How we ended up here
Hi y’all! As mentioned in my first post Welcome & hello, I’ve always found joy creating for those I love. This includes but is not limited to: making handmade Christmas cards with my dad and siblings, painting personalized coolers for friends and family, making fleece blankets and stockings to surprise my cousins for Christmas, painting on the jetty rocks at the beach, weaving bracelets on a clipboard during the summers, and painting pieces of art for their spaces.
None of this makes me a professional or trained artist, believe me, I know that. I still have a hard time calling myself a professional artist even though you are here, on my very official website, looking at art that I’ve made to sell to you. Imposter syndrome is real, my friends, and if you feel it, you are not alone. But hey, we’re powering through. I continue to remind myself that if I wait until I’m perfectly qualified at something to give it a try, I’ll never get there. So here we are trying anyway!
After graduating from college (the University of South Carolina, where I studied Marketing & International Business, go Gamecocks), I took a full-time job in sales working in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I’ve since progressed through my career with the same organization, moving throughout Florida to Jacksonville Beach, and then Tampa, where I live now. While living in Jacksonville Beach, the world came to a pause, and I found myself in need of a creative outlet, a way to distract from the total chaos of the world and total lack of control I had over any of it. This led to breaking out the box of acrylic and watercolor paints I’d moved from apartment to apartment since college, and I started painting again. In an effort to recoup the cost of my hobby, I created an Etsy shop and an Instagram, naming my business “Grove Harbor Shop.”
Background story: My paternal grandparents have been married for 58 years and spent most of those years living in a cozy green house on Grove St. in coastal Massachusetts. As a family, our best memories were spent at that house and on the water in New England, so I thought “Grove Harbor Shop” was a sentimental and fitting name for my new endeavor, which at that point was mostly supported by family and friends/chosen family.
My first “studios” in Jacksonville Beach, FL
Over the following couple years, even as the world opened up again and I progressed through my career in sales, I continued to paint and found that others were interested in what I was creating. I enjoyed what I was doing, but found it wasn’t profitable, and felt that in order to legitimize my business, I needed to make some changes and truly invest in myself. I’ve always been a saver and not much of a risk-taker when it comes to finances. But if I wanted the freedom I long for someday to work on my own schedule, spend time with family, travel, and give back to my community - I needed to get more creative and take some chances. I also found that, though Instagram is an amazing and useful tool for meeting people and sharing my work, it may not last forever and I didn’t want to be dependable on it - I wanted a lasting home for my hard work, on my very own website.
So I reached out to Janet at SkyHouse Creative, a woman-owned small business in my home state of New Hampshire, and together we embarked on the exciting process of rebranding, (proudly putting my name front and center in the business), creating a website, having professional photos and videos taken of me and my art (I could not have been a more awkward subject, for proof see video footage on the About page), and what you see now is the culmination of the blood, sweat, and tears (plus stress, investment, excitement, and more tears) put in over the last year!
I’ve realized through this process that what legitimizes me as an artist and my business as real, is me - all it takes is saying, “Yes, I’m an artist, and this is my business” and that’s that (I do always worry what people will think about that, but that’s just none of my business). I’ve also realized that I will not ever be perfect or have all the answers - I’d like to believe that the day I launched this website, it was flawless, I’d anticipated every scenario, and everything ran seamlessly. But that’s just not (and never going to be) the case. I’m learning as I go, and how boring would it be if this was the peak of my knowledge, creativity, and abilities? How fun you’re here for the early stages of it all?
The fact that you’re here does validate that I have something to offer - whether that’s friendship or familial relation and you feel obligated to be here (hey, we’ll take it), or you’re interested in purchasing a piece of art, now or later, large or small, from a large canvas painting to a notecard. Either way, I am so grateful you’re here.
