It is never too late to make your dreams come true.
Just look at Joanne Swanson, now 47, who wanted to be a painter.
She never even picked up a paintbrush until six years ago. Now her
original works and prints are sold in galleries. She will soon be
included on a website for select Native American artists. She has
completed about 100 paintings of various sizes.
"I feel blessed doing what I do because I love to paint," said Swanson,
a Norton Sound woman now living in Koyuk. "The icing on the cake is that
it’s selling and there are times when I can’t believe it."
Swanson was born at fish camp on the Shaktoolik River. Her father was a
Public Health Service sanitarian whose job took him around the region
and gave him an income that allowed the family to buy books. Reading
became "an escape of sorts" for Swanson, who found articles about Europe
and imagined she was in other countries.
Swanson clearly remembers a childhood experience in which she believes
God told her she would be someone special. She was seven at the time,
picking berries alone one evening after her mother and sisters quit for
the day and left for camp.
The thought came to her that she would be someone special. "I said, ‘No,
I don’t want to be someone special,’" she remembers. Later she knew she
wanted to be a painter.
She graduated from Unalakleet’s Covenant High School in 1971 having
never taken an art class. She entered college but soon quit.
She later gained self-confidence through her marriage to Lee Eckels, a
Ryan Air pilot.
"I sensed he saw possibilities and potential for my life," she said.
"Like my present husband, he encouraged me in whatever my interests were
at that time."
Eckels was killed in a plane crash in July 1980. Though shattered,
Swanson entered Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage that fall as
planned. She earned an education degree in 1985.
She married Chip Swanson, a Covenant Church minister, in 1990. A few
years later, when the couple and their two children lived in Bethel,
Swanson found she wanted to paint.
"But I can’t start painting till I know how to paint," she told herself.
So she spent the next year and a half reading about painting. In 1993
she bought watercolor paints and brushes at a garage sale. That
December, as a gift for her husband, she did her first painting: A scene
of people outside the Covenant Church in Unalakleet.
She did not paint again until the family lived in Wasilla for a year.
When friends asked to buy some of her works, she knew her time had come.
"Then I knew, yes, I’m going to be an artist," she remembers.
Swanson has been painting ever since. Between cooking and cleaning at
home she may paint for just ten minutes or a whole morning. She is still
searching for a style of painting all her own.
The hardest thing about painting, Swanson said, has been the lack of
fellow artists to talk to. She now phones artists around the country for
support.
Another challenge is dealing with the business side of selling her
works, and with public recognition.
"Sometimes I want to live in a box and not let anybody know I’m an
artist," she said.
A Native Alaskan expressing herself with watercolors, Swanson teeters
between two worlds.
"I didn’t have ancestors who were watercolor artists; I don’t have that
background," Swanson said. "It’s like living in two worlds that are
worlds apart. My mind is off in the country picking berries and cutting
fish. Meanwhile I’m at the desk and painting."
Swanson remembers a teacher who seemed amused that Eskimo children could
learn. She, in turn, found his attitude amusing which made for an
understanding between the two. She later read of European explorers’
views of Native Americans as 'vicious savages,' and wondered if he, too,
had read about that.
"We, like anybody else in the world, have talent," Swanson said. "We,
like anybody else in the world, need to be challenged. We, like anybody
else in the world, can learn. I think there’s a lot of talent in the
villages, lots of potential, but it’s not tapped."
Copyright © Carol Gales. Used with permission.
