My Birth as an Artist

I never went to art school. Although I've taken lots of classes, I don't have an art degree. But I had two pivotal experiences that propelled me into painting and guided me into the work I've continued doing for the last 30 years.

Through a series of miraculous events, my husband, Ed, and I became English teachers at a Chinese university in 1986-87. We had been married two years and were greener than green, but we were also desperate for a new adventure and distance from our small town. We traveled to Zhengzhou, Henan Province,the People's Republic of China, and were provided with an apartment in a building for Chinese faculty. For the next 14 months, we taught English writing and conversation and traveled extensively throughout the country.

It was a challenging time to be in a central Chinese city. Our apartment didn't get over 40 degrees for three months, and Ed and I each lost 30 pounds over the course of the year, subsisting on rice and cabbage and pancakes through the winter. There were more horses than cars in our city of one million, and I could create traffic accidents by letting my blonde hair blow freely as I walked down the boulevard (a rather heady experience).

 

On my first day of teaching, I skirted around puddles of standing water and past broken windows in the languages building. As I entered my classroom, 30 brilliant graduate students in khaki Mao jackets and caps rose and stood respectfully at attention. My life was never the same again. Over the next year, these students and another class of university faculty opened their hearts to us, told us stories of growing up during the Cultural Revolution, and shared their impossible dreams for the future. Ed's and my apartment was full of guests every night. I felt flooded with the strong impressions, like we were on a different planet.

How could I process all of these exeriences? I had packed pastels and watercolors in my suitcase, and I began illustrating our students' stories and my own gut responses. The word got around that I painted, and soon I was joined in my living room by several classically trained Chinese artists. They taught me that the drive to create transcends borders and that art happens even in unheated rooms with the simplest of materials. When we returned to the USA, I had refined a personal visual language, but, more importantly, I saw art as a vital lifeline for expressing burning, hard-to-resolve emotions.

Returning to the US was a bumpy transition for me. Ed and I moved to Oakland and struggled with new careers, tight funds, and my family of origin in crisis. I hit a major depression almost immediately and found myself in a therapist's office, pulling out a couple of watercolors and explaining, "I don't know how to use words to describe what I'm feeling, but it's a little like this..." For the next three years, I took her one or two paintings a week and we discussed the feelings behind them. Those three years became a kind of MFA program, and in the end I had a body of 300 paintings, the birth of my life as an artist.

I am grateful for that Chinese experience and the deep friendships that happened there and the artistic expression was born in that unheated apartment. And I'm grateful for the therapist who helped me paint my way out of a very dark place.