocheted, sewed, needlepoint - needles were her thing - and always encouraged me to sing and dance. Though cancer took her when I was only 13, those thirteen years of having her in my life grounded me in a way I cannot explain. I rebelled against the businesswoman my father wanted me to be. I surely could have taken the easy route in life and gotten that business degree he promised to pay for but instead, I went with my heart, my soul, and changed my major to theater and took on those dastardly student loans in order to study something that made me truly happy.

After college, I went back to Chicago and worked in advertising by day and worked the theater scene at night. I didn’t know that those three years of 60 - 84 hour work weeks were preparing me for my next journey - Hollywood. California was always the destination since as long as I could remember, not only because of the glitz and glamour but because my Mom was born and raised there. She graduated from Bell High School, met my dad at Camp Pendleton and they fell in love. Though they split when I was only 2 years old, they loved each other until the day she died. My Mom told me on her death bed that he was the love of her life and that is why her headstone contains, not her maiden name, but his last name. Because of this, because of my Mom’s stories, I equated Hollywood with the place you fall in love. I’m sure the movies had a heavy hand in molding that opinion but today, I’ll give that credit to my Mom.

So, in the immortal words of Horace Greenly, in 2000 I went west and grew up. Hell or high water I was going to try my hand at this acting-thing in Hollywood. After only six month of being inundated with plastic surgery commercials and being told I was too fat to be an actor, I changed passions and went the producer route. I was so incredibly angry at all of the body shaming that I took that anger, determined that I could single-handedly change the industry and teach them to treat people of any and all sizes with respect, and turned it into a logistical/logical career: Line Producing. The business side of Hollywood my father should have been proud of. That anger was only put on the back-burner of wanting the industry to honor a woman’s body. After all, I represent a real woman’s body! I wasn’t starving myself like Julia Roberts was on the set of “Pretty Woman” eating only 1 avocado a day. There is a famous story where she passed out on set, Garry Marshall “plied her with tuna fish, and the shoot continued.” My womanly curves were earned with the combination of good food and womanly sex appeal! I wasn’t about to give that up!

Throughout my career I still dabbled in art on the side: drawing, painting and the likes. But everything I created was a distraction or simply something to do during hiatus’. I really didn’t sit down and try to tell a visual story like I was actively doing through movies and TV. When I am working creatively with the story or the look of a scene, I feel completely fulfilled but as my career progressed it focused more on the numbers, schedules and less on the creative. That hole I had been ignoring grew bigger and bigger until it slapped me full force in the face in the form of depression. Determined not to go on prescription meds, I drove back into art. I had been playing with canvas and paints for a couple of years and hated everything I created. Only the garbage man really got to experience the travesty of the experiments I conducted trying to get paint to “leap'“ off the canvas. 

Any normal person would have logically gone to sculpture or other 3D art medium but I always wanted my art to hang on the wall in canvas form and reach out towards the viewer. It was something I’d not seen before and I was determined to find a solution. It wasn’t until 2017 when the stars aligned with opportunity, need and a drive where I truly sat in the problem. I was President of Production for a small production company and there was this gaping hole in the office hutch that I needed to fill. The owner of the business was a talented designer/decorator type but this was different. This was MY space and something I felt strongly about creating myself. After a solid month of ‘sitting’ in the problem, figuratively and literally as I stared at the hole everyday at work, it came to me during a casual trip to a Michael’s store: Burlap. But that’s a different (much shorter) story that you can read about HERE. 

After a couple of months creating this insane 5 foot piece of art that only I would know the true meaning of, I brought it into the office and.. woooow. It was better than I thought it could look! So much so, I HAD to do the photo op with it! The photo below clearly shows my eccentric side and damn I look gooood. But again, I digress… story con’t below…

Oh, I forgot about my fedora! I have a hat obsession and I just felt like a queen in this beautiful office being framed by my own art work. And THIS is the moment I became fired up about the artist that had been dormant for so long!

Living with high functioning anxiety, which was later diagnosed as extreme ADHD, I knew I was partial to the work so always doubted its true visual impact until I started conducting meetings in my newly completed office. Not a single person who came in the room failed to make a positive comment on The Story of 43. I’d blush every single time, too. It was an amazing feeling receiving the very unexpected praise for something that meant so much.  After a couple months of this praise and telling myself, “this isn’t a fluke, right?” I dove back in again to see if I could recreate this lightening in a bottle but I was soon back to 12 - 14 hour days on set, so, art took it’s common backseat in my life of priorities. 

When COVID hit in 2020 I was one of the lucky few who was able to work throughout the pandemic, and working from home saving me 2+ hours a day of commute time. What was a girl to do with 10+ extra hours in the week?! ART, of course! I dove head first into finishing the Hollywood Series I had started, oh so long ago! And when I was able to see those three pieces together, I knew my unique style wasn’t a fluke after all!

Through the encouragement of friends, I started researching galleries and going to virtual meetups trying to learn an entirely new career path. In 2021, I was invited to share my work at the Los Angeles Clio Art Market but it ended up being canceled due to COVID. Sorely disappointed and completely not confident that I could make any headway into a very tight art community, I was definitely deflated. I don’t know what’s harder to break into: Hollywood or the Fine Art World!

In Nov of 2022 I was invited by the Alessandro Berni Gallery to be a featured artist at their San Francisco booth in 2023. I was thrilled but it wasn’t going to be a simple “Yes” from me in order to attend. Oh no, the San Francisco Art Market actually curates all of the work showcased! A committee actually views the work of each gallery and approves each artist prior to the event. That was the longest month of my fledgling art career… waiting to hear if MY art, my heart and soul, was good enough for this prestigious event. 

Further convincing me that Story of 43 wasn’t lightening in a bottle, it was vision, it was heart and it was my soul that the committee saw and accepted me into their community. Somehow they saw ME through my quirky painted burlap on canvas. I can express no greater feeling. 

And so here I am, standing in a road between Hollywood and San Francisco. The week ahead is completely unknown and wondrous. The potential is infinite in the unwritten future but also scary. So, as I travel north, I need to simply breathe, take in the super bloom along the way and enjoy what’s about to come… good or bad because, baby, look how far you’ve come!