It
took Aleta Pippin 10 years to decide it was OK to be an artist.
Nationally recognized as an astute businesswoman, she
didn't know how to relax and become her most authentic self. These days
she is gaining the attention for her art that she already enjoys in the
business world.
Pippin says she has finally learned to paint from the
heart and not worry about what other people think of her art or of her.
But getting to this point didn't come easy.
Pippin's odyssey of self-discovery began when she moved
to Santa Fe in 1991. "I think we boomers are constantly searching for
greater meaning; I know I spent my whole life wondering who I am," the
56-year-old says.
"Remember EST?" she giggles. "I've been on that
bandwagon myself."
She has written books like "Sit Still and Succeed," "Say
Yes to Success NOW!" and "7 Habits for a Centered Person" that were sold
on her Authentic Entrepreneur web site.
She knows her subject. In 1984, during a cyclical
downswing in the oil and gas business, her husband, Corky Weaver, was
forced to lay off Pippin, his vice president for administration and
investor relations, from his Houston-based company, Weaver Exploration.
Moving on
Looking for a business of her own, Pippin purchased a
small executive-suite business. After nine months of working 12-hour
days, six days a week, she looked at her options: "all two of them -
sell the business or expand."
She opened the larger Front Office Business Centers.
Shortly after that, Weaver joined Pippin and she brought in a general
manager. By '91, Front Office owned four large executive-suite business
centers in Houston, and Pippin and Weaver could pursue their dream of
living a semi-retired existence in Santa Fe.
But this admitted Type A+ personality got the bends
trying to decompress too fast. She had a hard time adjusting to life
without a Day-Timer. "Who am I?" she wondered. "What do I do?"
She saw the name, Roberta Harris, in a small ad for
painting classes, recognized that Harris was a Houston artist and, on an
impulse, signed up for the class.
It wasn't as wild an impulse as it seemed. When Pippin
was a child, she had loved to draw and paint. But her family background,
she says, was "very naive."
"We never went to an art gallery, never went to a
museum. I had no idea what the options were for art. It didn't seem like
anything a person could actually do," she says.
At age 18, right out of high school, she married and
went to work. Two children came along, and her career in business
continued and grew.
"From 18 to fortysomething, I would pick up a pencil
every now and then and draw something. I draw very realistically."
Exploration
In Harris' class, Pippin started by painting faces and then included
landscapes. "I couldn't do it as a hobby, though," she says ruefully.
"This was my temperament. I couldn't just enjoy it. I thought I had to
make a living at it."
When she wasn't an instant success as an artist, she quit painting and
began searching for - something.
Call it midlife crisis, empty-nest syndrome, menopause or just
existential angst, Pippin dragged the patient Weaver through two moves
in Santa Fe and four in other states, looking for her elusive self.
"I spent 10 years wondering what I am supposed to be doing with my life.
I spent a year studying to be a Unity minister, and when I wasn't
accepted to seminary right away, I decided that wasn't it.
"I moved us to California in 1998 to join the National Speakers'
Association, and never made a speech. I didn't enjoy Southern California - we
were too near the ocean and it was gray all the time - so we moved
further north. Then we went to Las Vegas, Nevada."
There, she started painting again, but initially wasn't happy with her work or her
studies. Finally, pulled by love for her daughter and two grandchildren
who live in Santa Fe, Pippin and Weaver returned to New Mexico in 2003.
"Sometimes you need to leave to know what you've left behind," she says.
"I finally realized that we can second-guess ourselves forever, but
we're not really here for a purpose but to focus, and in that
focus our God-self flows through and in that is our true meaning for
being," she says. "I
make art. Maybe it's my age or where I've evolved to, but I've finally
quit questioning it."
Aleta Pippin's
paintings have been praised as "joyful" and "healing." This
is "More to
the World than the Eyes See," an acrylic on canvas.
Finding Direction
With this new hard-won wisdom came liberation as an artist as well. Back
in 1991, Pippin had taken her self-described "sweet little bucolic
paintings" to a master class taught by Alex Shundi. He looked at them
for a long time and turned and asked her gently, "Why are you painting
these?" She was devastated at the time. "I don't know what else to
paint," she told him.
"Abstraction wasn't something I was drawn to," she says, but Pippin
listened closely as Shundi taught. "He helped me to understand that
abstraction has the same technical criteria as landscapes - design,
color, value and shape still have to be considered."
Coming home to Santa Fe three years ago, she remembered those lessons as
she sat in her studio carved out of a guesthouse on her and her
husband's property. "I realized I was really tired of visually
replicating something all the time. I needed to experiment."
At the same time, she switched from oil to acrylic paint and decided to
push the new medium to its limit. Soon, Pippin threw away the brushes,
too. Her new works which she labels "controlled chaos," are poured paint
on canvas or paper. They have been getting larger and larger. Lately she
has been adding a high gloss with resin or acrylic airplane gloss.
She shows with the Santa Fe Society of Artists, of which she
is president this year, and as a member of the limited-partnership Artistas de Santa Fe Gallery.
Ironically, now that Pippin has let go of the need to be commercially
successful, the new paintings have sold to individual and corporate
collectors as her earlier work never did, drawing prices in the high
four figures.
The paintings have been praised as "joyful" and "healing."
For Pippin, it is finally all about the art.
