Hi there. I'm Josie!
First things first... Here's a little "bullet bio:"
- I'm an artist, and I have just recently decided to sell my art.
- I'm 29 (as of April 2015).
- I have one daughter, one husband, one dog, and two cats.
- I live in the Portland, OR metro area.
- I'm impulsive and constantly changing my mind, but the one thing I have always loved is creating art.
- I mainly do landscapes - my style is a combination of realism and impressionism. I also do some abstract painting.
- I love puns and just can't help myself.
- In my free time, I'm most likely reading a novel or playing a video game. I read a lot of young adult fantasy/science fiction, but I will give any genre a try if the writing is good. My favorite game series include The Legend of Zelda, Harvest Moon, and The Sims.
- I am a part-time caregiver (strictly non-medical).
- I have my esthetics (skin care) license, so I do makeup, waxing, and facials on the side.
- My educational background includes English literature, writing, and of course art.
- I love animals and am in the process of registering with my dog as a therapy pet & handler team.
- I've been a perfectionist with OCD tendencies my whole life, but motherhood and impending middle age are forcing me to mellow out. At least somewhat.
So there. This blog is mostly going to be about art (which, I realize, is a very wide topic), so I'll elaborate on my artistic side. I work in a lot of mediums - acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, graphite, charcoal, ink, calligraphy, etc. I have tried almost everything and I'm pretty confident in my skill and talent. And by that I mean I stick with what I'm good at and keep the failures to myself.
One of my long-term goals is to be successful enough to create and sell art as a full time career. Another is to get back into stained glass. It's an expensive medium and I'll need enough overhead to rent or own a studio separate from my house. It's really not a good idea to have glass and lead all over when you have a three year old, dog, and cats running around. I mean, I don't know from experience, but it's a safe guess.
As for the name of my... errr... company? Business? Whatever. "Nowhere Tree Studios." I had a huge list of ideas and possible names, but I kept coming back to this one. For one thing, I'm most often inspired by trees. My freehand doodles usually turn into trees or other plants, and almost all of my landscapes feature trees. When I think of places I've lived or particularly loved, the trees are the biggest part of the memory - how they smelled, what the leaves sounded like in the wind, the texture of the bark, where they stood relative to the house or places I played. One of my favorite things was to use sidewalk chalk to trace the shadows on the pavement, and watch how they changed at different parts of the day.
The "nowhere" can mean a lot of things... Three enormous birch trees surrounded the house I grew up in. But they were all susceptible to disease, and eventually each one had to be cut down. So now they are nowhere - only in pictures and memories. I also love being in the "middle of nowhere." It's a great big feeling that I have trouble putting into words... The seclusion, the space and time to just THINK without distractions... It's wonderful.
So, as I said before, art is a very wide topic. I might post some inspiring pictures, random doodles of my own, talk about a favorite artist or write about art history - anything goes. I live in Portland, and there's a lot of "unexpected art" around here. I went for a walk through an old neighborhood yesterday and found random glass mosaic tiles in the sidewalk. Things like that make me smile.
Thanks for reading and I hope I'm interesting enough to earn your attention!
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