We were lucky to catch up with Elizabeth Howe recently and have shared our conversation below.
Elizabeth, appreciate you joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?
Okay I’ll set the stage for you. In the late 1960’s my family moved from a suburb just outside Cincinnati, to Jackson, Michigan, pretty much in the city. We lived in a townhouse development with lots of friends. I loved the simplicity of the place and it had what I thought were super cool white metal cabinets. The playground of the neighborhood school was right across the dead-end street in front of our house where everyone parked. I was almost 7. We often played on the playground, or in the street. One day a young woman approached me on the playground and told me she was an artist that she drew pictures and painted and asked me if she could draw my picture. (For the record my Mom was there and gave her permission) She told me I could keep the picture if I liked it when she was done. This right away made me agree, because our family was large and having something no one else did sounded great to me. I remember though when she handed me that painting, it was like my eyes opened. I felt seen and special. I saw myself in a way that I didn’t in the mirror. I wanted to be like her. I never saw her again, and I don’t know if she became an artist or not. But how that simple drawing made me feel, I wanted to feel again and I wanted others to feel it. At some point in the short time we lived there I started making paper dolls out of cardboard and selling them to my friends for a penny or a nickel. I’m not sure what made me think that selling art was a thing, whether it was something the young woman said to me, or maybe my Mom did. Today I still have one of those paper dolls, she came back to me after my Grandma passed. She was a great collector of my art some of which I still use today when teaching art as examples of how we all start somewhere.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I got into the industry officially in the mid 1980’s hand painting bedspreads for a Cuban Design Company out of Miami Florida that had just been purchased by a bedding manufacturer in Fort Lauderdale where I had transplanted myself after college. The Design Company was expanding and they mostly wanted to hire artist with fine art degrees, but agreed to let me paint a sample. I matched the sample and got the job.
Growing up in the 1960’s and constantly interested in making art, I had all the classic, crayons, drawing and oil paint sets with tutorial books, and paint by numbers but no formal lessons. I just kept making art. I have a lot of art that I did as a kid, thanks to my best collectors Mom, Dad and the Grandmas. One of my favorites is of a couple crows in a tree near a fence that I apparently did in 10 minutes as my Mom made a point of making a note of it on the drawing. Another favorite is a drawing of me on a horse, it’s little note said “ Yet another of Elizabeth’s drawings”.
Fast forward I did a few commissioned painting of peoples camps as a teenager and toured some art schools. But practicality took over. Not that I couldn’t pursue art if I wanted, Ironically the folks were all for it, but my best friend and chance for rides to and from school was going to a university with no fine art at the time. Graphic Art was available, but it was the early 80’s and computers were just becoming a thing and I saw the industry would change so much that I didn’t think it was the right fit. I pursued a degree in Advertising and Marketing and took art classes as electives so I could get commissions painted. I loved to paint and was getting pretty good, if you told me what to paint, but struggled with a blank canvas.
This was a pivotal thing for me and set the stage for my life’s work. I moved on from painting bedspreads to painting fabric, faux finishes and silk paintings for another design company in the area. The lack of a fine art degree held me back at both companies. It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work, but the assumption was that I didn’t have the abilities without the degree so I wasn’t given the same opportunities.
Art is the only thing that people think you are either talented at or not capable of doing. You would never say that about music, carpentry, sports or any other thing. If you show interest, someone says hey! let’s teach you the tools, how to use them and then you’ll need to practice and get good over time. I suppose that is a good argument for going to fine art school, but is it the only way to do the journey. I started to look at artist that had creative expression pouring out of them, producing amazing work without already having a formal education in art. Perhaps they are the “talented ones” but was it they were gifted, or driven to not stop doing art.
I started to understand that indeed driven to continue creating was the key and the rest could be learned whether in a fine art program or not.
I was greatly mentored during my time as a studio artist and became determined to continue learning and teaching others that they could too. I also learned some of us have it pouring out of us, and some of us need to learn some tools and that the more tools we learn the more creative expression happens without trying to conjure it up.
I branch out on my own and started painting murals indoors, the sides of buildings, ceilings, It was great fun! This led to my interest in big art which is a completely different story that played out in the kid classes I did while running the art program at our local YMCA and a couple of large art installations I did later in local parks.
By the early 1990’s my husband and I had started a family and decided to homeschool our two girls. I of course being an artist was always sought after as one friend said “You’re an artist you can teach my kids art”. That simple statement was when the pivotal point made the turn. The bridging in my personal journey of the “I can do art but struggle with a blank canvas” to my full ability to look at a blank canvas and create. I began to teach what I most needed to learn. I started where my kids were, preschool and lower elementary art skills and worked my way up. I created curriculum as I went. 30 years later I’ve taught all ages from 18 months to 90 year old’s. Starting with the basic, and watching lives transform. Mine being one of them. I taught at my dining room table, homeschool co-ops, ran the art program at our local YMCA , gave workshops for parents, did painting parties and private lessons. In the beginning during the 1990’s a weird thing started happening in the “art community” We were not supposed to interrupt a child’s enate ability to create by teaching them anything, we were just supposed to just give them materials and allow creative expression. I found this worked good for 5 year old’s but around 6 or 7 create kids craved knowing more they became aware that their drawings could be better . Of course because of the weird thing with art that your either talented and can do art or shouldn’t try, kids felt they weren’t talented. I have even heard many times well-meaning parents explain “Well… I guess you’re like me, just not talented ”
In my usual what most people are doing I run the opposite way mentality, I doubled down and began teaching even the 3 to 4 year old’s the lines of drawing, color theory and we used real art tools not the usual ones designed for kids. Art is a journey. Begin it early! I have countless stories of changed mindset, confidence built, deductive reasoning, creative problem solving, project and time management, styles developed and beautiful work with this approach.
Though currently I am focusing on my paintings and am not holding ongoing kid art classes, I still do special events and private lessons. I consult with creatives and parents of creatives to help them understand the process, organize their materials and workspaces. I have found I am particularly good with tuning in on where someone is in their creative journey and supporting their process.
My learning journey continues as well as I continue to take master classes and workshops. Honing in on what I want to express and having a great time painting. I enjoy having collectors and creatives come to my studio and gallery in my home where we can hang and share our journeys. I continue to seek new galleries that would be a good fit for my work and creating commissioned pieces for collectors.
Art is a special thing. The experience is completely different for the artist than it is for the collector. The artist looks at each piece as an experience. The creativity in each stroke is a physical thing that happens to the artist. They need to experiment and sometimes change styles, colors or genre. The collector gets a sense of that experience in the finished piece, but for the collector it is the way that the colors, strokes or composition speak to them, the way the piece feels to them, the way it feels like home and they have to have it. It is why artist are the best collectors, they understand they are looking at it from the outside in instead of the other way around. Does that makes sense.
The art is this beautiful thing that is wonderfully stuck in the middle of the expression and the impression.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
What I think non-creatives will struggle to understand about my journey is how the creative process works. It can look chaotic it doesn’t have a direct system the way other academic pursuits do. It stems back to the idea that Artist are either talented or not, that they don’t have to learn it or its just something they do for fun. We need to understand it’s a process and a journey and the journey is more important than the outcome. This is completely opposite of math where the outcome is more important. Though some schools have fabulous art programs and instructors that understand the individual journey, our systems of education have often kept art at bay, as not an essential, using it as a filler to appease the people who can’t sit still or aren’t maybe good at math. I would love the opportunity to have art taught in school as a regular program of development the same as math. I think you would find that the people that love math would be incredibly challenged by the creative problems solving and deductive reasoning it takes to work out or problem solve a piece of artwork just as creative often are with math.
I would also encourage non creatives that our creative journey is essential for who we are as people it is like breathing to us. If we have to put it aside for a while we always plan on picking it up again. If something happens and we can no longer creative the thing we were doing we will find something else creative to do.
Everyone’s journey is different and if it seems like we squirrel and get sidetracked it is part of something we need to learn for the next part of our journey.
Lack of focus can often be associated with lack of intelligence or caring, but it isn’t. We need to daydream. I often assigned daydreaming as homework and had to walk through the process with several parents over the years, thinking that daydreaming is wasting the kids time and parents money. That if the kid didn’t come home with something pretty to put on the refrigerator every week I wasn’t teaching them enough. I purposely did projects that took more than one week to do. The kids needed to know that they need to work at design and development, and parents needed to know it’s a process and there is a lot more involved in creating. Day dreaming or sitting and observing life rather than always needing to be doing something is part of the creative process and it can be frustrating to a creative when they are constantly encouraged to be participating in an activity rather than just observing it. It is a tricky balance and it looks different for everyone. Creatives approach life very differently but often find themselves having to adapt to function in a non-creative atmosphere rather than the other way around. I often find that having similar conversations with creatives help them understand why they can feel disconnected from either the world around them or themselves.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
In our increasingly visual world I feel like society can best support creatives by recognizing that there is a living and breathing creative ecosystem already in place and that it is a completely different way of looking at the world. We just hover inside the norms of society. We need to let go of our prejudices that art isn’t education or a good way to make a living. Our world is still in need of creators inventors and people who think of things differently. This is why the under development of the daydreaming mind or seeing things in the mind’s eye could be problematic in the future
We have taken whole generations of kids and given them so much visual stimulation that it can fill the creative need in many and we aren’t developing the number of potential creatives we will need in the future. I believe we need not fill every moment of the day especially in kids, but get physically outside, and off screens.
We have begun to understand that not everyone thrives in the same working environment. Employers need to understand that creatives use a thinking approach and it may seem they are distracted or not working but if we solve it in our heads first the outcome to a project is often faster and more efficient.
I think a lot of people are tapping into their creative sides and as they do it will be more normal to society as a whole.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.artatmydiningroomtable.com
- Instagram: @eliz.howe11
- Facebook: eliz.howe11
- Youtube: elizabethhowe studios
- Other: [email protected] – as my studio email.
Image Credits
Robert S Howe Chyann Hall