Meet self-taught artist Lisa O’Connell. Like many people, Lisa’s life changed dramatically in 2020. She was working in a warehouse for a company that distributed materials for the education of children. Lisa was given the option to continue working or take furlough, and chose the latter due to potential health risks for other members of her family, and the work status of her husband (he was already retired). In short, she ended up teaching herself to paint during a pandemic!
By the third day of furlough, Lisa felt bored, and started looking for something to do. She started exploring options in crafts, and felt like it wasn’t for her, in spite of the fact that other family members had done a lot of quilting and sewing in the past. As she began to search instructional videos online to find something to do, she discovered someone who was teaching viewers how to paint using acrylic pours, and she thought, “I could do that.” Up until 2020, Lisa had had no experience in art whatsoever, not even art classes as a child. “I looked forward to my yearly new box of 24 Crayolas. That was literally the only art, my entire life.”
Lisa didn’t even know where to shop and what to buy in the beginning, but decided to order materials online, based on recommendations from the artists who produced the videos she watched. She started experimenting with materials, in their small, two-bedroom apartment. “I had so many fails. I still do,” Lisa reflected. “Life is all about failure. How you overcome them is what makes us shine.”
When Lisa paints, she doesn’t use any tools, except for what you see in the picture. When she was furloughed, she was waiting for unemployment, and keeping expenses down any way she could. She didn’t own a palette knife, but she DID have a cake server; in fact, it is the very cake server that had been used to dish up slices of cake for her children’s birthdays all their lives. Even though she can now afford a palette knife, she decided to continue using the cake server, and lift the birthday cake out of the pan with a butter knife instead!
Lisa’s frugality appears in other ways throughout her practice. She has since returned to work at the warehouse, and brings home tissue paper that is leftover from boxes of educational materials. She uses it to prevent damage to paintings when they’re stored (she has completed about 500 since last April, and sold about 100, and given away about 100). She also discovered that for acrylic pours, a pouring medium that she found at the home improvement stores worked just as well as what she could find at craft stores, and was much cheaper.
Lisa refers to herself as “very Irish,” and confessed that she inherited her father’s “very crude sense of humor. With that preface, she shared a funny story with me about how she was blowing on the canvas of a freshly painted acrylic pour. She had just gotten new dentures, and as she was blowing, they flew out of her mouth and landed on the canvas! “Thank God I have a sense of humor. I shared it on a Facebook group and got 500 likes!
When I asked Lisa where she saw this going, she admitted that she felt herself at a crossroads. Lisa admits that she doesn’t charge much, and many of her paintings she has given away to friends. “Art has given me a sense of self-worth, and I feel like I accomplish something that’s important, that people enjoy, and that makes me really happy.”