The Path Of The Artist Through A Wilderness Of "No".

I remember during a particularly low time of my life as an artist, around my late 20’s, putting a post out to a social media art group:

”Do you make your living as an artist? If so, how do you do it?”

The thread of replies grew quickly. Most of the artists did not, in fact, make their living off their art. Several made fun of me for even asking. And those who were able to make art without financial concern seemed to come from generational wealth, or had the support of a spouse with a lucrative job.

At this particular moment of my life, it was soul-crushing to read the vast consensus on the thread. It felt like confirmation of the despair I was meeting in my pursuit of success as an artist.

I sat with my head in my hands, crying for hours.

I know I’m meant to do this. But how?

Since I’d come into this world, the single golden thread of fate that had always seemed to tug me forward on my life’s path was The Art.

I’d known my whole life that my life purpose was to create visions, and to pour my entire heart and soul into doing exactly that.

But what happens when the world isn’t set up to support people like me?

What happens when all I find on my path as an artist is a wilderness of “No”?

This wasn’t the first discouragement I’d received on my path as an artist. I’d worked hard in art school to land a studio job in the film industry, and that plan hadn’t worked out. I’d then tried to continue the creation of my personal visions on the side of a full-time job.. and that had sucked away the energy for creating my visions. Now, at this time in my life, I’d relocated to Colorado.. and was trying once again to follow the path of magic towards making my art my central life purpose.

And it wasn’t working out.

It wasn’t working out for a lot of reasons. But, looking back, I see one of the central reasons was that I was holding on to a delusion of “being discovered” by the right patron, and then supported.

I’d put the locus of power outside of myself, and was subconsciously waiting for somebody else to do the work of success for me.

And I mean, hey. Some artists do find patronage.

But I wasn’t one.

And, no matter how good my art was.. it wasn’t going to blossom to the extent that I knew it could without some kind of support.

What I wasn’t fully aware of at that time, was that I needed to become that support for myself.

I needed to learn that for an artist to make their way through a wilderness of “No”, they have to pick up their tools, and carve their “Yes” through an unforgiving landscape.

One step at a time.

And that success didn’t come to me overnight.

What it ended up looking like is a decade of ups and downs. Making beautiful things, getting a little success and recognition, and then being overwhelmed by life’s realities again.

But the thing is, I didn’t give up.

Through baby steps and struggle, I became the support I’d been looking for outside of myself.

I learned to work for skills I didn’t have. And I started putting forth the effort to not only make art, but improve lots of other things. Marketing skills. Business skills. I had thought I was working hard before.. but I started working at a higher standard. Looking at those nooks and crannies in my life where I’d waste time, or watch TV.. and instead, choosing to work on my visions. I also experimented across a vast amount of ways for artists to profit. I picked up freelance illustration jobs. I took gigs. I collaborated with other creatives. I looked for and applied for open calls. And, yes.. there still was a lot of No. There still was a lot of failures. There still was a lot of “the hard way”. And, I kept a part-time gig as a massage therapist going, in order to keep (even a bare minimum) amount of support while I was continuing to try to keep as much time open as I could for my main driving passion.

But the main point is that I kept the flame of the vision burning, and kept working on it no matter how discouraged I was.

And, beautiful things happened along the way.

The fact is, I did find that patronage and support I had been dreaming of. I just didn’t find it the way I thought I would.

I found it through sharing vulnerably and honestly of my heart through my art and words to a community I nurtured and built, and in return.. they supported me with displays of generosity far beyond what I ever expected.

As it turns out, over time.. the “No” was having a path carved through it by the will-power of my “Yes”.

And people were getting on board with that vision.

That was “Yes” blossoming in a way that I had never fully calculated into my idea of what success looked like, but I’ve since realized that it’s some of the most fulfilling success. The kind that truly connects with the hearts of individuals and the struggles of their life journeys, and helps them find meaning and purpose within themselves along the way.

And now, because of finding my “Yes” through nourishing community connections, hard work, and perseverance.. I now make a substantive chunk of my living off my art.

I still have my ups and downs. I still struggle in life. I have sacrificed a lot for this path. And I’ll sit down with any young artist who’s trying to support themselves - even in part - on their art.. and be completely honest about the struggle.

But it’s a struggle I want.

Realizing visions in a world that can’t see is one of the hardest things a person can do.

It’s a form of pioneering. And pioneering through the unknown is work that visionaries are made for, if they can keep the flame of their drive alive along the way.

I look at the impossibility of my life.. of how I’ve somehow found a way to keep doing the thing that I’m meant to be doing against all odds.

And I know that you can too.

Keep going.

What My Time In Norway Has Taught Me As An Artist..

Natthagen AiR in Julussdalen, Norway, June of 2024.

It had been a long pandemic…

And, luckily, I’d spent most of it making art. Like really. I was holed up in my studio most of 2020, and used the lockdown to paint and paint and paint. So I had a brand new body of work. And, with it, some new confidence.

As we circled the bend towards late pandemic, end of 2021, I found myself considering the possibility of travel. Not just travel, but an artist residency somewhere abroad. That would be the perfect thing, I thought, after being stuck inside for so long. It was time to see more of the world. And to see it as an artist.

I found myself scouring the Resartis.org website for open calls through the fall of 2021. the glow from my desktop computer illuminating my face blue until the wee hours of the night.

Where did I want to go?

I found so many exciting open calls. Artist residencies worldwide. Spain. Australia. France. Italy. Ireland. And even some here in America.

But I started honing my search into a particular part of the globe I’d always wanted to visit: Scandinavia.
Specifically Norway.

I thought about how my friend and I had been talking about a Norway visit since 2018 or so, and how I’d always known I was going to go there someday. Ever since I was a kid, I had long felt a deep intuitive connection to that area of the world somewhere in my bones.. and wanted to go find out if that connection was real.

I scoured available Scandinavian residencies, and found several open calls in Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

I submitted somewhere north of 50 applications to worldwide artist residencies during that time, and waited to hear back on whether I was accepted or not.

The months went by. And I waited.

In February of 2022, I was accepted by a particularly charming artist residency in the forests a few hours north of Oslo, called Natthagen.

I was finally going to Norway. For the month of May, 2022.

I’ll never forget arriving for the first time to the Oslo airport.

This was the farthest I’d ever been from home, and I was beyond excited. The sounds were different, the people were different, the feeling in the air was different.

I remember lugging my just-south-of-oversized baggage (full of art supplies, hopes, and dreams) through the surprisingly quiet Gardermoen airport. Sleep-deprived and overcaffeinated as I wandered into the unknown, I couldn’t help but feel that I was beginning the adventure of a lifetime. At least.. after I finally got some proper sleep.

Arriving at Natthagen after a few days in the big city of Oslo felt almost like coming home to a long-lost family’s home in the woods. I was greeted by a sprawling forest of red pines and birch trees, a big classic Norwegian red barn with white trim, and several smaller wooden cabins on the property.

Natthagen was a gallery, artist residence, and summer cafe run by Trond and Robert, an eccentric and caring couple who I felt immediate familial warmth with.

I took up temporary residence in a cabin built in the 1700’s, and took leave of running water and a working toilet for a while. (They weren’t missing. They were to be found just a short walk away “at the main house”).

And I began working on emerging inspirations in the art studio: a bright and airy room attached onto one of the barns overlooking a field that led into the forest.

I reveled in the deep quiet. In the energy of the place. In the woods. In the land.

I’d never felt connected to a place like I was feeling connection to this place. And began to explore everything I could that was new, different, and Norwegian.

I started to experience the difference between my own cultural conditioning and this new culture.

This was a profound experience to me not only as an American, but as an artist.

I started to feel an awareness of the way I talked, thought, saw the world, and even made art .. as an American.

I saw it In a way that I could never thoroughly be aware of from within the world of my own culture. The stark reflection of my way of being from an entirely different world sparked strange new connections and ideas in my mind.. some of them challenging.

In America, we do big. We do loud. We do grandiose. We esteem ambition, worship work, and clamor for the top. And, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. But what I’d recently come to terms with was the toll that way of existing took not only on us as humans, but on the environment we lived in.

Here in Norway, I was experiencing a way of life that was so much slower. So much more connected to the natural world. So much less grinding and ambitioning and overdoing. So much more sustainably sized. A way of living that was based on consideration of the rest of the web of life.

You saw it in how the Norwegians spoke. What things they deemed important, and not important. How they made their mark (or took care not to) on life around them.

I started playing with my artistic concepts, as I absorbed my Norwegian environment like a sponge.

A different style of art started to come out of me, conveying the new feelings and thoughts I was having.

Having always worked in symbolism, that aspect of my work didn’t change. But, the way I communicated with the symbols did.

In the quieting of the loudness I always felt encroaching on my consciousness in America, I found new sounds - quieter ones - speaking their ideas into my world.

I drew my inspirations with colored pencils on toned brown paper late into the night. Late hours that were hard to tell, in the ever-lightening Norwegian night sky. (Not quite at it’s peak lightness until June, but certainly getting there in May. )

The pieces I made were informed by the colors of the place. The symbols of the place. The cultural influence. Trond’s Forest Finn cultural connections. And, the stories I felt interwoven between all of those things.

And I discovered another side of my expression.

“Jumula” - colored pencil on toned paper - a drawing from my artist residency at Natthagen AiR, 2022

After this experience, I became an advocate for artists to travel.

An artist’s mind is stimulated by new problem-solving. New ways of making connections. New ideas.

And there’s no better way to thrust you into that exact kind of stimulation as an artist than to travel.

Experiencing different cultures will present you with a myriad of new information. And with that new information, new ways of creating. If you are open to the many ways that other cultures will challenge what you know and are accustomed to, they can create the perfect catalyst for an artistic transformation, opening and inspiring new forms of expression.

We don’t just need “the foreign” as artists, but as citizens of the world.

In ways, all humans are fairly similar. We experience love and loss, desire safety and security. But in many other ways, we also are very different. We have all created different ways of being in our respective cultures, and those different ways of being are like different styles of paintings: all rendering the beauty of human connection in different brushstrokes.

Being open to different forms of expression helps us create new bridges between us.

And those bridges help us solve complex problems between disparate groups of people.

Norway changed my life.

And I’ve now been back to visit several times since. I’ve committed to learning the language. And, I have an entirely new set of hopes and dreams. All from having the experience of life from a different culture, with different ideas and different ways of doing life.

I now want to share that world with others, particularly artists, in hopes that they will also benefit from this land that I so dearly love.

Which is part of why I’ve begun envisioning workshops and retreats in Norway, in hopes to help bring artists from other cultures there.

If you are looking for an opportunity to explore Norway yourself, as an artist, we would love for you to join our Mythic Soul Art + Astrology retreat in September of 2025.

And, surely, my passion will drive towards creating further opportunities in the future.

Keep exploring the world, artists.

We need you on the journey of creative discovery.
Our future depends on the visionaries.

- Adrianne