My Artistic Resume...

I always kind of chuckle when I read over art competition prospectus and they want a complete artistic resume. This is when being self taught makes me wonder if I am at all at a disadvantage- you decide.

What I think they are looking for is a resume that isn't so much unlike the resume we use to get jobs. To be totally honest, I am not sure what they are looking for. I guess in my naivete they aren't just looking for beautiful or compelling art.

 Sure, the artists with long histories of lessons and education are I am sure to have preferential treatment than someone who is self taught.

So here is my REAL life artistic resume... for the whole world to see, am I ashamed? Of course not! Quite to the contrary, I am proud of the Artist I am today and I am confident in the artist I will become tomorrow.

I began drawing at age 2, or maybe younger, about the time I could hold a pen and scribble. I was a horse crazy kid, so my mother taught me to make stick horses. Well, that was all I needed. I began to draw stick horses daily, and stick people, then I noticed, horses weren't thin, they were quite thick, so I added a thick middle to the 'stick' horse. Then the heads began to look more like horses.

It went from there, my older sister was also very artistically talented and my mother gave me one of her old sketch books to look at and practice from. That proved to be a great teacher. In the first grade, I found a great book called 'Draw 50 Horses' I checked it out and kept it for months. I just kept checking it out again. The simple steps to drawing made it clearer to me how horses were put together and my drawings improved tremendously.

As my skills improved as a young horse artist, my mother was a stern and harsh critic- to my advantage, instead of taking my drawings and pasting them on the fridge as 'cute', she would point out that a horse's hoof isn't shaped this way, and his leg, shouldn't bend that way, and if he were standing, his front legs would be too small. She delivered it with a dose of dry humor that always left me laughing and heading back to the kitchen table for more.

I thank her every day for her comments, because they made me continue to grow as an artist.

In 2005, I took a couple of oil painting lessons from an older lady that was local. I learned about the magic of Liquin as an oil medium, but I couldn't afford the lessons and I basically went back to my kitchen table.

So that is it folks, 24+ years of sitting at a kitchen table, and now in the last year or so, at my own easel. I don't have a fancy education, I don't even know that much about art. I don't have fancy terms for the paintings I do, or names for the techniques I use. I just paint. I know what I like, I know what I want to create.

I don't have a clue what composition style is what, who is a famous artist now or when... I have no idea about a lot of art related things.

What I do know is that I have stacks of art instructional books that help me when I am stuck. Do I pour over them and read every little page? No, I don't. You know where I buy most of them? At thrift stores and yard sales, bargain tables at the book stores and sometimes online.

Often I just skim the pages, read the subtext and look at the progress photos, if I need more than that, then I read. So my artistic education has been for the most part free, or 1.50 in thrift store book prices.