We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jeanne Oliver a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jeanne, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

As kid it was always inferred by the adults around me that people don’t make a living by following a creative passion. I think this may have been more prevalent in the small rural town where I grew up. With my heart wanting to pursue fashion design and with a portfolio full of drawings, I believed them and went on to pursue other majors in college. It would take many years for me to forgive myself for not believing more in me and following who I knew I truly was.

When I was a young stay at home mom I started to dabble in my creativity again. It started in simple ways and often as a way to reward myself at the end of the night when the kids were all in bed. Scrapbooking and then later altered composition notebooks, wooden letters and frames filled my evenings.

What started as a creative outlet in my day-to-day life became requests from friends to purchase for themselves or as a gift. These simple beginnings always remind me that there is incredible power in just showing up right where you are with what you have. The beginning led to local wholesale orders, then supplying to stores around the US and abroad, hiring local artisans to sew my designs and create soft goods, later using a manufacturer here in Denver and step after step to where we are now.

Where we are now 14 years later looks nothing like those beginning years but each step along the way prepared us for where we are now. I am a full-time artist, an author, podcast host, online art school creator with over 66,000 members, and a business consultant. I can’t wait to see what I am doing in ten years and how our work today prepares us for what is next.

And I am very proud that my husband and I support our whole family and collaborate with so many artists each year because we pursued a creative passion!

Jeanne, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

The heart behind our business is to create affordable and easily accessible online art courses so our customers can become the artists they dream to be. So often we make excuses why we are not living a more creative life and we want to help take those excuses away.

Connecting with our creativity is needed now more than ever! The world is loud and can be very distracting. We offer a space where people can learn new techniques, create just for the joy of it and reap the rewards of practice.

Whether you have always wanted to connect with your creativity or you have been creating your whole life…we have something for everyone. We believe creativity is always calling all of us and we just have to say yes!

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is that I get to be a beauty chaser. I am not just an artist but I get to live a life with the eyes of an artist. Pursing art has given us a life where the most important things are clear. I have learned how to embrace and honor my creative ebb and flow and to make time to practice, the importance of quiet and to make sure I disconnect. Without this creative journey, I don’t know if I could articulate authenticity. For me to create intuitive art I have to practice, honor quiet and disconnect. Only by those three things have I learned to trust my gut and even know what that means when it comes to my art.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Maybe you started investing in your 401K as soon as you got out of college. Not me. I didn’t start to really think about my future and wanting to create a solid financial foundation until our first child was born. That is how I now think about growing your email list. Our email list is our biggest revenue source in our business and I wish I had been intentional about connecting with our customers, collecting names and emails, and serving our customers better through a strong email engagement. This is the one way you can guarantee that the people that love what you do are seeing what you have to offer. We really honor our customers through beautiful newsletter content and helping them know when we have live workshops, new online courses, or new products. I just wish I would have known to start the second we started our business.

Contact Info:

• Website: jeanneoliver.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeanneoliver
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/jeanneolivercreativecommunity

Image Credits
Jack Oliver for the profile photo and the image where I am painting