There was a day one summer, in the exhausting time of hands-on, tantrum circumventing mothering, when I recieved my fourth rejection letter in a matter of months. Together, they each represented weeks or even months of effort. Days of no clean socks and chaos and juggling. Compounded, the last one hit me like a pallet of bricks. Was I doing the wrong thing? Was this the wrong direction? Why all the wasted effort? Wasn't this a journey I was called to? Why then were no doors opening? What was I supposed to do, then?
When my husband came home from work, I said I needed time to process it and grabbed the keys. Thinking of a few options of places to go, I settled on the park near my house. I made my way to the water and sat near the flow, letting the tears out. What am I supposed to be doing?! I pondered my options, to retreat from the world of contemporary art and all its difficult opportunities for growth and stretching and a particular audience, or to continue to try to receive validation and gain momentum in the path that many people I admired said was the right one. As I was sitting there, playing with some mud, and contemplating what I would spend my limited time on, I realized that I was holding clay. “Clay From The Riverbank Where I Sat Waiting For Answers.” I had kept thinking, “My work is about hope. I can’t give up hope over my work.” I decided to use the raw material of that moment to move forward, with answers or not. Even if I didn’t know how to process this, I could still keep making work. Of all the courses of action, I felt like I needed to just keep making things, and just find ways for people to see them.
I left with a sense of peace. And a bag full of the clay from where I sat. With an old crock full of the clay on my painting table, I began adding it to plaster and making paintings from it. I exhibited the work, and brought the pieces home after some weeks.
Answers came. One day a young man came to our house days after losing his father. He stared at my painting as I described what it was about. About confusion, about hope, about not knowing the path forward. He completely related and spent 45 minutes talking about what he saw in my painting. As we experienced the work together, it became clear that of all the directions I could have as a focus for my career, that I wanted to focus primarily on the way the work affected people who are going through difficult things. That emotional connection through artwork is what mattered the most to me, not grants or awards or anything I could apply for. It’s a focus that has remained, and the desperation of that moment ultimately brought me a profound clarity.