We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Janice Yow Hindes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Janice Yow below.
Alright, Janice Yow thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career
Public Education is in crisis. So many changes are needed. Art is part of everything we see. The other part is science. Nothing we have is not touched by art, yet we do not teach it with proper importance in our schools. An architect designs buildings, and carpenters, tools, and machines build them. An automotive designer plans our cars, and men and machines build them. Art is where imagination and problem-solving are presented at a high level for students, but our schools often see art only as wall decoration. Art is the creative process of our brains. Einstein tells us that genius has limitations while imagination has none. Serious, thoughtful, challenging art classes are desperately needed in public schools along with a million other changes. Public education is one of the main factors that made America this great nation. We are rapidly dismantling the foundation of our strength.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
A Super Mom who saved my childhood drawings until she had the opportunity to give me art lessons after my two children were born is the reason I became an artist. It took her that long to find a way in the art void where we lived. Mom was a bulldog with an angel heart. Representational art is what I like. There were no ateliers, or universities in my area teaching that discipline in the 1970’s. It took years, miles, and lots of trial and error dollars to cobble together the art education I wanted. Luckily, I found some of the greatest minds in the art world willing to share their knowledge; unluckily, women had a real bug-tussle competing with men in the art world at that time. I signed my first paintings, J. Hindes. That way patrons and judges did not know which gender painted the artwork. Later, I got braver and just put it out there.
I was not the only one in my area hungry for art training. Three years after I opened my studio in the big city of Hindes, Texas, population 13, I had 125 students with a wait list nearly that long. I barely knew how to hold a brush, but they did not care. People were so eager to create they would let a novice could lead them, and they paid!
Growing up on a farm with no boys in the family had me working in the fields early and doing heavy manual labor. I suspect a work ethic is the foundation of most success stories, and I will always be grateful to my dad for not only teaching me how to work, but why. With a young family I managed on three days to teach 9 three-hour classes and all day workshops on Saturday in different cities. It didn’t seems like much compared to hand moving irrigation pipes through muddy fields. Ok, that’s my walking to school uphill in the snow story.
One day I calculated the profit on being an artist. After all expenses are subtracted, I discovered that I was making between 10 and 25 cents on the dollar. If I sold a painting for $1,000, I received $100 to $250. So when I opened Hindes Fine Art gallery in San Antonio in 2017, I knew how difficult it is to make a living in art. I offered artists 75 percent of the sale price, and amazingly, a lot of great artists were willing to take a chance on an upstart. At our grand re-opening this November (closed a covid a while), we have several of the best artists in the United Sates. No brag, just fact. Check the bios of our artists for yourself. I have problems, but fabrication of facts is not one of them. I am really proud that great artists trust me, that the gallery is lovely, and that San Antonio has a significant gallery on its way to become notable. If you like representational art, Hindes Fine Art is where you need to visit.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Art was my life’s work until one day it wasn’t. Mother died of a massive heart attack, I was having chest pains, and we had moved many times from one insurance company to another. I couldn’t see losing a fourth-generation ranch to medical bills, so I began looking for employment that did not require a pre-physical. The Dominguez State Jail needed education teachers so badly they were offering health insurance for life if you worked just 5 years. I thought I could do anything for 5 years, so I signed up. Problem: after my 4th year, the time required moved to 10 years. In my 9th year, it moved to Medicare. So I just decided to work a few more and take a small retirement. That plus my years of self-employed social security would make a reasonable retirement. But the grand state of Texas said I was double dipping and allowed only 33% of my social to be paid. Double Dipping? That was my money Texas invested for my retirement because they didn’t trust me to do it. Social Security and Public Education are my main soapboxes. After 13 years in prison, I escaped back to art, and found that returning to painting was not like getting back on a bicycle. It has been a hard road back, really, really hard. But what’s worth having is not difficult?
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I admire hard work because really we are only responsible for our choices, attitudes, and efforts. The rest is merely happenstance. That’s why I asked Andrea Wollenzin to be my partner this year. She was my art student, so I knew she had talent and drive, but my respect deepened when I saw her struggle and survive being a single mother with a special needs child. She had dropped out of college and passed her real estate license. In seven years, she went from scraping by to being a member of the Jason Glass Group of realtors at Phyllis Browning. She works hard and treats people with respect. The fact that she is young, pretty, and knows social media had nothing to do with why I asked her to be my partner.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hindes.com
- Instagram: janice_hindes @hindesfineart @andywolly
- Facebook: Hindes Fine Art Janice Yow Hindes
Image Credits
HINDES FINE ART