Photo by Jay Paul
Ask me what I do, and I’m likely to tell you anything but the truth. Ne’er-do-well is my favorite response, as it sounds just as pompous — but somewhat funnier — than what I actually do. I spend most of my time painting and creating mixed-media pieces depicting people, but saying you’re an artist in Richmond is risky business, especially when you’re a self-taught 50-year-old former journalist who came to art for a peculiar reason. Our city is home to a great art school, a world-class art museum and some really cool galleries. There are people among us who have devoted their lives to creating and promoting art, and I’m still not comfortable inserting myself into their world. I stumbled into art at age 45 because I needed a way to relieve the stress of work.
At the time, I was the daily newspaper’s beat reporter covering education. It was meaningful work at a time of rapid change for the city’s beleaguered school system. But it was also physically and mentally exhausting. Some days, I’d be in a school before 9 in the morning covering one thing, at City Hall past midnight waiting for the Richmond School Board to wrap up another of its always contentious, seemingly endless meetings, then back up at 6 the next morning because the superintendent was calling to complain about the story I wrote. In a fit of fatigue one day, I went to an art supply store and bought a few small canvases and some cheap paint. The first day, I produced a decidedly amateurish rooster and an even worse vase of flowers.
My initial output was mediocre, but I didn’t care. I was old, I had a job, I was having fun and I was — and still am — married to a wonderfully accepting woman who works for the state, which offers the kind of health care that allows spouses to pursue their artistic dreams beyond a reasonable point. So I kept painting. Within a year, I shifted my focus from farm animals and still lifes to people, realizing that painting, like writing, was a way for me to tell stories. Or at least provoke people to ask questions, or make up their own stories about the people I paint.
After a couple of years, my career had run its course — being a beat reporter is a young person’s job — and I decided to see what would happen if I focused on art.
I’m not alone in coming to this in middle age, but I might have had an advantage few of my friends did: experience in journalism. If nothing else, writing for a newspaper teaches you to work fast and to toughen up. You won’t make it long if you equivocate or if you get your feelings hurt. You do your work, take your lumps and do it all again.
That has paid off in my pursuit of a career in art. I work fast, and I don’t much care what others think. I had one teacher look at my work and say it would make “a nice underpainting.” One of my oldest friends told me (twice!) how lucky I was to be able to “make bad art all the time.”
I’m happy just making it.
I can say that in 2018, I had work juried into shows in three different galleries, and I sold a half dozen or so pieces, including three to people I don’t know. I now have a piece in the corporate collection at Capital One, and I had another on display for two months in New York City’s Garment District as part of the “Art Elevated” competition. In the summer of 2019, I’ll be an artist-in-residence at Chateau D’Orquevaux, an old manor house turned art colony in rural France.
Thinking about it now, the thing that made my new profession possible was how I approached it in the first place: I just jumped in and started working. I didn’t study market trends in search of a lucrative next career (definitely not art, by the way). I found something I thought might be fun, then I stuck to it long enough to work my way from awful to hopefully not as awful (art being subjective, there’s a lot of leeway for you in there). I’ve had the luxury of a second income at home, so I haven’t had to pursue commissions or teaching assignments. But even if I had, I’d offer the same advice: Get up and get to work, and you’ll figure it out soon enough.
A decade ago, I never would have imagined myself painting every day. But that’s the fun of life. Open yourself to possibility, and anything can happen.
