Hey there!
So glad you landed here. Welcome to my blog Behind The Build: An Artistpreneur’s journey through life and business. I’m Christina, a forty-one year old woman living on the granite seacoast with my family building a life and business that I love. Here I’m going to share my lessons, the peaks, the valleys and tips I am learning along the way. So come along with me on this crazy adventure I call life, because adventures are meant to be shared.
Before I get to it I must set one expectation, and that is this blog will be filled with spelling and grammatical errors all throughout. I am not about perfect whatsoever. So you if you are looking for perfection, this blog is not for you. However, if you are someone that wants to know someone else that doesn’t have it all figured out even at 41, swears once in a while, okay more than once in a while, and is just trying to make a living doing something that they love, then you’re in the right place friend. Starting in the here and now my photography career has come full circle, finally! Which I will dive into a little later. Now for some “stuff” about me. I'm a really nostalgic person and have been obsessed with photographs my entire life. I’m pretty sure my photography and nostalgia go hand in hand. I’m a serious art lover. Making art, seeing art, anything art inspires me and fills my soul. I have always expressed myself and emotions through art. It’s my therapy along with exercise. Just like journaling; it’s something I have done since I was a little girl. I’m a green tea and chocolate lover, I love to play sports and do anything active outside. I am an avid skier and my rule on the hill is; if you can’t keep up I don’t ski with you, unless you are my children. However, I know there will be a day they will be skiing much faster than me and sadly I think that day is coming all too fast. Lucky for me I found a gentleman that keeps up so we rip it up together!
So more about my photography…..I went to college for photography and learned that documentary photography is amazing! I had this teacher that was down to earth, rough around the edges and straight up cool. I still hear her voice in my head, “GET CLOSER!” My photography career pretty much stopped when I graduated, which was in a recession and just an all around crappy time to graduate from college. While I was in college I started my own little marketing company that helped pay for my school and then some. So I parleyed that into a gig with an organic soda company. Thus my business education began, something that art college didn’t provide.
Fast forward over fourteen years later and I learned a whole heck of a lot of stuff. After leaving the food and beverage industry I stumbled around for a while chasing the Benjamins, if you know what I mean. I had two kids at this point and was trying to squeeze myself into a corporate career that was just not me. See, my years in F&B were never a 9-5 job, I didn’t have an office, I made my own hours and was compensated on my performance which meant I pretty much did what I wanted. I was allowed to be creative which allowed me to grow and learn in the business world. I’m not sure why I thought putting myself into a 9-5 job, living by someone else’s schedule, making someone else money was going to make me happy or even jive with me. It wouldn’t, it didn’t, DUH Christina! Truthfully though, I now know why I did that. I was chasing security and all the things that I thought came with a “real” job. Health insurance, a steady paycheck, job title that made me sound grown up and so many other things. When, in actuality I was putting my future into to someone (company) else’s hands. My future was tied to someone else’s whims and they could throw a monkey wrench into my plan any time and I could do nothing about it. YIKES!
After a an epic failure at a company that I loved, in an industry that fascinated me I decided that the fear of going back to a 9-5 was greater than the fear of failing in my own business. So I vowed on the day I was fired that I will NEVER work for anyone else and I will own my failures because they are MINE. I will embrace my failures and use them to make myself better and drive myself forward. The thought of looking for a job depressed me because I knew that there was no job out there that would make me happier than the one I had been trying to avoid my whole adult life. So I threw my hands up and said I’m going to monetize my photography, I’m going to create a business that fits my life and feeds my soul. I know on that day my Dad was smiling down on me and saying, “Finally Christina, go get-’em!” 2008 compared to now is so different in a really good way. Can I just say thank you to social media for making the world become obsessed with imagery! I mean, seriously the entire planet is obsessed. In 2008 people did not place the same value in an image as they do today. Imagery can be powerful!
