The Jeanne Oliver Podcast Episode Nineteen | Trust Your Gut with Wendy McWilliams

On this episode Jeanne talks with self-taught painter Wendy McWilliams. During a crisis in Wendy’s own life she picks up a new “hobby” that changes her life. When she painted her first painting it was awful but she heard a voice inside say, “Do it again and this time relax” and she did. The joy from painting has now led her to be a working artist and she shares a bit of the journey during this interview.

Episode Notes

Podcast 019 | Follow Your Gut with Wendy McWilliams

 

On this episode, Jeanne chats with Wendy McWilliams, an abstract painter, teacher, and health coach whose work stops you in your tracks.

 

3:30 “I really was not artsy in any way I didn’t think, but I always had a creative energy about

me…”

 

4:52 “I just picked up this little ‘Learn to Paint an Orchid’ book, and some cheap little brushes, and acrylic paint tubes, and a pad of white paper, and I started painting this orchid and it looked so horrible.”

 

5:41 “I had a voice that came to me, and the voice said to me ‘Paint it again but relax.’”

 

6:45 “I basically became born again, I was reborn as a different creature, a different person than I was before painting.”

 

8:22 “I didn’t grow up in a family that appreciated art…art was not something that was highlighted in my home at all. It was like a foreign country I was going to for the first time in my life.”

 

9:35 “I’m one who listens to myself and my intuition very heavily, it’s gotten me everywhere I am in life…”

 

15:56 “I’ve had 22 jobs. A lot of my jobs were crazy stuff that nobody should apply for without knowing anything about it. Like welding sheet metal at a factory.”

 

16:19 “I would just go for it, you know?”

 

19:59 “I heard somewhere that all entertainers and people that are artists in any way have a deep-seated need to be accepted, to be loved.”

 

21:00 “I realized that what matters is to keep going.”

 

26:55 “To be honest with you, I thought my whole art career was going to go down the tubes because of this quarantine. I thought, ‘who’s going to buy art?”

 

29:03 “I come from the place that creation is always wanting more. Whenever you create, I feel like it’s a channel from God, a channel through me.”

 

35:38 “Isn’t that an interesting thing when it comes to the creative endeavors that there would be anyone that thinks there’s not the right to actually make a living from that.”

 

36:43 “Visual artists we have this starving artist stereotype that will not die. And it takes people like me and you talking about this to let people know that Justin Timberlake doesn’t go do concerts for free.”

 

37:49 “Don’t worry about what people think about you. You have to let go of trying to please everybody, you’re not going to please everybody.”

 

38:40 “You have to listen to yourself and trust yourself, and don’t be afraid of people’s judgments.”