Ever dream of quitting your job to pursue a more creative life? If so, you might like reading my newly published memoir
Here’s what I AM – My Journey To A Creative Life is about:
After surviving five cardiac arrests in one night following a minor accident, I vow to ditch my career and live the rest of my one and only precious life writing fiction, making photographs, and creating art.
Wanting to make sense of my decades-long frustrating quest for an artistic life and discover how creative work became my salvation, I search my memory cache and sift through five decades of personal journals. Delving deep into my psyche brings to light my attempts to break free and follow my bliss.
On this voyage of self-discovery, I learn how my relentless pursuit of career success and making money, of doing and achieving, repeatedly eclipsed my cherished creative dreams. Along the way, I explore the source of my ambition, my chronic anxieties, and my habitual coping mechanisms.
In my memoir I share my thought processes and struggles to become an artist. I reveal the rollercoaster highs and lows, the joys and fears, the successes and failures that represent my life as a passionate, restless, constantly re-evaluating artist.
My memoir, I AM – My Journey To A Creative Life, illustrated with full-color images of my art, is available from Amazon as a printed paperback and hardcover book and as a Kindle eBook. The eBook is also available from Smashwords.
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My passion for color, vintage fabrics, ties and buttons comes together in my Textile Art series
Swerve features an outmoded tie, two pieces of fringed trim, and old buttons on a brightly coloured piece of upholstery fabric. It measures 28” x 34”.
Tree of Life features outmoded ties and old buttons on a traditional piece of upholstery fabric. It measures 35” x 24”.
I used two vintage hand-printed fabric pieces, fancy doilies, vintage buttons, and contemporary fabrics to create Springtime Fancy. It measures 28 x 34″.
Two Textile Art Works Juried Into McMaster Innovation Park’s Art In The Workplace Exhibition on view until June 27, 2024
Batik-printed fabrics come together in Jazz Lines (30×36″).
Fabrication 3 celebrates the colour green (24×36″).
Art Box Assemblages
Wishful-Sinful 2
I filled a vintage typesetter’s box (16.5″ high x 32″ wide) with an assortment of tempting treasures including an array of old lighters and seltzer bottles from my stash to create Wishful-Sinful 2, my newest art box assemblage.
ShowBox
I filled a vintage typesetter’s box (16.5″ high x 32″ wide) with an assortment of glittery baubles from my hoard of trinkets to create this razzle-dazzle Showbox art box assemblage.
Reliquary 1
This assemblage, made up of vintage wood and metal pieces I’ve collected over the years displayed in a vintage box, reflects my heritage. My paternal grandfather was a shoemaker, and my father, a welder. The black stone, an iron ore pellet, was made at Hamilton’s steel mill. Reliquary 1 measures 19”x16”x4”.
Reliquary 2
This assemblage is my homage to the exquisite designs of a vintage pie bird, ceramic insulator, two milk glass jars, and five glass bottles from my collection of old treasures. Reliquary 2 measures 12x12x3” deep.
Paintings
Field of Dreams
I created Field of Dreams in the depth of winter, my dreams filled with visions of fresh air and green pastures in the great outdoors. The oil pastel – mixed media painting is 24” x 36”.
Five Button Boogie – 24×30″
New Photo Art Portfolios
Keepsake, print-on-demand publications available at MagCloud. Click on covers to preview.
The photos in my Magnificent Mums portfolio celebrate the healing power of flowers and the beauty of chrysanthemums, commonly known as mums. The name, chrysanthemum, comes from the Greek and means golden flower. A glance at any of these glorious blooms instantly raises my spirits. I hope that looking at these images delights you, too.
In my wanderings over the years, my eye has invariably been drawn to rough stuff – walls with peeling paint, rusty metal sidings, and derelict buildings. While outside traditional concepts of beauty and art, these images, with their colourful textures and abstract forms, fascinate me. I see them as painterly visions worth preserving in photographs.
I made these photos of automobile hood and fender ornaments over the past dozen years while visiting classic car shows and car museums in Canada and the United States. I find the streamlined rockets and airplanes, along with some more abstract sculptures, to be delightful flights of fancy. Mostly from the nineteen fifties, they reflect speed, and the bold confidence of the jet age.
Linda Joyce Ott 