Printmaking, Puppets and Programming
My life’s goal has always been to create. I’ve had a pencil in my hand longer than I can remember and have always had a much easier time illustrating what I want others to understand than explaining it with my words. Especially for complex feelings. Ever since high school and the idea of “what comes after this?” grew bigger, I had made up my mind that I was going to “be an artist”. Whatever that means.
I spent time adding to my artistic tool belt attending the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR gaining critical thinking skills and a new craft: printmaking. As I fell in love with the dying art form, I made big steps to wrap myself in a printmaking world. While this made me happy, I realized building a career as a printmaker was a further stretch than I had imagined. Thinking on this, combined with the onset of some chronic mental health issues that a major move (Texas to Oregon) set into full fruition, I made a shift of environment and a shift of trajectory settling in Austin to seek my artistic fortunes while being much closer to my family and friends.
Time back in Texas has moved fast. I didn’t know where my artistic career was headed, but I no longer had access to the expensive and large equipment needed to be a printmaker without having connections. Knowing no one when I moved here, printmaking continued to fade out of my life and I started honing in on performance in the Austin music scene.
I was a 90’s kid raised on puppets. I hadn’t thought about building my own until I was in this lost place post art school, sitting in my new city pondering performance. So I started making and I started integrating myself onstage with my friends’ bands, etc. During the summers of 2015 and 2017, I spent time with one of the oldest, politically radical puppet theaters in the country: The Bread and Puppet Theater. Their philosophies with making puppets and their sense of community taught me so many valuable lessons. One of which was a little less kind, but it was the realization that if I wanted to take myself places (financially, travel wise, or career wise) I was going to need to come up with a much more solid plan than the ways I was approaching the art world at the time. I needed a leg up.
A lot of my time has been spent knowing the essence of what I want, but not specifically what it is or how to get there. I want to make art to feel alive and for a while I thought that art also had to keep me alive. That it had to pan out as a living, but I’ve come to the realization that I need to think more abstractly. As an artist and a programmer that’s a useful thing to do.
Programming had been on my back burners for a few years as I slowly but surely started to hit major burnout from my job of the past six years. Throughout my years in food service, I had never worked at a particular location much longer than a year and a half. Approaching years five and six with my company, Juiceland, and myself approaching my 30s I was started to get extremely driven to jump into the kind of abstract thinking that would answer my, “Well…what’s next?” to not pursuing my art as my salvation from food service.
Covid-19 hitting only helped solidify the plans I was pulling together. I knew I was seeking a way to work from home to relieve my body from such intensely physical work. While being more stationary, I also wanted something that could help me facilitate more mobility in a travel sense to finally have the flexibility to visit my friends and family around the world (and not lose money whilst taking the time to do so). It almost goes without saying that I was also seeking something with a much higher salary to help with travel mobility, but ultimately to help me facilitate my art and help other people more. Learning programming met all of my desires and seemed like something vast and malleable. A tool to apply and adapt to my interests. A new tool for creating!
After getting guidance from dear friend who was in the middle of a bootcamp cohort at the Flatiron School, I made the necessary arrangements with my workplace and my finances to take this opportunity to grow. Admittedly, I’m still not sure where I want this path to take me, but I’m already feeling more mentally stimulated than I have in a while consuming our course material and that really excites me. I’m looking forward to learning more and am interested in front end design as well as user interface design. Both are areas I could see my background in art/design as well as my years of customer service skills could combine to be a real asset. Wherever I end up, I’m thrilled to have made a decided change to my life trajectory. Cheers!
