Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d become a professional artist, at least not beyond youthful fantasies of what we want to be when we grow up. Certainly, it took me many years to come to the conclusion that I’d reached that status. However, I came to the realization only yesterday that that’s absolutely what I am.

Many years ago now, when there was first interest from people in purchasing my artwork, I looked up how to figure out pricing, because it seemed rather subjective. The best advice I found, particularly for paintings, was to figure out a specific rate per square inch. That was great, because it was objective and calculable. I read that professional artist rates range from 50 cents to 1 dollar per square inch, or more. Well, I said to myself, I’m not a professional artist, so my rate should absolutely be less than that! I started out with a rate of 25 cents per square inch for finished pieces to sell, or 27 cents if anyone sought out custom commissions. In hindsight, I was struggling mightily with Impostor Syndrome and may have been shortchanging myself, but it felt like the right approach at the time. In my early twenties, I also did some clay work that I sold, and that was more difficult to price out, but there was some decent success with that too for awhile before I rather lost interest in the medium. After a few years of offering works for sale and taking on commissions, I upped my rate to 30 cents per square inch; this was still certainly not at a professional level, but a little more than when I’d started. During COVID, I volunteered to teach virtual painting classes to members of my synagogue. I figured out logistically how to run two cameras at once in Zoom meetings so that participants could both see me speaking and a bird’s eye view of me painting. It was overall quite a successful endeavor and one I’d love to do again.

Then I began to work as an art teacher, first teaching art classes at my local Jewish community’s education program for high school students, and then later on as the art teacher at the local Jewish private elementary school where I was already a general studies teacher (yes, I now do both, and yes, it’s a lot of work, but it’s amazing). Inevitably, over time, this drew more attention to both my skill set and my own personal work, and I started getting contacted to showcase my art in community events. I was then pegged last year to facilitate and execute a huge community art project using ceramic butterflies to commemorate children who were killed in the Holocaust.

It’s hard to pinpoint any single event or moment that precipitated this shift into having a reputation where I became known as an artist available for such work and opportunities. What I can pinpoint are the four recent events in the last year which led me to recognize that this shift has occurred.

1. This fall, I was hired as my Sunday school’s art teacher, in addition to my seventh grade teacher position there, and in addition to my art teacher/classroom teacher roles in my full-time job during the week.
2. Last October, I was contacted to ask if I would be interested in contributing some of my artwork to showcase in a memorial event for anniversary of the attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. Following the success of that event, I was then asked to showcase some of my artwork during our Yom Haatzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) festival which took place last week. I’ve already been asked to be a vendor at next year’s festival to sell my artwork, not just showcase it. (I need to build up my inventory!)
3. My rabbi commissioned me to craft a design on a quilt square for our congregational quilt. After being dogged to get it done for months, someone finally suggested to him that he call me to ask me to help him with it. He told me what he had in mind and I drew it for him and returned the finished piece to him with a quick turnaround, and both he and the ladies in charge of the quilt were over the moon about it.
4. Following many months of painstakingly hard work, the ceramic butterfly project installation had its official dedication ceremony yesterday afternoon. I gave a speech and was introduced as a talented local artist who conducted the project.

There’s certainly no such thing as overnight success. This transformation into a “professional level” artist was definitely gradual. It took many little pieces of this puzzle that led to me realizing first that I could do it, and then that I was doing it. And it happened almost without my noticing. The dedication event yesterday gave me an opportunity to look back and consider how I found myself here, and it’s a meandering path of baby steps, each one crucial to the formation of the one following it.

To be frank, I do find it remarkable that I’m a professional artist, considering that at age 11, all artistic output from me ceased for at least a decade. My parents’ split threw impassable brick walls around my creativity with visual arts and I didn’t rediscover that passion again until I was in graduate school over ten years later. I wrote creatively, but I didn’t touch a paintbrush or even so much as a crayon for an exceedingly long time. Art is very important to me, because it helps me remember who I am.

It sounds dramatic to say that the trauma I endured stifled, silenced, and even buried my creative expression, but that doesn’t make it untrue. In the end, it really is no small thing, the circumstances in which I find myself identifying as a professional artist. No small thing.