About me, or Contact me
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Email: Proxartist@proxartist.com
Phone: 1-440-725-4645
About me:
I was an imaginative child that grew up in a gated apartment complex. I didn’t grow up in a idyllic pastoral setting. It was Suburbia. At home, I played out side on sidewalks and rain puddles. I made fortresses with the giant snow piles the plows pushed by the big trash bins. I spent a lot of time playing on my own in my always messy room. There weren’t many other children my age where I lived, and I had no siblings, so I spent a lot of my home life on my own, and in my own imaginative world.
My mom was a hard working single parent so I spent most of my childhood at daycare. I was not a stay at home alone kid like most of my generation. Daycare was an interesting place. Stable enough. Kids came and went. So did the caregivers. Part of the property was a sprawling piece of old farmland, and a forest area with part of the Chagrin river flowing through it. This is my fondest memory of that whole experience. We spent a lot of our summer days eating honeysuckle nectar, picking wild berries, playing in leaves until my eyes were swollen shut from my allergies. We went on river walks, explored the woods, I made mud potions, you know, the regular normal kid stuff I couldn’t really do at home.
As I grew older I leaned heavily on the arts to keep me occupied. I guess I understood I had a talent for it, but I didn’t really think I could actually DO anything with it other then keep my hands busy when I was bored. I was an average school student. Mostly, all aspects of school bored me to death. I did the minimum to pass most subjects, and the social hierarchy nonsense was a mystery to me.
Then I graduated, and was free-er. I ended up going to a local community college and started to get a generic degree in “whatever”. Of course all my electives were art courses. Drawing, painting, sculpting, ceramics, metals, enameling, all of them. Up until this point I had only known art as a thing to do when you were bored. I had no idea this was something you could learn in a formal setting. After three years of this I had exhausted all the art electives, and I started taking courses as independent studies, or just took them for no credits at all. At this point I was encouraged to apply to an Art school. I could finish out my degree there, and go further than I could at a community college. I had fought this direction for my whole life I think. Who goes to art school?! And why?! It seemed frivolous, and ridiculous in so many ways. I wasn’t wealthy. I didn’t really have the means to make this choice, but I went for it. Applied, skipped a year of the program (I could have skipped 2 but chickened out). And poof. I was in art school. Holy crap what an interesting place. A bubble. A place filled with creatives. A plethora of art related course materials to study. I ate it all up. This was probably the only school experience I excelled in, in my entire life. Of course I have had to take on the burden of immense school loans for it. I question my direction sometimes, but i think for me, it was the right path. It made me a hard worker, it made my shell harder, it developed my aesthetic. Not everyone needs this experience, but I wouldn’t be the “me” I am without it.
Of course my aesthetic didn’t just grow in a school setting. I have been filling sketchbooks with drawing, painting, and mostly doodling for as long as I can remember. I think it started in Geometry class. I filled all those graph paper squares with circles, then the circles became other shapes, then it just exploded into free form colorful craziness. I would doodle in all my classes. I would doodle at home. I would go out a lot and doodle in coffee shops, listening to coffee shop musicians. Then I doodled in bars, listening to bar musicians. (its amazing I didn’t mess up my vision doing that. Bars have zero lighting) All this doodling developed my art “Style”. It is my foundation.
Anyways, after art school what do you do? I plunged right into outdoor art shows, put my stuff in galleries, and submitted my work to exhibitions. All good ones. I got into a lot of the places I submitted to, won awards, and people loved what I was doing...but I couldn’t make a living doing that. Nothing actually sold. What I made back then was so arty, and out there. You can't pay bills with awards. I trudged through this for a few years, and got married along the way. In 2008 I had my first baby (Isaac) and I lost all interest in what I saw was a waste of my time. I quit making, focused on my new role as a mom and was so fulfilled doing that I didn’t need to make things. I got a few different retail jobs to pay those pesky school loans. Then I had my second baby (Noah) in 2010. Still wasn’t making. Still working random jobs.
In about 2013, when Noah was three. I got the itch to make again. I knew at this point I had to change my direction. Re-invent what I make, and maybe why. I had purged a lot of the art school stuff at this point. While it was an important step in my creative learning process it is also incredibly stifling, and geared towards an “ART career”. Which is not what my purpose is. I want to create unique , beautiful things, that are still true to my design aesthetic. I want them to be accessible to all. I want them to be understood by most and many, not just a select few. I want to offer objects of beauty to the world. I hope that they are treasured. I hope that they are Objects that have meaning to the wearer, and are Objects that bring joy.
So, here we are now in 2024. I now have three amazing children. I’m a hardworking mom and running this one woman business I started about 7 years ago. I quit all my part time jobs, and I’m still paying those student loans off. I put my new direction of work out there, and I think its been accepted. I"ve shared my process across many social media platforms, and I’ve gathered together my people. The ones that get me.
Welcome, and Thank you for all your support over these years.
