LIZ RUEST
-Liz, we'd love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today, both personally and as an artist.
I had a lot of encouragement early on to explore art, but self-doubt, that old annoyance, convinced me there were better options, that I wasn’t good enough. In high school, with an amazing art teacher, there were several students better than me. I chose the safe & sensible plan of a technical degree, and fit art in as elective classes. If the high school buddies were good, well, university-level talent blew me away! The technical degree brought me to a job on the West Coast, very exciting. But without making time for art, I was missing part of myself; one of those high school art buddies reminded me of that, and I started looking for classes and ways to add art back in, to remind myself that I was more than the tech career that had taken over my life. I’m grateful for those pushes into art, both early and later on, and now I feel I’ve grown comfortable with the role of artist, at long last.
-What did it take to find and own your voice in your art?
In a practical sense, it takes time and money. My technology career helped build a buffer, for which I’m grateful. And it was an exciting time to be in technology, as it exploded. Thinking back, I wish I’d included a daily art practice sooner, as even five minutes in that brain state is wonderful.
When I started adding art back into the balance of my life, I took local classes, explored mediums, tried techniques and compositional ideas, and then I hit a slow spot. Somewhere in there, I had the idea to finally try to figure out Photoshop, which always felt intimidating. But like any other method, it doesn’t feel that way after, oh, at least a year? Once I added a technical element to my visual exploration, I started to feel like I was onto something that was very much me: handmade, yet collated and refined digitally, not any one medium but many.