What Makes Me An Artist???

As I'm finishing up my thesis and wrapping up this quarter before graduation I starting doubting myself. I know, crazy, isn't it. I've spent the past 3 years learning who I am as an artist and in one evening started to forget. I started wondering if I wasn't fitting into the stereotype of being an artist. I don't have a BFA or MFA, I've never sold a piece, I've never applied for a grant, never been shown in a gallery outside school. I have a full time job completely opposite of being an artist, I'm an administrator for a behaviorist consulting group.

So what makes me an artist? I whipped out this piece of raw, ungessoed canvas, cut it into an organic shape and wrote my answers all over it with marker.

This is what makes me an artist:

• I'm not afraid to take up space and get really really BIG!
• I own my mistakes and see the beauty and lessons in them
• I express myself through my art
• Art is my way of healing
• I think outside the box...and around the box, in the box, on the box, with the box, without the box, deconstruct the box.
• I LOVE ART
• I want to Explore, Dream, Discover
• I never stop wanting to learn...about the world, about people, about myself
• I am part of a community
• I AM MYSELF. Everyone else is already taken.
• It's the time in my life, art making that is, when I feel the alive. The opposite of out-of-body experience. It is a deeply felt inner body experience.

What I realized after making this piece was that I am an artist based on my own definition. I'm an artist because every morning I wake up and want to make art. That above anything else, makes me an artist. I came to JFK to study Transformative Arts to discover myself as an artist, to claim her, to be her. I have done that. There is no reason to doubt myself anymore.

I AM AN ARTIST!!!