Reinventing Yourself as an Artist

If you know me, then you know I've re-created myself many times over as an artist. Originally, I was a cartoonist where I grew up in my father's art studio as a kid. Some parents keep their house well stocked with whole milk and good food, my father always made sure I had a fresh sketch book , plenty of art supplies and an eccentric posse of artists to inspire me.

As a kid I would have "art-sleep-overs" with my guy friends. We would check out football books from the library on a Friday and spend all weekend copying the pictures into our sketch books. When I hit middle school I started playing the keyboards in a country band with a bunch of adults across town. I answered in ad in the newspaper and my parents would drive me to band practice each week. In high school, I fell in love with The Police and was in various alternative rock bands through college.

During my junior year at Radford University,  I fell in love with jazz and I discovered fiction writing. I started working as a freelance writer - or at least I tried to, while bringing home the bacon with various day jobs and touring with a jazz fusion band.

After college, I went to grad school to study creative writing and started a career as a full blown traditional jazz pianist. That lasted until I hit the age of 30 and then I gave it all up and went back to my roots. I started making my living as a visual artist in Portland, Oregon, selling my cartoon-like oil-pastel prints at the Portland Saturday Market. This led me back to the east coast where I rented a 1,200 sq ft studio in Easthampton, Ma and started painting on canvas - Large chakra paintings with water based oil paints - some as big as 8ftx8ft.

After a few years, I went back to the stage as a solo-performer which led me into my current work as a professional storyteller.

Hearing Raghava give his talk in the video below was very helpful especially since he and I seem to get a lot out of working with kids. Through the years my kid workshops like Raghava's, have always  comprised a large portion of my work. The world likes to dismiss people like us as "Renaissance Men." But, I don't think this term quite fits. 



Originally from TED TV: Raghava KK: Five lives of an artist.

For more info about "The Neon Man and Me" and other storytelling projects by me - Slash Coleman - please visit www.slashcoleman.com