I learned how to write, produce, and share music by working with my paintings.
I can’t tell you how many people in my life have asked me “if you could pick one thing, what would you do?”
And though I don’t answer this bluntly in person, what I want to say is — why would I EVER have to pick one? Why?
Where did this idea come from that we must “pick” something?
I did not choose songwriting.
The songs come to me. I can’t help it.
I can’t turn it off, even when I TRY.
There were years of my life when I would pray for God to take the music out of my head because I didn’t see how I would ever be able to write or experience that side of me. Because everything in my then-current “reality” was forcing me to -choose- one thing.
Painting is a seemingly separate part of me.
I don’t “see” paintings in my head when I start to work on them. All I know is that I have this “feeling” that I want to paint. And I paint.
It is the easiest and most natural expression available to me (aside from music and writing).
For me to choose one or the other would be to suppress and deny the most natural parts of me that want to be seen and expressed.
The difference has always been the availability, the acceptance, the encouragement, the support, the means.
I didn’t always have the means to produce music, but I’ve always had the means to paint.
Painting is relatively inexpensive (but like all art, can become a high expense the farther you go — with higher quality materials and larger surfaces comes a price).
But with music — instruments aren’t cheap. Music software isn’t cheap.
And when I got started producing music, we didn’t have all the loops and apps and buttons to push that exist now. Or at least, not to my knowledge.
But even if I did have those things way back then, I wouldn’t have learned the extremely valuable skills I have now.
My goal as a songwriter was never to “create a hit track”, to follow trends in the music industry, or to “make it big.”
My goal was to learn how to accurately capture the fully produced versions of the songs I hear that stream through my head and how to hold them intact throughout the entire songwriting and production process.
That has been my biggest challenge as a songwriter.
If you’ve ever had the experience where you have tried to paint or draw something and it “doesn’t look how you saw it in your head” — apply this to music.
When a song comes to me, I hear it. I hear it just as you can turn on the radio and hear a fully produced song.
So no, just laying down some chords on a piano was never enough for me (though deeply satisfying in other ways).
I wanted to know how to make it sound the same as what I can hear in my mind.
And I wanted to do it myself.
This has been happening since I was in high school — 13 years ago.
13 years, 2 laptops, 2 keyboards, 2 hard drives, 2 monitors, 3 microphones, 3 music softwares, and countless hours later — I am now at a place where when the song hits me, I can sit down with my keyboard and laptop and in 30 minutes, have the fully produced version exportable and on my phone so I can listen to it whenever I want.
No loops, no pre-loaded beats, no samples.
Every sound of the song is created by hand, by voice, by me.
This was my goal as a songwriter.
And I am here.
So how did I learn this from painting?
There were several years in that time span that I was either deeply depressed or trying really hard to “choose one thing” — so I poured that energy into my paintings and turned my back almost completely on my music (on the surface).
Art actually isn’t that different in practice from what you might experience in the music industry.
There are many voices in the world who preach color theory, best practices, design, blah blah blah…
Getting it exactly right or “creating amazing art” was never my goal.
I just loved to paint. Anything.
Chairs, canvases, clothes, DIY projects, walls.
I didn’t care, as long as it I was painting.
But in so many seasons of life, I was encouraged in one way or another to “sell” these paintings.
At one point I decided I wanted to become a full-time artist because I love to create so much, that’s the only thing I wanted to do. I have a very long list of visions and projects I want to pursue in my lifetime, and there’s no job in the world that lures me in more than my own work that wants to be created. So I felt that the only way I’d be able to do the projects I wanted to do all the time was if I became a “full-time artist.”
So I went on a deep dive internet rabbit hole Google search exploration — “how to become a full-time artist.”
Guess what I found.
A lot of rules, best practices, shoulds…
See what’s trending, sell on Etsy, cater to holidays, have regular sales, think about what people like to buy, start a blog, create a content calendar, identify your target client/audience, go to art festivals…
NOWHERE did I find a single voice that said, “Find what you love and get really good at it.”
So I did all the things.
I started blogs, created an Etsy, created holiday art and sales…
And what I realized was how deeply unsatisfying and awful that all felt.
So I stopped.
Then randomly (or was it) one night years into this journey, when I was up late nursing tiny baby Emerson, I stumbled across an artist on Instagram who created an online program called “Brave Intuitive Art” where she created videos of her painting process from start to finish — but instead of her talking about “how” she was doing what she was doing, she talked about what she was thinking and feeling.
Why she picked the colors she did, why she made the marks she made.
And it had nothing to do with “rules” or “best practices” but how she felt.
Moment to moment.
I had to try it.
So I made a commitment to myself that for an entire year, I would not accept any commissions or projects from anyone else, I wouldn’t follow a schedule or content plan.
I was going to try to paint “intuitively” and just post whatever I felt like posting about my progress on Instagram.
Over that year, my entire life changed.
Not only did I unlock this artist within me who was dying to come out, but I also learned how to tune in and listen to the voices deep inside of me — the ones who were there all along.
I learned how to trust myself.
I learned how to stop listening to what everything outside of me said to do and tune into what my gut was saying.
And it was so exhilarating and rewarding that I decided I wanted to pattern my entire life around what I’d discovered.
I asked the question — what if I tune into this internal voice when I’m not painting? What if I apply this to everything?
What if the same process that informs the colors I choose and the marks I make is the same process I should apply to the sounds of the music I make, the places I travel to, the foods I eat, the people I surround myself with… what if?
During that time, I did not sell a single painting (at first).
Nor was I trying to sell them.
But what I gained from that experience has shaped and evolved every part of who I am.
Slowly, since that year of 2017, my life has been shifting around me and through me.
I am not the person I used to be, because that person was a sum of years listening to voices outside of me telling me how to be and trying to fit myself into the expectations of others.
Who I am today is the result of letting go of all the voices to discover — who is the she within me?
And it is an ongoing process of curiosity, exploration, and discovery.
One that will not stop until my final breath.
Because to live and experience life through this lens is the greatest adventure of all.
I would choose it over and over compared to the box-shaped, cookie-cutter paths that were presented all around me and are all around us all the time at every turn.
Every season, I am surprised by what I find inside, waiting to come out.
And it’s not always art or music.
There are poems and words and stories and visions and experiences and events and ideas and…
Well, it never ends –
Because I am still alive.
And for as long as I’m living, this is how my soul wants to breathe.
If I become a “full time” artist in that process, amazing!
But it doesn’t even matter anymore because what I have found in this process is more valuable to me than anything else I have ever been taught…
It’s that in this process, I found me.
And I get to be her forever.
That is the highest reward.
I get to be her the artist and the songwriter but also her the mother and the friend. I get to be her as the neighbor and the coworker and all the other “roles” that want to play out in this life time.
And I will do them all with joy…
Because I get to do it all as me.
This is the purpose of my life.
To be me.
And knowing this, I have decided that I want to be me to the fullest.
Because I love her – why wouldn’t I want to be her fully?
Then the next questions came –
If all of this shifting and discovery was the result of “what happens if I view my whole life this way?” then…
What happens when I take everything I learned about myself through this process and be “her” on purpose?
What happens when I take everything I’ve learned and double down on what I am innately really good at instead of putting all my time and energy into things that I’m not into?
What happens when I stop trying to get better at things that are hard for me and capitalize on the most natural parts of my being?
What happens when I just ask the question, “what is the most ‘me’ in this?”
And through this exploration in answering these questions, BREATHING came to life.
BREATHING // A body of work. A story. A message. A sound. A journey. A truth. A knowing.