Fearless Creativity

Those Etsy artisans taught me something. But it didn't happen overnight. 

You see, I opened my SandStorming shop before I was quite ready. Whatever for, you ask? 

It goes like this: A few years ago, I created some bras for an auction to support a dear friend who had developed breast cancer. [She is doing wonderfully well as I write this, for which I am infinitely grateful.] The bras were lauded as being rather clever, and I was encouraged to make more for sale. So I slapped a few photos on Etsy and left it at that. I sold one or maybe two--I don't even remember now--which left me with the thought that people are just being nice when they say, "Oh you could sell that, it's amazing!"

But I think now that, to sell, there's the product accomplishment, and then there's the exposure accomplishment. Clearly I was not cooperating when it came to exposing myself. Er, in the promotional way, mind you. After all, I reluctantly but diligently posed for that catalog-style shop shot. 

No. The problem was, everyone except me was certain I had something to offer. It's not that I didn't think the bras were worthy of sale. I simply couldn't wrap my head around having a shop that sold things I made, because, well, that would be too much like me, and I'd spent half a lifetime being everyone else but me. And after all that time, I thought, it just ain't fittin'. Ain't fittin'.

And then I encountered Pippenwyck's. Now that's a shop. Unique, delightful, imaginative. And a story behind it all, told in a guileless, delightful manner that sent me straight for a text window where I could finally and bravely confess my own artistic story. 

Astralana

It felt like a revelation to create this first drawing after more than a decade of closing off that part of myself.

In fact, this woman with star-tresses began as a scribble at the margin of a poem from the early 90s. I gave her a name, Astralana; and I've started to think of her as the superhero type: one of those characters of the surreal sort, with a mysterious background. A little dark. A little light. A lot of hope.