How I Actually Became an Artist

People see the paintings now and assume it always looked like this. It did not.

My real start was the front wall of a physical therapy clinic in a small Michigan town. I was working there as a PT assistant, one of three jobs I was holding together as a newly single mom of two. I was also a certified personal trainer, driving to women's homes to help them get in shape with whatever equipment they already had, hauling along whatever extra I could carry to help them reach their goals. And in the hours that were left, I painted.

The clinic owner knew I painted and hired me to make a series of sports paintings for the wall patients passed on their way through rehab. People would stop, look, and ask who did them. That was the whole beginning.

Those questions turned into commissions. I took anything anyone would pay me for. Pets. Flowers. A piece to match somebody's couch, or their kid's comforter. No job was beneath me. I needed the work and I needed the money, and I did not turn a single one down.

I painted at night, after my shifts and after my kids were asleep, and on any weekend hour I could find. I was not thriving. I was barely making it. There was a Dollar Store across from my little apartment, and I would walk over and buy the cheapest food that would stretch the furthest. I lived next to a McDonald's, close enough that the smell of the fries came through the windows and the glow of the golden arches was the view out my bedroom window. I could hear the air brakes from the 24 hour truck stop all night.

Here is why I shared that part. That was the point where a lot of people would not have quietly set the brushes down. They would have thrown them against the wall in exhaustion and given up, because carrying all of that was a lot. I understand it completely. I did not want my kids to think I could not take care of them. I did not want them to see how tired I was. I did not want them to go without a single thing they needed. And underneath all of it, being an artist was a dream I had buried a long time ago. It never came first when I was married, and now it was being smothered again, and I would not let go of it. It felt like the only true part of me still trying to hold on, when every other single thing in my life had been uprooted. I felt like a nobody. I had no idea how the future was going to play out.

Here is where all that stubbornness led. Those same hands have painted live on Maui, in Scottsdale, and in Las Vegas, shown in galleries across the country, and sent work home to collectors here and overseas. Somewhere along the way I made a deliberate choice to step out on my own. Not because I have anything against galleries, I am grateful for those years and the doors they opened, but because what I really wanted was to work closely with the people who live with my art. So now I run my own business, Dani Abbott Fine Art, which still feels a little surreal to type. I get to choose the work: painting one on one with collectors to make the piece they have always dreamed of owning, and taking on commissions, designer partnerships, and larger projects for luxury homes and spaces through Abbott Atelier, the commission and trade side of what I do. The girl watching those arches flicker at night could not have pictured any of it.

The spark is older than all of it. It goes back to my great-grandfather, a Swedish woodworker whose carvings I grew up staring at. I wrote about him in Swedish Inspiration. He is the reason any of this started.

I am telling you this because paths almost never look the way we picture them. Mine went through three jobs and a Dollar Store and a bedroom that glowed fast-food yellow, with truck brakes hissing outside all night. If you are somewhere in the messy middle of yours, wondering whether the thing you love is worth holding onto, it might help to know that this is often exactly what a beginning looks like. Do not let go of it.

More of the story soon. And if you want to follow the work as it happens now, I would love to have you in my Collector's Circle.

Warmly,

Dani