We were lucky to catch up with Karen Pride recently and have shared our conversation below.

Karen, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I come from a very small town in Southwest Michigan where the course of life is clearly laid out for little girls. We are told to be good, look cute, be nice, find a decent man to marry, have some babies, be a good wife, a good cook, a good mother. Normal, consistent, achingly good, and god loving are really all that is required to be awarded with a seal of approval by the townspeople and the church.

For 18 years I did a fairly decent job of following the good girl, small town guidelines. Then I went to college. Quickly, my course in life shifted to one that honored my personal truths. I began to learn who I was, and pushed back on all that was expected of me. I shook my head NO at good girl approval, and instead took one intuition guided risk after another, leading me to become a well known health food restaurateur, yoga studio owner, photographer and all-around creative in the place that became my home, Portland, Oregon.

There was the risk to go against every piece of advice that everyone in Michigan gave me. The risk to forge my own up-hill path that led to the life that I envisioned. The risk to study culinary arts, photography and eastern philosophy, along with the risk to sell nearly everything I owned and move to Portland immediately after turning 23 years old. There was the risk of writing business plans that I didn’t know how to write and then hopping on my bicycle to visit every possibly rich person I had ever met in Portland to ask them to loan me money for my dream restaurant. There was the risk to use every dollar I possessed to open my food cart at the age of 27, and then my first cafe at the age of 28. The risk to borrow $200k from a very kind woman and buy a yoga studio when I was 30 years old. The risk to open a 2nd and 3rd restaurant and then sell them all in 2018. My next risk was traveling solo in a van for 1.5 years, followed by shutting down my yoga studio in 2020, buying my dream house and turning it into a rental property. Next I took a deep dive risk by starting my current photography business.

We didn’t even talk about the romantic risks of the heart, or the risks of taking off on travel adventures so big that they will change your whole life. The truth really is that the great stuff in life exists on the other side of fear. For some people, comfort and safety is what they need, what they crave, but for me a life that is too safe feels suffocating. I am not remarkable, I am just willing to take the risks required, over and over again, to eventually get to the life that I dream of.

Karen, 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?

As a child and teenager I was always documenting my family, friends and romantic relationships with a camera. In college I studied photography for 18 months and fell head over heals in love with the art. I was shooting all black and white film, hand developing my film and printing everything in the darkroom. The entire process was fascinating to me.

I was very creative with my camera in college, mostly turning it on myself to take experimental, semi-nude, long exposure images. Photography was the tool that I used to explore my emotions and to see myself at greater depths.

I took some time away from photography to pursue a career in the restaurant industry, but when I returned to the art of imagery I found that those same passions boiled up to the surface. Emotion, expression and overall aliveness are the components of imagery that give me goosebumps, therefore that is what I attempt to create. The difference now is that I have an additional interest and understanding in the process by which I am able get my subjects to expose their true selves. My camera is only turned on others once after I have taken the time to get to know their depths, which I then attempt to translate into imagery.

I am proud of my ability to connect with my clients; to create a space safe and comfortable enough that they allow themselves to unravel while in front of my camera. Over time I have developed skills that aid in putting my clients at ease, but above all I am able to get my subjects to drop the presentation and show me their true self, because I have done the ongoing personal work to break down my own walls. The client sees the real me, feels safe, and then allows me to see them. I am proud of the relentless personal work that I continuously do in an effort to show up in the world as my true self.

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

The lesson that I had to unlearn is this: Art should me made with others in mind. The viewer decides what is worthy.

That is WRONG. Terribly, horribly, deadly wrong. We must all make the art that gives US shivers, goose bumps, feelings. I don’t even care what the feeling is, I just want to know “Does your art make you feel?”. If your art makes you feel, then it is has value to you and that is all that matters. Not everyone will understand your art and that is ideal. They shouldn’t all understand it. Not every piece of art is for everyone. You, the artist, are not for everyone. Listen to your heart, your intuition, your shivers, and I promise that the thing that makes you feel so goddamn alive that you’re basically in another dimension will speak volumes to others as well. Your art will not speak to everyone, maybe not even the masses, but it will speak to the people that you need it to. You will find YOUR audience by being yourself.

I learned that lesson by attempting to people please and then failing to please both myself and others. It takes a while to learn the lesson, because we often make work that is pretty and liked, but that work is lacking in profoundness. Being liked is different from being magnetic. F*ck being merely liked; aim to be magnetic. You become magnetic by being unabashedly yourself.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is freedom. I am free to make my own timeline, live where I chose to live, work with who I chose to work with, take a new direction whenever I feel like it, and best of all, I am free to be weird. People expect artists to be weird, because we are! It is so richly wonderful to be free from the constraints of normality. I could choose to sell my house, move to a tiny island somewhere in the world, adopt two llamas and decide that I am now a painter of insects and billygoats and my friends would be like “strange, but seems like a thing Karen would do.” The longer you live as a free, weird person the more people expect that of you. You get to be an enigma. It can be a long, uphill battle for some people to accept you as such (it was for me) but the journey is ripe with experience and the reward is divine.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.karenpride.com
• Instagram: @karenpride