Working for the weekend

By Debra Meadow

The Southwest Community Connection, Sep 27, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Debra Meadow / The Southwest Community Connection

Artists with full-time jobs, like Marjin Wall, must find time to appease their creativity. For Wall, sometimes that means staying up late during the week to create bowls, platters and candlesticks from wood.

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Consider the artist who labors hours in her airy studio. She sails languidly in a sea of possibilities, on a ship of inspiration. There is ample time to reflect and experiment — a brushstroke here, a dab there — in hopes of landing on the shores of artistic excellence.

Oh, wait. It’s time to get to her job. The one with the paycheck.

“She” is me, an artist at heart and hand, even when working to bring home the bacon, beans, and broccoli from my job as a department manager for a local grocery store. I’ve always thought of inspiration as a river of ideas flowing through my mind. When a fertile one floats by, I must have my net at the ready, or it will race downstream, quickly forgotten. This kind of concentration demands scores of uninterrupted hours.

This year I am participating in Portland Open Studios for the first time. Each fall Portland Open Studios, now in its ninth year, invites the public into about 100 artists’ studios to watch artists at work. Eastside studios open on Oct. 13 and 14 and Westside studios on Oct. 20 and 21. I want new work to show, and that means making it in the crevices of time that lie between the demands of a full- time job. How do other artists do it, I wondered, given that few make enough money selling their art to support themselves? I poked my nose into three artists’ studios to see just that.

Debra Meadow

Making time for creative pursuits

Pam Greene paints large scale, abstract landscapes in a sun-dappled, all-glass studio behind her Hayhurst house. For 19 years Greene, in her 40’s, has worked as a sustainable shoe designer at Nike. Remember that river I mentioned? Greene confirms my suspicion that it waits for no artist.

“We’re not faucets,” she says. To make the most of her limited time — evenings, weekends and vacations from work — she must have her paints, brushes and canvases at the ready the moment she walks into her studio, so “when there’s a spare moment, there are no excuses,” she says. “My biggest hope is that when the weekend rolls around, I’m inspired.” To that end, she says “I don’t cook, I don’t have kids and I don’t watch T.V.”

Marjin Wall, 52, does cook — and garden and exercise — but she doesn’t have children and the round-trip commute from home to office to workshop takes about a minute. Wall is a woodworker who turns fancifully shaped bowls, platters and candlesticks colored with milk paint. She builds one-of-a-kind furniture when time allows. She and her partner run a business selling safety supplies, like traction devices for icy conditions, from their South Portland home office.

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