By Jennifer Forker
Associated Press
One was a stockbroker, another
a computer whiz. There's a therapist and a small-business owner. Each
retired from a traditional career and launched into another in the arts.
"Do I still have
nightmares about the other (job)? Yes," says Bill Sanders, a
Steamboat Springs, Colo., ceramics artist who is retired from the lumber
and wood flooring business he owned for 20 years. He says he still wakes
up sometimes in a cold sweat worrying about whether some shipment is
making it to a job site on time. Then he realizes he doesn't need to
worry about that anymore.
These days, Sanders, 64,
keeps to the outdoors - he skis during the winter and volunteers for the
U.S. Forest Service during the summer - and creates his artwork, which
includes dishware, decorative pots and sculptured horses.
He learned the basics of
ceramics as a teenager living in Southeast Asia. He kept at it while growing
his Honolulu lumber and flooring business to include eight employees and
more than $1 million in inventory by the time he sold the company in
1997.
Then, he and his wife,
Barbara, also an artist, moved to Colorado, and he turned to his lifelong
love of ceramics more intentionally.
"Clay is kind of cool.
It's just dirt," says Sanders. "If you don't like what you did,
you just throw it back in the bucket and then you can make something
else."
Jennifer O'Day, 61, of
Austin, Texas, is a former stockbroker who says her mixed-media artwork
nourishes all her senses.
"It really sharpens my
ability to see visually and perceptively and I think tactilely,"
says O'Day. "It's not just about my mind and my hand accomplishing
something. It engages that whole mind-body-soul thing."
She was born into a
business-oriented family, so that was in her blood, she says. The art she
nurtured.
"I wanted to do
something that was closer to the bone and less about the money,"
O'Day says about the portraits she now assembles.
It's not just about my mind
and my hand accomplishing something. It engages that whole mind-body-soul
thing," she says.
There's one aspect of her old
stockbroker life that she sometimes misses: engaging with clients.
Geri deGruy, 59, also enjoyed
her previous career, as a therapist in private practice, although it was
emotionally gruelling working with many of her clients, who were abused
women.
"Toward the end of my
practice, there was a feeling sort of like PTSD," she recalls.
She turned from being a
therapist to the textile arts, which required that she slow down.
"I started seeing form
differently. I started seeing repetitive patterns," says deGruy, who
creates small art quilts and mixed-media collages. "My eye was
developing, my seeing was changing."
She still works every day.
"Always our time is
short - we never know," deGruy says. "I have that urgency every
day. I don't want to waste this moment. I don't want to miss this
opportunity to play with color."
Judy Hoch, 72, of Salida,
Colo., finds parallels between her former career, as a computer engineer,
and her current one as a jewellery maker.
"Jewellery making is
just engineering on a very small scale," she says.
Hoch spent a dozen years at
IBM, where she became a senior engineer and earned two patents, then
moved into a computer software job, from which she was laid off in the
early 1990s.
"I had to do something
after that," she recalls. "Going back to work in high tech when
you're 50-something, it wasn't a real good idea. It wasn't going to
work."
She took jewellery and metals
classes at a Denver-area community college and got hooked. She relies on
her mechanical engineering training when fusing metals or cutting stones.
"It's a lot of fairly
sophisticated measurements," Hoch says. "There are so many
technical things . Engineering is a very useful skill to have."
While she describes her years
in high-tech as fun - "like working with puzzles" -
jewellery-making taps her creative energy.
"You spend a week away
from it and you get terrible withdrawal," she says.
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Very interesting
ReplyDeleteThanks Dean. Glad to see you have got to grips with posting here :-)
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