Author: Laura Entis / Source: Adobe 99U
Artist and illustrator Lisa Congdon on how she transitioned from a job in non-profit education to a high-profile freelance art career working for brands such as Nike, Facebook, and the Museum of Modern Art.
At 51, Lisa Congdon is the picture of a thriving freelance artist.
Her client list includes Fortune 500 companies (Facebook, General Mills, Hewlett Packard), tech companies (Airbnb, Sonos), and art museums and universities (MoMA, Harvard), among many others. In addition to her commercial work, she makes, exhibits, and sells fine art, teaches online classes, and has published eight books, including the forthcoming: Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic.If you’d told her any of this in her early 30s, she would have laughed at you. Growing up, Congdon wasn’t even the creative one in her family (that would be her sister). After college, she went into education: first as an elementary school teacher and then as a staff member at a nonprofit working with public schools. Her life path seemed set.
But at 32, she experienced “a bit of a life crisis” after a long-term relationship with a woman she’d been dating since her early 20s imploded. In a depressive rut, she started seeing a therapist, who helped her begin the the terrifying process of figuring out who she was and what she wanted from life. Congdon didn’t have a lot of answers but, spurred by an unfamiliar urge to make things, she began taking community drawing and painting classes.
In the beginning, art was purely something she did for fun on the weekends. It stayed that way until, in the mid-2000s, she started a blog in which she posted pictures of her work. Congdon met other makers online, some of whom made their living from their art. It was a life she wanted for herself.
The transition wasn’t quick or easy. It wasn’t until 2011, at the age of 40, seven years after she began drawing, that she left her job to focus on her art career. “I did in phases,” she says, seizing opportunities as they came and slowly building up momentum and clients.
Here, Congdon looks back at her unconventional path to freelance success and why she’s glad she found art later in life.
Q. When you started drawing and painting, you did it solely for fun. Looking back, did that mindset help you professionally?
A. To a certain extent, because I wasn’t thinking, ‘I need to make work that’s really conceptual, or totally unique, or groundbreaking.’ I just drew what was around me, and then tried to make it interesting in terms of color palette and how I was arranging and rendering things on the page. My own style developed out of that.
Part of the reason I’m able to make so much work is that I don’t have voices in my head necessarily telling me that this is right or wrong. I just kind of try things.
Q. You also started in your early 30s. For creative industries, the perception often seems to be: if you haven’t established yourself in your 20s, the ship has probably sailed. Were there advantages to finding art later?
A. There are probably a lot of artists who are starting out who don’t necessarily have a strong set of interests yet because they are only 22. I’m not saying all 22-year-olds don’t have a developed sense of interests, but I think one advantage to starting later in life is that I knew who I was already. I understood what I was drawn to, and that really helped me not trip too much about the meaning of my work. I just started drawing the stuff I was interested in and I didn’t overthink it. It freed me a little bit.
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