Dear Artist,
How Building a Life (and a Career) is Like a Spiral
This month your letter from me extensive! Its a series of letters. Consider taking a walk in this beautiful autumn so you can listen to me read it aloud to you.
(New to Dear Artist? Catch up on previous letters in the Dear Artist Archive!)
A roadmap of this letter:
- An excerpted letter from you
- My Response: The Web Effect
- How a Web is Made
- Design Helix: The Shape of Growth
- The Gift Economy: A Web of Relationships
- Art Career Magic: The Exponential Spiral of Faith and Reward
- The Web Effect in my Career: A Case Study
- Fall, Past and Present: My spot on the spiral then & now
- Living With Art I Love
- Anderson Ranch, Part II
- How to protect and sustain the Artist Herself?
- Creating Artist-Forward Spaces
- A Commute through the Continental Divide
- The Home Search Continues
- Momo Says
Artist, you wrote me such beautiful responses this month to my last letter. I loved the fibers and packages you sent me in the mail, and the words you wrote on this wide web. Thank you! I am including some of your words here in italics for your reference before my response letters below.
Dear Jenny,
Thank you for your letter! It is always lovely to receive your “Dear Artist” letters, even if I do not respond to them.
I wonder about your title for this past letter: “If you always do what you’ve always done… you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Do you feel like you are reaching, stretching beyond what you’ve “always done”? There are so many very exciting things coming up for you! Not only having your work in the Aspen City Hall, but Aspen Art Week/Fair, visiting and working at the Anderson Ranch, and having your work exhibited in Alabama, not to mention the 3-month art show in January! It’s amazing! You’re doing it!
I wonder what causes us to be brave and break forward, going further than we think we are able to, or perhaps reaching towards the thing we know we are capable of even though it’s intimidating? I like to think it’s a little piece of ourselves, the part that knows intuitively who we are and what we can do and what we need to ask of ourselves. The part that wants to live freely and fully. Maybe it’s our spirit-self, our Highest Self. The One that can be often ignored or hidden away due to what we think we need, what we think we should do, how we think we should be perceived, what we think is “good enough” for us for the time being. The One that slowly fades over time if we shut her out, but never quite leaves us. This is something I’m struggling with myself… but… I am amazed and inspired by you, how you follow your intuition with your art, you create and create and give and sustain yourself. You listen to your higher calling, and your artwork is now being recognized and loved by so many people!
Thank you 🙂 There is so much to unpack in these questions, and I begin here with what I am calling the web effect. The web effect speaks to your thoughts about sustenance, surrender, bravery, and diligence, and your personal experience of moving forward yet also feeling stuck.
The web effect: how building a life is like a spiral
How a Web is Made
I watched this video of a garden orb web spider and her magnificent process (if you only watch a few seconds, I suggest starting around 2:23). She creates a bridge through the sky and lets it fall where it will. At some point she creates a “pre-web scaffolding” with un-sticky silk, from the center outwards, to support the “catching-web” to come. Once the scaffolding structure is in place, she spins the final sticky web, circling around and around, from perimeter to center.
Design Helix: The Shape of Growth
What I find fascinating about this process is exactly what feels frustrating when I’m the spider. (Has your spouse ever said to you in the midst of a perpetual disagreement, “we’re going in circles?” mine has!) This applies to personal challenges, interpersonal relationships, work problems, and designing a life.
I know they tell us careers are like ladders. But I think they need to zoom out a bit, and look left and right, and reexamine the structure of progress and adventure, to see that many worthwhile endeavors are much more like webs.
In order to advance from where I’m at right now, I want to quickly get to the center, but in order to do that, I actually need to work my way around the entire web many many times. In fact, I have to build a time-consuming utilitarian scaffold to support myself just to be able to begin and sustain the “real work” of the work I actually want to do, and then circle the scaffold many more times while building, and then destroy the scaffold, and then fix it to begin again. All just for a dinner! (or whatever your goal might be). In the midst of it all, in the height of a challenge, the spiraling action may seem like going in circles.
This Design Helix is a possible illustration of the evolution of an adventurous idea or the process of working through a challenge.
The Gift Economy: A Web of Relationships
In many ways, I connect to the notion of the Gift Economy explained in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass:
“In the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift economy is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (p 28)
Kimerer continues that the “bundle of rights” so expected by the consumer economy is at odds with the “bundle of responsibilities” attached to a gift economy.
I am an artist often operating in the gift economy: I was given this gift of being an artist, and I have taken responsibility for that calling in my life. I am given gifts of provision to be able to continue to answer this calling, and I take responsibility to labor and spin and send the fruits of my labor–my artwork, my writing, even this newsletter– as gifts out into the world, where they freely touch people. Then, through some kind of divine alchemy, they often come back to me as gifts of sustenance, connection, and inspiration. Its a spiral of faith.
In this world of commerce, it is often SO challenging, but most of all, it is MAGICAL.
Art Career Magic: The Exponential Spiral of Faith and Reward
One of my most favorite parts of my journey as an artist is how the rewards for my faithful labor spiral exponentially through time.
Whereas a typical nine-to-five job creates a predictable relationship between time in and money out, an artist’s earnings for labor is anything but guaranteed–its definitely correlated but not directly causal. An artist’s work may take years to develop and publicly surface, years more to build reputation, years more to build prestige. As we know, often the financial “career” of an artist is only just begining when the human life of that artist ends.
Even within the artist’s brief lifetime, an individual piece of art might also take years from its gestation and completion until coming home to its rightful person. Yet when it does, there is a “meant-to-be” feeling that is nothing short of magical. That energy snowballs directly into the creation of new work, which snowballs into future connections and sustenance, and so the spiral grows.
The Web Effect in my Career
From Greeting Cards to Gallery-Spanning Solo Exhibitions: A Case Study of Exponential Growth
For example, as a college student, I made a collection of greeting cards to sell at my school’s annual arts and crafts fair. I never expected to sell over $1000 in $3 greeting cards in a single day! But it didn’t stop there.
That surprisingly abundant response to my humble offerings gave me the confidence to build the biggest painting panel I’d ever built. It gave me Permission.
Permission to take up more space as an artist. To go bigger.
That permission came from the success felt from an accomplishment that was partially outside of my control, and thus the success felt like a wink from the universe to keep going.
That Permissive wink spurred me on while creating a special painting called Citywide, and four years later (through a series of many other magical events) that painting caught the eye of a gallerist in Kansas, who not only sponsored my solo show at her gallery, but also bought the artwork for her personal collection before the show!
I perhaps would have never made Citywide without first having sold a greeting card, and I certainly never would have sold a greeting card without first having made one, and I wouldn’t have made one without having painted many paintings first–many of which felt like failures, and might have been discarded, and were sacrificed to the cause.
It all grows the spiral.
Of course, that show led to other artworks and other shows (including my solo show, Everyday Saints, at The Art Base in Basalt, Colorado, which was up around this time last year) and the snowballing spiral continues mysteriously.
(And in case you missed that show: here are some memories:
Past, Present, & Future: My spot on the spiral then & now
Fall 2024: Solo Show: Everyday Saints
All those harrowing tectonic shifts in my life caused me to create the body work for Everyday Saints, which became the application material that helped me get accepted into CFA Scottsdale for 2026, a career goal I’ve been building towards for seven years! It’s all bewilderingly connected. You might call it a web. 🙂
Fall 2025
As I prepare for Scottsdale, I decided to bring a new member into the studio family…
Meet Abagail Chloe, AKA ‘Little Foot’, my new baby longarm!
At just six feet long, she is much tinier than her fourteen-foot long big sister, Lucey.
‘Chloe’ means “little green shoot” and is a symbol of new growth and fertility; I love that chartreuse green, which also appears often in the “letting-go” colors of fall.
Abagail’s namesake is our spider friend from Sheldon’s first Colorado apartment, when he moved out to be with me. At first I was afraid of her and her massive webs beside the walkway, and then Sheldon helped me see how beautiful her creations were, how special a creature a spider might be, –not a monster–but a magical and perhaps even whimsical creatress–, and then we named her Abagail, and the name helped me to see her in an entirely new light.
Little Foot will accompany me to Scottsdale, Arizona for the Celebration of Fine Art, a show I have been working towards for the last seven years! (learn background on that story here). As I priced out box truck rentals for bringing Lucey to and from the show with a 15-foot box truck, it became clear that a little sister might be a better investment. She will fit in my CFA booth! Find my profile in their artist pages! Of all 100 artists, I’m the only one repping the medium of textiles.
Fall 2025: Aspen City Hall Biennial
Living with art I love: Dusk: A Favorite in My Personal Art Collection
I have a special piece of art by my former colleague, Michael Krueger, called Dusk (Like the Web Implies the Spider). Unbeknownst to me, he actually named the work after a studio visit we had together, where I shared with him a text in my personal canon, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, by Wendy Doniger, which he then read and enjoyed, and then used as a namesake for his art. Doniger is a prolific scholar in Myth, and in this text, she posits that we can learn about ancient cultures by the myths they leave behind, like how we might learn about a spider by studying her web.
I saw Dusk at Krueger’s exhibition, (Just Like) Starting Over, at Haw Contemporary in Kansas City. It hung next to Dawn (Like the Web Implies the Spider). I love what the two pieces do together: their dual portrayal of both sides of the night: a perfect and immaculate creation, pregnant with possibility, set for hunting in the evening, and the drapey, dew-dropped, weathered-and-worn web in the morning (as a mother, I can relate to all that web has been through!).
While clearly in conversation with Dawn, Dusk in particular confronted me, transcending the duo and the exhibition entirely into my deeply personal heartspace. I remember walking into the exhibition and it immediately yanked me from across the room, gripping me with mighty gravity. It spoke directly to me. Even as a humble graduate student, I found a way to make it mine. I proposed a payment plan with the gallery. It eventually found its way home, to me.
Dusk has already been with me in three different homes, and the piece still moves around, but currently it rests on my aunt’s old folk dresser, brought to me in Glenwood from my dad in Detroit, from his father’s home, which began dissolving along with his father, several years ago (Grandpa Welden just recently passed away on August 5, at age 98). The piece feels like an anchor for me, and has become like a personal portal.
Anderson Ranch, Part II:
Whispers of Meaning with Michael Krueger
During my recent time working at Anderson Ranch, I had the opportunity to work more closely with Michael than I had in the past, and was I delighted when his process of the creation of Dusk appeared in his lecture slides!
The Artist is the Asset with Jasmine Wahi
After Michael’s Workshop, I continued my stay at the Ranch for a Masterclass called Career Momentum for Artists. The course covered all kinds of business-related topics not taught in art schools, and I would love to teach a version of it someday, as artists desperately need this information.
“Everyone loves the art; Nobody loves the artist,” Jasmine would say as she spoke about pricing, contracts, secondary markets, residuals, etc, –which all tend to be structured to sustain everyone except the singular artist making it all possible.– These predominant structures need to centralize around the artist. “The artist IS the asset,” she said. Her course was oriented on helping us as artists keep that in mind as we do business in a greedy world that assumes ownership of us and our work.
“Without artists, many people who make crazy money on the backs of artists would lose their livelihoods. I for one wouldn’t have a job,” she said (she is a curator based in NYC). Without artists, the art world stops. Furthermore, society as we know it would die.
How to protect and sustain the artist herself?
Creating Artist-Forward Spaces
Over the course my time at the Ranch, the buildings themselves were their own curriculum: teaching and inspiring me each day. I’m utterly obsessed with architecture on a personal front, and I was constantly studying the many structures of this utopian built environment. It’s impact on me burns even brighter now than the workshops I took.
Once home, I researched the design scheme and learned that eleven new or adaptive reuse buildings were created for the original working ranch campus by Basalt-based Architect, Harry Teague and his firm.
“One of the keys to the success of the Ranch as an institution is that it encourages interaction between artists and crafts people working in different media. The layout and character of the buildings and spaces are carefully considered not only to enhance but to cause those personal interactions.” -(Harry Teague Architects website)
Architecture creates pattern and ritual. It literally shapes how you live your life, down to the tiny momentary details.
You recently asked what I’d be if I wasn’t an artist; I’d be an architect. I love what Teague says here about his recent Art Studio Achitecture project for the city of Vail:
Fall 2025: A Commute through the Continental Divide
The Home Search Continues
As I continue to search for my own Artist-Forward space to call my home, I think about spaces that allow for creative messes. I dream about a space that gives me the light I love, and the privacy I need to focus on my work.
Your handwritten letter is about the house we went under contract for this month. It is a Frankenstein house, but in all that had to be done I had many beautiful dreams for it. I thought it was my house. The contract fell through, and I spent all month working on it, and took a lot of time off work. I keep saying if it’s meant to come back to me it will, or something better will come along. The universe is full of abundance.
Momo Says
All language is an approximation. I love learning this anew with my 23 1/2 month-old son Moses, who turns TWO in just a couple weeks. He has impressive command of language, parroting our every phrase, absorbing the names for new objects all the time. As his language precision grows, I’m cherishing all his sweet approximations and sharing some of them with you:
*At the begining of September, Momo picked up a penny and called it a rock. (!) While he now can identify a coin as a penny, I cherish that he still has no clue what money is or does.
*This month Momo saw his grandpa Jim who is visiting, turn over a chocolate birthday cake he was about to frost, and I asked Momo what it was. He doesn’t get much exposure to sugary foods, and and thus identified it visually as “meat.” (!) I said “ya, its yucky meat we don’t want to eat.” And then he said, “garbage meat.” We kept that garbage meat away from him, thank goodness!
*Later he saw a chocolate croissant and he called it “poo poo!” And I said, “no, it’s not poo poo,” so then he said, “meat.” “No, it’s not meat,” “…Bread” was his third guess. I said “yes.” I did let him have a piece of it, with all the wonderful flakes all over his clothes. I did NOT, however, supply him with the word “croissant” yet, because I don’t want him asking for one any time soon! I’m preserving his sweet syrupy innocence a little longer 🙂
He is growing in his ability to wait for mama to get ready for the day before he goes to “open white door” to go “dow-stairs!” He flies up and down the staircase with ease, often choosing to slide down on his belly for faster movement, but the first trip of the day he almost always waits at the top of the stairs with is hand open wide up at me, “hold mama haend.” And we walk down together, to begin another exhausting day.
I hope you enjoy this web of words and experiences, spun especially for you.
With Love from Your Artist,
Jenny Welden