Calling Myself An Artist

From amateur status to professional, I have had difficulty redefining myself with a name that others have spent decades to become.

“She Named Her Daughter Hope” was the first painting I ever sold. It was one of my first paintings to be exhibited. It was also my first showing at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston and their first sale abroad to Scotland.

From my perspective, I’m still the skinny little girl from Dacia Street, who became one of the first female linesman in the City of Boston. I’m always “Techny-Gal” a telecommunications technician, and a Fedex truck driver.

Each step of my journey has been a cause for celebration, commemorated with the proverbial feather in the cap. And in between those achievements, I also became a mother and a wife.

By the time I was 40 years old, the idea of making any new achievements was long behind me, I had so to speak reached my peak. And although I would never live vicariously through my kids, I lived happily for them. They were the center of my world.

For me, becoming a “Stay-At-Home-Mom” was a no-brainer, but it was a decision that effectively put an end to my career, as technology moved up to the clouds without me.

And then the unthinkable happened, the babies that I had so diligently helped to raise, grew up! Which was the whole point of being a parent, until it wasn’t.

In 2017, my kids moved out and left their childhoods behind. The magical memories reverted back to reality, like Cinderella’s carriage, the little treasure box with the painted heart on top, went back to being just some painted popsicle sticks that the girls had glued together.

In our new reality, my husband and I repositioned our chairs. Now we faced away from the stuff they left behind- the lucky rabbit’s foot, the tennis rackets, and a baby doll, who like us, was no longer played with.

And I was just coming into my independent new life, when a devastating illness upturned my world. But somehow that burden opened up a new vista and I discovered that I had a hidden talent, that is I could paint. And as quiet as it’s kept, I might’ve never known it existed inside me, had I not become sick.

Since 2020, my work has been invited to sixteen art exhibitions, it’s been featured on a TV show, included in four art catalogs and twice appeared on billboards. And I’m very proud that one painting, temporarily installed in Boston’s historic John Eliot Square has been included in the permanent public art archive, listed by longitude and latitude https://bit.ly/3Cq7Ix4

Somehow I’ve managed to live an ordinary life quite extraordinarily. I call myself artist ❤️

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