Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jen Olson. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jen, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

I picked up a paint brush shortly after the birth of my second baby.

To say my motherhood routine was grueling would be a gross understatement. I was often foggy-brained from the kind of sleep deprivation I couldn’t even comprehend until it became my reality. My days were filled with nursing a baby, diaper changes, potty training, making food, cleaning up, making food, cleaning up, making food, cleaning up, again, and again, and again.

My “first career” was teaching music full time, and going from being a beloved choir teacher with a cult-like following of students and parents to this new and brutally lonely work, was a painful adjustment to say the least. I was desperate for a safe place to rest, restore, create, and most importantly, feel like I had an identity outside of my mothering role again.

At first, painting was just my precious me-time and an easy way for me to take off my mom-hat. My practice was obsessive and extremely private. After taking some online watercolor classes, I began sharing my work with a few close friends who encouraged me to release what I was creating on social media.

The day I finally posted some portrait art on instagram and Facebook, my inbox was flooded with inquiries about how much I charged for custom work, what sizes did I offer, and when could I have a piece completed. My heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest. I was elated with the incredible and scary thought:

“Wait, could I be a REAL artist?”

After doing some research on pricing and getting lots of pep talks from all of my closet friends and family, I took on my VERY FIRST CLIENT. I was a bit of a bumbling mess figuring out packaging and shipping, and still had a somewhat apologetic posture when I finally asked for payment. My client however, could not be more thrilled and eager to finally have her own customize “Jen Olson Original.”

For my simple little life as “just a stay-at-home-mom” this was the beginning of something huge. Not only was this a major career shift, but the path to personal growth and expansion that felt like the stuff of dreams.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I began my painting career while half drowning in the all-consuming job as a mother of young children. Catching small moments between baby tending and toddler wrangling, painting began as a simple way to grab precious “me-time.” But with experience and time it became a way to explore the roles, identities, expectations, and realities of being a modern woman and mother. So often we have been taught to hide the emotional, physical, and mental labor that comes with nurturing. So often we are told by society how to view our worth, our bodies, our ambition. My goal is to acknowledge the hidden value of women on their own terms with color, water, and light. I love to capture the honest beauty of motherhood; one that is complex and visceral, blissfully sweet yet at times overwhelming, mundane, or darkly painful. I want to show real women with real bodies; bodies that challenge the dated but incredibly persistent and toxic ideals of beauty we were all socialized into. I enjoy painting women who bypass culturally fabricated shame and oversized purity culture in order to own their own sexuality, taking it away from those who commercialize or abuse it, and giving it back to the women where it came from in the first place.

In my painting I want to show that the value of women does not come from fitting into a single ideal, but that they are inherently beautiful for freely being themselves and for their efforts to be so many things to others.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I received rigorous and intensely professional technical training throughout my childhood and young adult life as a career music student and teacher.

My biggest take-away was to always please my teachers, strive for perfection, embrace precision, and execute musical performance “the right way” so I could best serve my audience at all times.

But with perfectionistic technical training, also came a silencing of my own point-of-view.

The privacy and autonomy within my painting practice has unlocked an incredible freedom. Moving away from “doing art the right way” has been so FUN and very rewarding.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I hadn’t posted a single thing on social media for years when I started sharing my artwork. I had about 200 followers and no real understanding of “how it worked.”

A few small philosophies have really helped as 90% of my income directly comes from social media:

1) This is a long-game: there is not going to be one event that causes my account to “blow-up.” There is time to create lots of different content and try many different approaches and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

2) Collaborate: my biggest periods of growth have come from reaching out to like-minded influencers and offering them a product in exchange for coverage via stories, or even better, co-hosting a giveaway. I created a painting of a big time influencer with over 2 million followers and felt like I hit the jackpot when she shared it on her stories. I got nearly 200 followers over night and about 2 dozen outreaches for commissioned work.

3) Be authentic: people don’t just want to buy art, they want to buy the artist. And the sooner you get really clear about what drives your work, the better you’ll know how to connect to your audience. Showing up in the online-space, on camera, can be scary and feel so uncomfortable at first, but your tribe is out there, and they won’t be able to find you if you show up in a overly curated, hyper-professional way.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jenolsonartwork.com
• Instagram: @jenolson.art
• Facebook: Jen Olson Art Facebook Group

Image Credits
Photographers: Emily Dill Vance Avion McNab