Side Obsessions

Not gonna lie to you, I too, have been confused about all the sculpture and pottery that I’ve churned out over the past 30 years and what it means to my trajectory as an artist. As I’ve also been a serious stained glass artisan, gardener and landscaper, seamstress and upholsterer, wood craftsman, a student and professor, and more recently, a musician, it’s sometimes a wonder to me how I’ve been able to maintain an illustration career when these other things insist on commandeering my attention.

And I must admit that some of these endeavors have been obsessively serious enough to make me turn my head and question my career choices. Sculpting in clay always held such a fascination for me and I always had my hands in it, but not until I was gifted a pottery studio in 2015 and could pursue ceramics as the real deal, that sculpting became less of a hobby and more of a deliberate component of my art practice.

In 2019, I was given a small order for a 60 tile commission and learned a great deal about what it’s like to do ceramics as a career. Good news is, I’m not giving up my day job yet. I’m still dazzled by all of the endless possibilities a blank two-dimensional surface holds and my mind prods me insistently with painting ideas. The pictorial space of the ceramic tile and the endless possibilities for storytelling in its infinitely malleable form scratches that “illustration itch” quite a bit.

When I started my illustration career in 19-freakin-92, I was young and naively hopeful about rocketing to stardom in the science book publishing market, making money, and generally having a successful career. I’m lucky to have gotten into the field when I did and I can’t complain; it’s been an amazing ride and much of it has gone very well for me. And I never terribly minded things like fluctuating income and long, long hours of work, but there came a time when I looked around me and wondered, “Is this all there is to this?”

Perhaps one gets to a place where doing the same thing every year gets a bit… monotonous. What do you do after you’ve painted over 1000 Monarch butterflies?

The question here is one of sustainability. How do you maintain your interest and curiosity for and around your work year after year, and keep it going for the long haul, hopefully for decades?

The side obsessions and detours are what have have allowed me to continue to grow as an illustrator. There were many times I thought my other interests were trying to steer me away from illustration, but they really only ended up proving to me that what I was doing is what I do best. Ceramics, stained glass, woodworking, and all the many side obsessions have served to make me a better human so that my communication abilities are sharpened and my experience deepened. These detours test my abilities to see through the many lenses of Art. These challenges have brought me more clarity and most importantly, have given me meaning for my life.

So, if you work small, go design an image on a 6’ canvas. If you are a landscape painter, sign up to draw the figure every week for 6 years. Become an avid cyclist. Plunge headlong into a 100-page graphic novel and learn Photoshop on the fly. Read a whole bunch about landscaping and create a new flower garden. Get work in another illustration genre just because it seems interesting. Buy a piano and teach yourself to play so you can join a band and write a few albums in a few years. Be fearless. Be less interested in your shortcomings and more interested in your explorations. Picasso changed whatever he was doing every 5 years or so because he cared more about his artistic integrity and curiosity than the profits. A change up will do you good.