We were lucky to catch up with Margaret Luo recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Margaret thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

Taking vacations has always been hard for me to do, but I think they’re really important for my mental health and creativity. As the sole proprietor of my business, I have to balance being creative and making artwork with managing all of the business aspects, so I find it difficult to be away from my business for long stretches of time.

However, I do my best to find ways to fit my vacations around the seasons of business. I know that late spring and early summer are busy with art festivals and exhibitions, so I try to plan my vacations in late summer or in January and February when my work schedule is a bit slower. I prepare for my vacations as a business owner the same way I used to prepared for my vacations when I worked a full time job: I let the people I work with, whether it be collaborators, organizations I’m partnering with, clients, and collectors, know that I’ll be on vacation and unresponsive to email. I also set an automated out of office reply on my email, and I remove social media and productivity apps from my phone. It can feel scary to feel so disconnected from my business, but within a day, I’m always reminded that nothing is really that urgent and it’s more important to use this time to reconnect with myself and rest.

I also find that vacations bring about inspiration for new ideas because I’m making room for my mind to wander and relax. I find that I’m no longer occupying my brainspace with the logistics, planning, and administrative side of my business while on vacation, and this opens up space to come up with new ideas and painting collections I want to pursue. In this way, vacations are an important aspect of being an artist with a business because they create opportunities for me to come up with fresh ideas and concepts.

Margaret, 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?

I became a full time-artist after working as a data scientist for a policy research company for many years. While I had found meaning in my career aimed to improve well-being for people and communities through health policy research, I had always wanted to be an artist, but I was taught it wasn’t a practical career choice. As my career as a data scientist progressed, I started experiencing burnout and felt disconnected from the people and communities I was impacting through my research. I found myself turning to painting during my time off as a way to reconnect with myself, my communities, and nature.

In the beginning of my artistic journey, I balanced painting and creating artwork with working as a data scientist. After a few years, I realized that I wanted the experience of working for myself and running my own business centered around my artwork, because I wanted to share the beauty I saw and experienced in nature with others. I gradually transitioned into becoming an artist full-time, and during that time, I also worked through unlearning the belief that being an artist was not a practical career choice. By building a career around my artwork, I can see, feel, and hear the impact my artwork makes in my clients’ and audiences’ lives, which was something that was missing from my data scientist career. My artwork has been shown in coffee shops, galleries, and museums, and talking to people and sharing the emotional connections we have to art and nature have been the most fulfilling part of this career.

I’m a self-taught artist, and my artistic practice centers around my love and appreciation for the natural world. Each of my artworks starts with going outdoors to see the rhythms and variations of patterns in nature. I’ve always had a fascination with water, and so the majority of my artwork is centered around this element. I am inspired by the places I visit and read stories of them to understand how they came to be as I saw them. All of these experiences translate into my artwork where I highlight the Earth’s resilience and its renewing cycles. I want to share a reflection of humanity’s roles in nature and its life processes and what we can learn from nature.

As I continue to grow my career as an artist, giving back to my arts community has been vital. I serve as the Vice Chair of a volunteer-run organization called genARTS Silicon Valley. genARTS’s mission to empower creative individuals and emerging art leaders in Silicon Valley really resonates with me because growing up, I didn’t feel like I had the resources to build the practical knowledge of being an artist because I wasn’t connected to my local arts community. Through volunteering with genARTS, I’m able to bridge my professional experiences in my previous career to the organization’s artist membership. I provide mentorship and guidance in grant writing, resume writing, and other organizational skills in the context of the arts. It’s really important to me to give back to my community by providing more professional development opportunities that are often inaccessible or unavailable to artists, which in turn helps build a thriving arts community.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Something that I’m constantly working on is overcoming the scarcity mindset. Growing up, I found myself often focused on the things that I didn’t have or that I wouldn’t have enough money, time, etc., to do what I needed to do. Throughout the years of working through this, I find myself falling into this pattern of thinking less often, and I’m better able to acknowledge when I have a scarcity mindset. Becoming a full-time artist and running my own business has also helped with overcoming this mindset, as I’ve learned to reframe feeling limited by the things that I don’t have to instead focus on the opportunities I do have in order to achieve what I want in my career and life.

It’s very easy to think that you don’t have enough money, time, skill, motivation, or whatever it may be, to pursue what society deems as a ‘risky’ career that’s seasonal and can bring inconsistent income. But, for me, the solution has been adopting an abundance mindset with good planning and being adaptive. If I think that I don’t have enough time, I prioritize what is most important to me, what I enjoy doing the most, and what’s important to my business, in that order. You can’t do everything, and so many people will want to take up your time with their wants, so you need to know your values so you can better prioritize what’s truly important to you. Thinking more abundantly and centering around my values has helped me grow as a person and live a more balanced life pursuing a career that I feel more fulfilled in.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

A book that has significantly impacted my journey to becoming an artist and maintaining a consistent art practice is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The Artist’s Way is a guide to help you pursue your creativity by nurturing your artistic expression and self-discovery through a 12-week program. My supervisor at my previous job recommended the book to me when I had expressed being interested in pursuing a career in the arts, and I’ve gone through the book three times since. What guided me the most was the practical exercises and writing prompts that pushed me to unearth the imbalances in my life and put into practice regular creative pursuits. This helped me build a solid foundation and understanding of what I wanted to be doing both in my career and as an artist, which has led to a more fulfilled and healthy life that blends both my artistic pursuits and entrepreneurial mindset.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.margaretluoart.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/margaret.luo.art
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/margaret.luo.art
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretluo1/
• Youtube: https://www.instagram.com/margaret.luo.art