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Jodie King - The power of honest art
Jodie King - Artist, Wild Woman and Educator on
The Power of Honest Art
Introducing Jodie King - the artist, educator, and entrepreneur on a mission to unleash your inner power, freedom, and joy! With 20 years of art experience and a playful, spiritual approach, Jodie connects with audiences from around the world. She is known for her high-demand innovative online art and business courses as well as national and international workshops. After suddenly arriving at the canvas almost two decades ago, Jodie King has set herself on a mission to educate and empower artists around the world with the goal to shut the door on the starving artist cliche.
These are the edited highlights of my conversation with Jodie. If you would like to read or listen to the full interview (we talk about so much more!), click the Read More button or the Audio button at the end of the article.
www.redefinepossibility.com
You teach artists how to make Honest Art and to reconnect with their wild side. What does that mean?
I'm primarily an abstract artist and artists I support would ask, “How do you know when an abstract painting is finished?” I sat with that and I thought two things. Number one, would I hang it in my house forever? Number two, was it a fully honest expression that came through me?
What we do as artists, and really what we do as humans, is we look to other successful artists or people who have done things well, and we try to emulate our work based off of that.
That is the absolute worst thing we could possibly do as artists, because, if we are being called to show up and to create something, there's something that needs to be birthed through us.
By looking at other people and thinking, “Well, I want to do something like that”, we are robbing the world of what is meant to come through us. So to me that is Honest Art.
Then it filters into a spider web of your whole life. Am I showing up as myself, truly me? Is that something that was imparted to me by my upbringing or is this truly what I think? Is this how I am saying something in a way that maybe my mother would want me to say it? Or, am I expressing myself truly as I would want to say it?
It can feel uncomfortable when those emotions and feelings come up. How do you encourage your students to work through that?
In a workshop, we talk about the creative process and how it has six steps. The version that I'm thinking of was created by Adam Grant. I didn't come up with it myself, but the six stages of the creative process are number one, this is gonna be awesome. Number two, this is tricky, and number three, this is shit. Number four, I am shit. Number five though, is wait, this might work. Number six, this is awesome. So it's an inverse arc. We start with a whole unicorn and rainbows and we go to the depths of self -loathing and then we come out the other side.