The Drawing that Sparked an Art Career

This simple still life of walnuts was a very influential piece in my art career. I drew this my senior year of high school at a time when art was a dabbled hobby. I had only taken one art class – Into to Art – up until that point. My creativity was expressed in doodles on class notes and the weekly Spanish vocab illustration that I took far beyond assignment standards.

This piece solidified the fact that I wanted to create art. It slowly chiseled the idea that I wanted to spend my life pursuing this concept I was stepping into. Despite the many words of wisdom telling me to run as far as I can in the opposite direction, I took the leap. I pushed away the comments of: “Photography is a hobby, not a career” and “My friend was an Art Major. He now works at Hobby Lobby.”

I poured a lot into that piece, spending time and thought and patience working with the details. And I saw a glimmer of a hope. A spark of acceptance. My walnut still life was sent to the college I didn’t know I would be attending and accepted into a student art show. It was another stone placed in my path leading me to where I am today.

A few short months from graduation, I committed to the college out in Nebraska. I went into Art Education, heeding advice of the “safer” route. I figured, sure, it was a good way to get a job and still make art. I figured I’d use all the breaks to travel and make art and write. But then the first day of education class the professor said, “Now don’t just go into teaching because you think you’ll have all this free time during breaks.” Whoops. I soon realized education was a bigger undertaking than I’d anticipated.

I lasted a whole three days in the education department before I dropped out. I simply wanted to make art.

It did not dawn on me quite as calmly as that, though. It was more of a hyperventilating as the teacher told the class to draw our dream classroom. I sat there quietly panicking for several minutes. I finally threw some easels beneath a tree onto my paper just as the teacher called the activity to a close.

The idea of a classroom made me completely claustrophobic. I felt this turtleneck tighten around me.

I can only stare out a window for so long before going absolutely crazy.

I guess that moment of drawing easels beneath a tree was a foreshadowing. A foreshadowing of my future self, living as an artist and working in camp ministry.

I do have to say, the ironies of life arrived years after I left the education department in a panic. I worked as a part time teacher for a semester following the close of camp’s fall season. I didn’t hyperventilate. I didn’t run out of the building in a claustrophobic mess. But I did go on spontaneous hikes or run some miles along dirt trails when that bell rang noon.

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