Shawna Moore - Artist
RE:Create - DO THE WORK! There isn't any way around it.
Welcome Home! A winter away in Costa Rica and Nicarauaga how did you maintain your creative practice while traveling?
The travels through Central American and later to Hawaii are a way for me to recharge my mind, body and sprit. That in itself is nourishment for my creative self.
Over working your artistic muscle results in burnout and pushing things too far, oftentimes when they are asking to push back.
I usually buy a new sketchbook before embarking on a trip. I work on a 12x9 inch Strathmore Watercolor pad. Once I arrive in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Hawaii, someday Bali, and unpack my bags, I take over the tiny table that usually comes with the budget apartments we rent. I keep it simple with dinner plates for palettes and used food and drink containers for water and paint mixing.
I use a combination of watercolors and gouache with occasional tempera or gesso thrown in if I can find it. I try to paint everyday usually when listening to music or NPR on my phone.
This becomes my downtime when I am not surfing, doing yoga or grocery shopping and cooking.
Bit by bit the books begin to fill. I don't usually see how the small paintings find their way into the larger studio work until about a year later.
The translation is difficult but critical to the way I work these days. I need both, the separation from my home and studio and then the intense return where the expectation is on exhibitions and output.
How have you stayed motivated in your career? Did you have an overall strategy or did you just persevere because it was your passion?
It had taken a considerable amount of time to get to the point where I had an art career. Although college exposed me to materials, artists, and ideas, it was not helpful for my launch into the working life as an artist.
I worked at many jobs from waitress, tree planter, housekeeper, recycler, potato farmer, yoga teacher, juice maker, etc. The benefit of all this was that I saw how people ran their businesses (well and poorly) and I also learned what a productive workday looks like (usually more than 2hrs and with a long view toward an endpoint).
I also had a robust active sport life with lots of skiing, mountaineering, rock climbing and hiking in the west. When I had my daughter Pixie at age 35, I had to hit the brakes on everything. That was a great time to reevaluate what I wanted to do.
First of all motherhood was so delightful and engaging that I was committed to that. At one point, making little drawings or taking a quick class was all I could add into my day with a young child. Eventually, I knew I would need to cultivate my own interests and continue to grow myself, so as she grew, I purposely made time for myself.
At one point in around 2002 or 2003, I would try to do just one thing a day to turn the wheel of creativity. It could be sending an email, looking at an art book, taking some photos, quickly painting in my studio or having a conversation with another artist or friend.
I figured if I did enough little things, maybe one a day, they would all add up to something...eventually.
As an artist, how do you deal creatively with self doubt, fear or insecurity?
Fear, doubt and insecurity are constant companions in life and in art. Now at age 55, I don't have all that much time to waste on those things.
I wish I could tell my 20 or 30 year self to "get over it!" I'm serious! I can paint or I can worry and stew. You learn to prize vulnerability!
I have read tons of books that deal with such issues, "Art and Fear," by David Bayles and Ted Orland is a great one. Their philosophy is to see your fear and learn how to work with it, rather that trying to run from it or assuming your won't ever have it.
I found that once I beat the crap out of myself emotionally in the studio with (self doubt, fear and insecurity) that I was invincible in the advocacy for myself as an artist.
I have no fears about showing someone my portfolio or asking for representation because I've conquered the only critic that matters...ME!
Currently I am reading Jerry Saltz's book "How To Be An Artist." I love the discussion of creativity and process and I still have my art heroes like Agnes Martin and Brice Maren.
It is important for me to feel as if I am part of something bigger than myself and this book is helping with that and I have even discovered a few new artists voices I hadn't heard like Shoog McDaniel. I love learning and I love being wowed!
I keep a small scrap of paper in the bathroom gallery of my art studio. I tore it out of an Oprah magazine that I thought was profound, it reads,
"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint...and that voice will be silenced."
Vincent Van Gogh
That pretty much covers it!
What have been some of the greatest successes in your career?
My greatest success has been proving to myself that I could be an artist and support myself doing this work.
I have made couple or maybe ten really good paintings, ones that I think I would be in awe of if I saw them in a gallery or museum. Once I created two large (60x60 inch) encaustic paintings for a regional museum show. I worried about them so much and thought they were too similar to the work of another artist's work who was in the show. I lost sleep over feeling like an imposter.
When the show went up they were spectacular! Probably two of the ten paintings I mentioned above. Those paintings owned that show. I didn't make any money from that. I didn't get famous. But I did it!
Currently a professor from the architecture school I studied with right out of high school contacted me about visiting the college where he now teaches. He is the dean of the art and architecture school and asked if I would be a visiting artist and bring an exhibition for the universities art museum.
Feeding back into the educational and artistic foundations that I benefited from feels like a success.
You've built the business & promotion side of your business with an active social media account, website, books and retreats - what advice do you give others who want a successful career doing their art?
Make some good art first!
It doesn't even need to be great, but it is difficult to build the promotional side of the business when you aren't confident in the work or you haven't made it. I suppose, if I could, I would just paint, but that is not how it works.
I'm not rich, so I need to make a living.
I also want to get the work out into the world so people can see it. So in that regard, connecting through social media, teaching, galleries, my website and books becomes important.
I rarely do anything unless there is direct benefit for the studio, art or me. That sounds selfish, but if I do my best work and put it out there, it benefits others too.
Describe your yoga/art retreats and their purpose?
Funny question as I don't teach or hold retreats much anymore. But the raison d'être for them initially was to financially support the art and the studio practices.
Yoga has taught me so many lessons about art and life. The practice, truth, and discipline required to develop as a student of yoga is the same as that which artists need. So when I taught yoga and art together in retreat settings there was a goal of getting students into community, the yoga sangha and then trying to get them to downshift from busyness and worry.
From that place we could reset into both the daily practices of yoga and art in a supported and usually exotic location.
Now as an artist in an older body, I need yoga to support the rigors of the studio practice. I am on my feet all day and I still paint large. Also, I plan to be in this for the long haul.
Agnes Martin made her final work at age 92. I continue to teach simple yoga practices at a local gym and just occasionally in a retreat setting. It's a way for me to get out in the world and share the wisdom I have gathered from some great teachers.
The purpose of doing yoga and teaching yoga is to be a wiser, healthier person and to share that experience with others.
Tell us - Why you do What you do?
I some ways it seems inevitable when I look back in time. My mom was an art teacher so I learned about art at an early age. I was the kid who won all the grocery store coloring contests and had an innate ability to look at something and make it or draw it. That might seem like I am describing talent, but talent only gets you so far. I've worked really hard.
I love art materials and color and looking at art and making stuff. I wanted to be the person who did that, the personification and occupation of ARTIST. I decided to see if I could.
I was also a young gymnast in the time of Olga Korbut and Nadia Comăneci. These young women were daring, exceptional and beautiful...judged as perfect! I wanted that too, I loved the community of the gymnastics team. I was strong and graceful. I got injured a lot. I turned 13 and got fat.
Those were hard lessons to learn.
Yoga helped me tap into that spark that ignited my interest in gymnastics, and I got to live the dream of wearing leotards and doing the splits but as a grownup!
I love surfing too and someone recently asked me why it seemed so easy for me. I used to compete in balance beam and I also was on swim team doing the sprint and relay events, so again there are all these overlaps between walking on something narrow and swimming like hell. That is pretty much all you need to surf plus an awareness of the ocean which is also something that recently I bring into the art.
You are very intentional and introspective with your work. Did that develop over time or did you always have that ability?
Nope, I am just like everyone else. I've made a lot of junk along the way. I once took a drawing class at a community college while still in high school (my mom's idea). I did this drawing of a still life with a giant milk can and the skull of the bull and it seems like there was some dried wheat stalks too. I thought I had nailed it.
I still have the drawing and the teachers grade of "B" with the note that said, "Nice drawing, but learn to temper your energy." I was so mad!
Now, 37 years later, she was right, and I have revisited that note many times over the years.
Using the unique material of encaustic helped me to slow things way down. The wax paint is not forgiving and you can wreck a week's worth of work in about 2 minutes. I try to work slowly and methodically with clear intention.
Last fall I made an experimental painting that I thought was going to be so good. It ended up looking like a batik tapestry from a Grateful Dead show parking lot vendor. Horrible!
The intention was there, but it wasn't anything that I wanted to set forth into the universe. I've learned to temper my energy.
Jerry Saltz says, "Subway sells a lot of sandwiches, but that doesn't make them good."
I seem intentional and introspective but I blow it a lot of the time too. I can come at you with both barrels and I try really hard to go easy on my friends.
The studio and my therapist's couch are where I let the shit storms happen. I am lucky that I hit life full throttle in my twenties. I was really into punk rock and still believe the mantra of questioning authority. I carry those acid trips and shows deep inside but haven't died my hair green for a long time!
We talk a lot about the "creative process' but what does it personally mean to you?
Everything is the creative process!
I'd say that at a certain point if you do even something simple with the inspiration that you are exposed to then it becomes the creative process. Cooking can be that way, reading a recipe and bringing it to life. I like working with my hands, so cooking, knitting and stitching things has always been part of how I pass a day.
I recently made a new set of potholders out of fabric scraps and old washcloths. Not everyone has the interest or curiosity for this. I would die without it.
I need things to travel from my eyes, into my brain, into the recesses of the mind, through my heart and out of my hands to become real, otherwise it is just a daydream, which is not a bad way to spend time either.
What motivates or inspires you as an artist and person?
I often return to Elizabeth Gilbert's suggestion of being curious rather than inspired. Inspiration can be hard to find, but as a thinking and feeling person, it is easier to be curious.
At times in my life I have felt like I am not doing enough to help the world. I worked for many years in the environmental side of the ski industry, trying to make those businesses greener and resulting in less of a footprint in pristine mountain environments.
I also think at times, I should be volunteering more and taking my white privilege into the world and sharing with those less fortunate. I still do environmental work in my small town, and I volunteer with a women's organization that runs a thrift store.
My current philosophy is that I have been given the opportunity to basically do whatever I want. To honor this gift, I do whatever I want. I refuse to bow to any judgement or shame or devaluation of my time or choices.
It becomes an exercise in freedom and democracy that I try to pass to others by being an example. What you "should" do is completely up to you!
Name 1 or 2 women who you admire and why?
When I lived in New Mexico I discovered Susan Rothenberg's paintings. They are very different that mine but she deeply explores the materiality of paint and her subject and some of her best work was made as a young mother in New York. That gave me hope as I had a youngster too. She ended up married to Bruce Nauman and living in Galisteo, New Mexico on a big ranch at the time I was there, so sometimes I would think of us as kindred spirits taking walks in the desert with our dogs and taking in that brilliant high elevation dry light and then returning to the studio to paint.
We have never met.
I also love Patti Smith the musician, poet, photographer and writer. She didn't quite fit in to standard culture and was best friends with Robert Mapplethorpe. She had produced so much good work and hasn't stopped.
Right now she is really into the environment and climate change issues with her daughter. Again, I feel like I shared the experience of counter culture and art with her.
Experiencing the AIDS epidemic through the lives of my friends and the scare it shot through artistic and gay community was profound. Patti Smith was at ground zero for that. The second wave hit us on the west coast. Both of these woman artists made their mark at a time when women were still coming into the arts from the outside.
We found a way to speak our truth!
What advice would you give to aspiring artists and creatives today?
DO THE WORK!
There isn't any way around it. Books start and end with this phrase.
Steven Pressfield even titled a book "Do the Work," the follow up book to his previous work "The War of Art." In it he again presents his theory of the enemy of creative works, Resistance, that stops individuals from achieving their desired objectives. You meet Resistance at every turn and you learn how to leap over it, duck under it, Aikido style bend around it, but it is always there and part of the battle with the craft.
It is how you meet resistance with determination every day that shapes you as a person and an artist. Sounds like a lot of work doesn't it?
The good news is that you can take this secret super power of handling Resistance into every part of your life: fitness, relationships, eating, and your process of self actualization.
I like to think I can inspire others by being a living example.
We talked about this the other day, but please share your thoughts about active Buddhism, spiritual growth and where you take your art career moving forward?
This is a practice that I developed with a former cognitive therapist, a student of Tibetan Buddhism who was just terrific. I had come to her with a Thich Nhat Hanh quote about selflessness. I was struggling with self protection and compassionate action. She said there is no prize for becoming a "spiritual doormat."
I also struggle with people in my life who I love but don't understand me. I have been called selfish, which is so hurtful. My therapist asked, "What is so wrong about being concerned with yourself?" Is it better to sacrifice yourself, live for someone else, or receive your fulfillment only through the other? If I am not fully committed to myself and self realization, how can I be of service of others?
Another teacher Roshi Joan Halifax from Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, recently wrote a book called "Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet."
She describes edge states where we are in transition and at that moment where you are looking into the abyss before the leap is where the transformation lives. Without being too much of a daredevil or risking my safety, I try to live this way, finding the dynamic edge where thrill and living resides.
I try to live my life in a way that I can look back at the end without regret. "The funny thing about regret is that it's better to regret something that you have done than something that you haven't done." is that start to one of my favorite punk rock songs it is a version of an old Irish adage.
"I have done the things I should not have done,
I have left undone the things I should have done,
and there is no good in me."
