People ask how I found time to become an artist while raising two children. The honest answer is that I did not find it — I stole it. An hour here while the house slept, twenty minutes there between one duty and the next. My practice was not built in long, luxurious studio days. It was built in instalments.
There is a discipline that only scarcity can teach. When you have all day, you can afford to warm up for three hours and produce nothing. When you have ninety minutes before someone needs you, you arrive at the easel already decided. Stolen hours made me decisive — about subject, about palette, about when a painting was finished.
The first critics
My children were, and remain, my first critics — and children are beautifully honest critics. A young one does not care about your technique; she will tell you the horse looks sad, or that the blue is the wrong blue. They were also the first audience to understand what I was doing before I fully did: making something out of nothing, in the middle of an ordinary life.
Constraint did not shrink my work. It concentrated it.
I will not pretend it was graceful. There were dried-up palettes, abandoned sketches, whole seasons where the only art I made was for the children. But the thread never fully broke. A sketchbook page in a waiting room. A study of a sleeping hand. The practice survived because it learned to live small — and anything that can live small can survive almost anything.
To anyone making art in the margins of a busy life: the margins count. A body of work is only a long sum of small, stolen hours that refused to add up to zero.
