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

Hi Megan, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

In an ideal world you follow a certain trajectory right, graduate high school, go to college and earn a degree and set off into this glorious career path. Well, my path didn’t follow that straight line. About two months after I graduated high school I gave birth to my first child. The college applications I had filled out, never sent in. My hopes and dreams of going off to art school in New York, Cincinnati, or Philadelphia put on the furthest back burner, I thought never to return to that dream. I took on the full time role of motherhood at 18 years old. Eventually I went to school to become an Ultrasound Technician to be able to take care of my son. As he got older, and life brought me some very heavy and devastating events I turned to painting to get through. After some encouragement from my now husband, I took some art classes at night and applied to The Cleveland Institute of Art, and my dream of going to art school came true, I got in on scholarship! Being 30 years old amongst a sea of super cool 19 year old art students was extremely daunting, and working and raising my son while being a full time art student was really difficult. But I did it, I graduated and went on to slowly build my career as a studio artist. Do I wish I had been able to do my “Plan A” first? Of course. Do I believe I would be further along in my art career if I had started at 20 instead of 30, absolutely. Would I go back and change the trajectory of my path, definitely not. Becoming a mother to my amazing son at a young age and working hard to support us and myself taught me immeasurable lessons and shaped me to be the artist and woman I am today. I know I can do hard hard things, I know I can push myself to achieve anything now. But, raising my now family of 5 still puts blocks and barriers I have to work around, but being able to be a mother and artist is something I was told was not possible- that I would have to choose one or the other, and today I am proving that theory all wrong. Even though it was a slower start for me and I am still working towards my goals as an artist, I am on the right path for me and I am grateful for the route it took to get me here.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I had always wanted to be an artist, actually not realizing I always had been. Growing up I sat on my grandfathers knee and watched him paint animals and nature. He taught me my first lessons in painting. When I was young my parents put me in adult water color classes and my love for art grew. Now I work as an artist, focusing in abstract painting. My work is very emotive and expressive, with my compositions being rooted in color and gestural movement. In my work emotions are transformed into pigment and gesture, capturing the in-between transient states of being. Layers of paint are poured over and over, being scraped and pushed, brushed, and rubbed, building up, covering up, breaking down and regenerating all at the same time. The layers of applications of paint tell the story of my physical process and emotional experience with painting while taking shape as unknowable landscapes marked with the residue of experience and emotion. As a studio artist most of my work is either created for exhibitions, or as commission work for clients. I have created paintings for many local businesses and offices, and have shown my work in many solo and group exhibitions across the Northeast Ohio and Michigan. I love to paint large scale pieces and murals, working larger than my body feels so expressive and freeing for me. The thing that I love most though, is working with a client and getting to know them on a deeper level and being able to create a piece that they connect to emotionally and is a reflection of who they are, it is such a beautiful thing when that happens.

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

The most beautiful and fulfilling part of being an artist is seeing someone connect with something I have created on a deep and personal level. So many times I have had people come to me and tell me how a particular piece made them feel a certain way. Wether it stirred something inspiring or more of a deep release of trauma. It is amazing to see how we can communicate with one another deeply through other means besides words. How color, movement, line, can actually communicate a shared experience or feeling, and having another person connect to my own feeling or expression of a feeling is indescribable, and that’s the reason I paint.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Often when I tell people I am an artist, they say, “Oh that sounds so fun, how lucky to just make art all day”. I think a lot of “non creatives” truly don’t understand the mental, physical and emotional work of art making. My painting process is an extremely physical one. I don’t just sit in a chair and doodle. I work with the paintings on the wall and back and forth from the floor to the wall. I am standing mixing paint, standing painting, kneeling and crawling on the floor around paintings pouring paint, sitting on the ground doing detail work. I lift large canvases up and down and up and down. Besides the physical labor of painting there are countless decisions being made, and problems and questions I am working out when I paint. Some days I have great painting sessions and some days it feels like I am just making mud, but then comes the hardest and funnest part of painting- unraveling and resolving the piece into a complete work. People also underestimate the amount of “paper work” artists actually do. All of the applying to residencies, exhibitions, grant applications. The constant writing and critiquing of oneself, and always challenging yourself as an artist, pushing to discover what else can I do or say as an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.megandardisart.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/megandardisart/