How I found My Work: it's OK to not quit

Hilary White; Sacred Art shop launch

Witty’s Lagoon, Metchosin, near Victoria, BC. c.1969. I remember everything about that day, even the dress, which was brown with coloured flowers and already too small for me at 3 and a half. My parents divorced and my mother and I went to live in Manchester a year or so after this. From then on, the deluge.

I had to teach myself how to work

A few years ago, some time after my mother died, a friend who knew us both well answered my question, “Am I very like her?” by saying, “You’re not a quitter.” I was raised in a time when we were told by adults all the time that it’s OK to quit, it’s OK to not commit to something and work hard at it. It was a big tenet of the hippie culture; if you get tired, give up. If you don’t feel like it, don’t bother. And whatever you do, don’t try and stick with something difficult.

A huge part of my long, strange and meandering path in life has been trying to figure out how to integrate work into my self-understanding. Because integrating work as a part of our identity wasn’t a big part of life growing up in the 60s and 70s. Mainly our parents were interested in trying to avoid it. But work has a lot to do with understanding ourselves.

GenX talks a lot about what it was like to be raised as children of the “freewheeling” hippies, now Boomers, and why we’re still angry about it. I think quite a lot of it came from the fact that our parents really never were very interested in anything we were doing, and used the excuse of being “open” and “non-judgemental” to cover their near total indifference to us, our aspirations and accomplishments.

That’s been a hell of a hard thing to overcome, frankly; if a kid is told in every way growing up that nothing he does or wants is important, no one should be surprised when he turns out a “slacker”. So work, what it meant and how to do it and keep doing it, was something we mainly had to figure out for ourselves.

I discovered in my teens that I liked working, how it gave me independence and some self-determination, helped me understand myself and my place in the world. There were still many years to go of wandering about, trying to figure out what I was even doing on this planet, and what the bloody hell was going on in the world, but at least figuring out the whole work thing was a start.

Finding myself in activism

I finally became deeply involved in conservative Catholic journalism and pro-life activism in which I was immersed from 1998 to 2015 - a period of time in which the world changed into something unrecognisable to many of us. What do you do when the world you are trying to save just… vanishes?

Catholic journalism; 15 years not wasted

As things got steadily worse and worse in the Church and the world, and a great many of the things I’d been expecting to happen started happening right in front of my eyes, I realised that the snowball of 1998 was by 2014 well and truly an avalanche and it might be a better idea to just get out of the way. Dive out of the way, I should say.

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in my new online shop!

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Gave up my job to get back to my work

But what else should I do? It was a pretty big question, and I knew instinctively that it could be answered by looking back. I had one secret card up my sleeve:

My secret hobby: studying classical academic drawing while journalisting. And drawing through cancer treatments. 2009-2013

After quitting my job and getting displaced by the 2016 Norcia earthquake, I kind of went into hiding for a few years. I needed to spend a lot of time rethinking; how do you recreate yourself after a deep, identity-building involvement in something consequential that has lasted through the best part of your adult life? I think you have to go back to the roots.

After the earthquake I spent 4.5 years in this little place in the country, far away and hard to get to, and slowly started remembering who I had been before and what was important.

It was clear that the answer was going to lie in finding my roots again, and creating something that would grow…

Figuring out who I am, with friends: 2017-2021 in the garden at San Martino

Slowly, and a bit painfully, I started remembering what I’d been before getting involved in All That. I remembered my grandmother and her painting and potting studio, and my grandfather in his garden. And I remembered the childhood spent poring over art books and haunting the gallery and museum in Victoria.

I remembered too my grandparents’ devotion to the arts as a form of service. They helped build their little town, Parksville, from the early pioneer days in the 1920s, by taking the things they loved and believed in and sharing them, teaching, building a community of artists and students.

Grandma and Grandpa, my father's parents, were the people I want to be like.

I’d spent half a lifetime trying to forget it, and now it came crowding back. This is who I really was.

One day, in a state of growing disquiet, I went down to the City, and found a poster in a shop window advertising a course:

Three and a half years of work

And I remembered that there was something I really did care about. And the more I did it, the more it grew into me and I into it.

I’ve given myself 5 years and I’m 3.5 in

I knew you don’t go from basic training in a skill to an established and successful brand, in any creative field, overnight. I had spent four years studying - at a small private classical atelier in Rome - as close to full time as I could afford, while I was working as a journalist. But it had been years since I’d finished, and I had never really considered seriously how one went from art student to working painter.

I signed up for the iconography course I’d seen the advert for, and I spent the last weeks of 2019 - the last moments before the world went completely mad - going down to Rome to learn a new trade. I realised it was going to take a while to learn the basic things I needed to get to a professional level, so I just decided to let it take the time it needed to take.

Commissions past and present

But I’m happy to say that at the same time I haven’t spent an hour of the last 3.5 years without a commission, usually more than one at a time. But honestly, commissions are slow and can’t keep body and soul together.

Scanner, professional brushes, paints and specialty pigments and the big easel. All bought with help from readers, patrons and friends.

It’s not all drawing and painting; learning how not to starve

I’ve had help every step of the way, all the way from my drawing classes to buying equipment to set up a professional painters’ studio. I’ve started making the scans for prints, and started doing drawings specifically intended for sale as prints.

Drawings and small paintings offered as prints in the Ko-fi shop now.

At some point, I realised that there were things on the list of stuff to learn and get good at that didn’t involve brushes or pencils. Something people don’t know about being an “artist” is that you don’t have to starve - the starving artist meme is a bit of silly nonsense made up by 19th c. Romanticism. The great painters of the past understood themselves to be entrepreneurs, business people. They treated their work like work, like what we would now call a home-based business. So, I’m doing everything I can to learn entrepreneurship, and modern online business practices.

I’ve been deep-diving into the world of online marketing for artists, and learning a great deal about how to make it all work. This is a well-blazed trail, and as it turns out there’s a whole online community of people out there making a living, and often doing quite well, and who like to help each other gain some security and success, enough at least to keep doing the work without worrying about feeding and housing themselves.

So…

The Shop!

With all that in mind, I’m very happy to announce the opening of my online shop at Hilary White; Sacred Art. This is where you can order high quality art prints of my drawings and paintings, printed on 100% cotton paper of the same type I use in my studio. I’ve got accounts open and ready with the fine art printers in the US and the UK, and we’re all set to go.

In addition to a chance to buy prints of my drawings, I’ve just added several items intended for the Christmas season. I’ve got tree ornaments and a set of cards, with both my own work printed on them and an original medieval miniature from a 15th century French manuscript, courtesy of the British Library.

I’m very happy to be able to offer people a chance to find some nice religious Christmas things. I’ve heard people say many times, and have found this myself, that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get really nice tasteful religious-oriented decorations, and especially cards, for Christmas.

These all come with shipping prices either built into the final price or listed below the item. You can see the full collection at…

Just the start

I’m very excited about all this, and now that I’ve worked out the details about how to create high quality scanned prints and other items, I’ve got all sorts of things planned. In addition to more paintings and drawings of my own, I’m looking forward to offering customers a chance to bring some of the beautiful but still obscure works by medieval artists as into their homes as prints. I’m also looking into the best ways to offer short courses in art history, basic drawing techniques and iconography.

I’m planning on integrating the shop, the courses and this Substack all in one place, and am right now looking for the right platform.

There is a whole world of forgotten art treasures that are being made available online by the museums and libraries that hold them as high resolution digital photographs. There is a wealth of beauty from the Christian centuries out there, and I can’t wait to share it with you all as I learn about it myself. We’re going forward in this together, and it’s very exciting. A friend said it a few months ago; “You’ve left behind Hilary White; journalist and become Hilary White; Sacred Art.”

Thanks again to all those who have come all this way with me. I certainly could not possibly have got this far without you.

HJMW.