HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

It’s only fair that if you are taking this journey with me, you should know how and where it began, right?

When I was a little girl, the only thing I wanted to do was travel the world and help people. I didn’t know anyone that did that outside of the missionaries that would visit our church, so I decided that I was going to be a missionary when I grew up.

I never considered art as a potential career. It was just a part of who I was. If I wasn’t running wild outside, I was creating something. Paper dolls were my favorite. Something about designing the women and the clothing and the dream life they must lead was such a beautiful escape for me.

And there was plenty to escape from. It wasn’t the poverty that was hard. My mom was excellent at ensuring we were fed and clothed no matter what. Although we weren’t always trendy, we never felt like we went without. Even when we were boiling water for baths and all eight kids were sleeping in one room, it didn’t seem like life was unreasonable.

The real challenge was growing up in an extremely abusive environment, with a father determined to prove that we weren’t worth having around.

Escape was a way of life and we all did anything we could to find it. For me, that meant I was outdoors in all weather from sunup to sundown and if someone managed to force me inside, I was making up stories and drawing pictures.

When I was eight years old, my art was published on the cover of Kansas, Too Magazine. I was ecstatic. My dream changed a little that day and I decided I was going to do art forever.

I really committed to that dream, competing several more times and hounding my aunt and uncle (who are phenomenally talented artists) to teach me anything and everything they knew. When I was fourteen, my art qualified me to go to the State Fair, the pinnacle of achievement for a homeschool kid in Kansas at the time. Little did I know, that was the last time I would enter anything.

Things at home had progressively gotten worse over the years and I wasn’t handling it well at all. After a more violent encounter than usual, I decided that I could no longer stay at my home. I went to public school at that point, couch surfing and staying as far away from my family as I could.

That summer took me to Los Angeles where I fell in love for the first time. The ocean became my first and forever love. I stayed as long as I could, but eventually heading back to the Midwest for school.

I attended Evangel University, studying social work. I was determined to use my degree to help kids escape violent situations. While I was there, my dad finally went to jail for a violent incident with two of my brothers. It only solidified the necessity of rescuing kids who were growing up like I had. I performed musically and toured with a drama group in college, but I had basically left the idea of visual art behind completely.

That continued after college as I neglected any form of art in favor of working dead end jobs that had nothing to do with helping people. I joined an unhealthy multi-level-marketing group (not all are unhealthy, but this one was) and sold my soul as well as all my time for several years.

I also found my “perfect husband” through that organization. We connected through our shared trauma and abusive backgrounds, marrying far too quickly and starting our family very quickly.

Two people’s unhealed trauma can easily create a toxic environment and I soon found myself in a situation very similar to the one I had grown up in. Creativity was smothered by fear and striving to be perfect, while I slowly withered away.

However, there is beauty to be found in every dark place if we look hard enough, and that time in my life gave me direction and purpose I never expected.

I left in the back of an ambulance, my husband being loaded into a police car. It was the worst, and best, moment of my life.

I was finally free, and the pain had become enough that I was determined to change. I began using art as a way to heal, releasing my creativity and falling in love with life again. Although I had quite a process ahead of me, I finally accepted the fact that this was, and always had been, a part of my identity. And by smothering that part of me, I had dampened and dulled every piece of me.

Since that time, I have learned the power of challenges. How they can break us or force us to grow, dependent on our choices in that moment. Even when it feels like we will never get through, if we keep going, we give ourselves the opportunity to look back from the other side, realizing that the only way to have a complete picture is to have both the darkest darks and the lightest lights. Without the dark, life… and paintings, lack contrast. And contrast is what makes things interesting.