So very often I get asked about my story as an artist.  Have I always been an artist?  Have I spent a lifetime drawing and painting?  What motivated me to pursue a fine art education and become a painter?  When and how did I know?

There's a part of me that feels that sharing the story is meaningless (or self-centered) drivel (alas I have Midwestern sensibilities) and another part that is motivated to share it.  One thing that I've learned as an artist and a writer is that you put your best artistic self forward when you make yourself vulnerable, so I'm going to share the story.  

I have always known, intellectually, that I was an artist from the youngest age, but I have spent a relatively small portion of my life as an active, practicing artist.  I drew a lot as a young kid and showed some promise.  My mother recognized this in me and found private lessons for me in the home of an art teacher somewhere around the age of 10.  Her name was Mrs. Jones and she was about 75.  Her primary medium was watercolor and so I spent a great deal of time learning how to wash colors over watercolor paper mounted on a board.  With watercolor, it's often best to let it flow and run and I remember with great satisfaction my time spent with her and there are still several watercolor paintings in my collection from that time.

At 12 or 13, I had another instructor, Mrs. Weber, who was a very skilled illustrator and oil painter.  So I spent a lot of time after school in the afternoons drawing and painting with her.  Some of my old oil paintings, including ones of Split Rock Lighthouse and my grandparents' dairy farm come from that time.

But the biggest influence, by far, was the mentorship I received from my high school teacher, Ms. Skutchan.  She did some fine art but her primary business was commercial graphic design.  What made her influence so profound though was her understanding and belief in me.  At that age and even now, I always felt like I was different, thought very differently from others and simply didn't fit in.  But she saw a part of me that others didn't and I received the strongest validation from her.  Because of her, my artwork was put in local shows and competitions and I even was making money on the side doing some graphic design for a local print company (mostly logo design and new business identities).  She strongly encouraged me to attend art school.  When I graduated, she wrote me a three page letter expressing her deep faith in me, along with the gift of one of her drawings of the sea, which had a profound impact on me.

I applied to several schools, including MCAD (Minneapolis College of Art and Design), the Kansas City Art Institute and Parsons in New York.  To my great surprise, I was accepted into each one, including Parsons.  But I never went and only briefly visited the Kansas City Art Institute.  I had all these doubts in my head about the practicality of being an artist and, quite honestly, I had doubts about my own talent level.  There was no one in my family who had ever been a professional artist.  And I had not really established the independence of my own identity, thinking or motivations, so I enrolled, like many others, in the engineering college of our state university.

After earning my engineering degree, I became a consultant in Chicago, but my interest in art kept tapping me on the shoulder, trying to remind me of who I really was on the inside.  So I did so pro-bono advertising design work with a group of local advertising executives and I enrolled in the part-time fine arts program at the Art Institute of Chicago.  I only took three or four classes there, but I did meet this prolific fashion photographer there who had his studio close to my Chicago apartment.  I spent many afternoons and evenings there and was able to draw some of his models.  Those drawings were then stored in my leather portfolio and did not see the light of day for decades.

My more traditional, conventional life then took over.  I put my artistry aside for decades as we raised a family and I worked in my corporate career.  But with both of our boys, we would enroll them in art classes in our local community art center.  My corporate professional life was terribly dissatisfying much of the time, but it paid very well and we had two homes and kids to raise.  Meanwhile, the calling to pursue my artistry grew louder and louder in my own mind, to the point of almost deafening. 

Finally, I became so frustrated and felt so far astray from what I believed my own true self to be, that I grabbed my old portfolio of work and took it into the Edina Art Center to share with the director there.  He looked at my work and referred me to The Atelier Studio Program of Fine Art in Minneapolis.  Honestly, I had no idea that such schools existed or that there was a network of these schools around the world that focused solely on fine art training in the classical, realist traditions of Europe.   These schools were relatively affordable, taught by professional artists and its classes were attended by a wide range of people in various age groups and situations.

I met with the directors, Cyd and Dale,  who took a look at my portfolio that was already about thirty years old and they accepted me.  So, in 2016 I enrolled in an evening class and in 2017 I switched from their part-time program to the full-time program.  In the fall of 2019, I took early retirement from 3M and went to art school full-time.  The rest is history and I am now a graduate of that very fine program, to which I will forever be grateful. 

So I think the long and short of this is that over the course of several decades, I finally found my way back to a part of myself where there was a strong internal calling and identity.  I finally listened to that voice from deep inside me that whispered "Doug, you are an artist.  You need to become yourself."