The Brand Is Your Mind

I spent Thursday and Friday watching high school students compete at State Skills USA in Grand Island, Nebraska. These are kids who build things and lead things. Welders, graphic designers, automotive techs, culinary artists, precision machinists, but also public speakers, community service organizers, students who compete in employment interviews and promotional presentations. The technical side and the leadership side, all of it. They train for months, sometimes years, then stand in front of judges and prove what they know.

Several of ours came home as State champions. A few are headed to Atlanta in June for nationals. And what struck me, watching them, wasn’t the winning. It was the work that got them there. The failures they’d already absorbed. The diligence that shows up in their hands before their heads even register what they’re doing. These kids have logged so many hours that their craft has become automatic, instinctive, part of who they are.

I love that. I love when excellence arrives through repetition and failure and stubbornness rather than talent alone. It is one of the things I will miss the most when I retire from teaching.

But here’s the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about while I watched: every one of those students had picked a lane. Welding. Graphic design. Culinary. Medical math. The competition required it. The training demanded it. You can’t become State champion in “a little of everything.”

And that's good. For them, that works. But somewhere on the long drive back across the Nebraska plains, I started wrestling again with something I've fought for most of my professional life.

What do you do when your brain won't let you pick one area to specialize in?

Let me show you what I mean.

This week was a blur. Monday was a school holiday, I worked in the woodshop on a table. Tuesday I was gone all day at a track meet, brainstorming and verbal notes for a painting due in a few weeks. Tuesday evening I was testing silk dyes and gelli printing. Wednesday I was technically in the building, but every high school grade was out on some project or field experience. I had no classes and was able to work on the State Medalist Series a mixed media project. Thursday and Friday I was two hours east with the Skills USA team.

Painting time? Almost none. But I did finish a piece for a friend that’s getting mailed out Monday. And I finally cracked the color tests for Elise’s wedding party gifts.

Silk dye color tests for hand-painted neck scarves, bag scarves, jewelry bag and scrunchies

Let me tell you about those colors.

I’m hand-dyeing silk scarves, bag scarves, and scrunchies for each woman in her wedding party. I haven’t painted silk in years, and I’d forgotten how preposterously saturated Jacquard Red Label silk dyes are. Holy buckets. Elise’s palette is all soft and muted, dusty rose, sage, faded lavender, and here I am working with dyes that look like they were designed to blind astronauts from orbit. In some cases, one part dye to fifty parts water, and even then I’m to saturated.

But she loved them. The struggle was worth it. Six weeks out from the ceremony now, and the studio is starting to fill up with color swatches and drying racks and those particular anxieties that come when someone you love trusts you with something that matters.

Here’s what I noticed while color mixing: I was doing silk dyes Tuesday night, then printmaking cleanup Wednesday morning, then driving to Grand Island Thursday to watch students compete in a dozen different disciplines, then Friday afternoon wandering the Stuhr Museum with a notebook, scribbling a travel story for Unhurried Letters.

All different. None of it fitting neatly into a single lane.

Railroad Town at the Stuhr Museum in Grand Island, NE.

I’ve been rebuilding my website. It’s old and janky and held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape. Most of the rebuild I don’t enjoy, logistics, technical fiddling, the kind of work that makes my ADD brain want to run screaming into the yard. But one part I loved: writing a manifesto-style paragraph for each collection. Explaining not just what the work is, but what I was thinking and feeling when I made it.

That’s when the old question surfaced again.

Every high-end artist branding, or business course I’ve ever taken says the same thing: find a lane and stay in it. Make yourself easy to categorize. Be consistent. Build recognition. The advice is everywhere, and it makes sense for a certain kind of artist playing a certain kind of game and interested in participating in the established art canon. It's not me. 

I'm neurodivergent. God-given, and what I now, as an adult, consider gifts. ADD, dyslexic, occasionally synesthetic. My brain doesn’t enjoy staying in one area for long, and that includes mediums. I spent thirty years where photography was my primary language, but I was always painting, sculpting, experimenting on the side. Now I work mostly in mixed media, oil and cold wax, encaustic, resin, and still photography. When I put together my collections, they look wildly different from one another. Like different artists made them.

I’ve tried picking a lane. Many times. Ugh. I get bored…fast. Something in me keeps escaping, keeps finding a new material or process that lights up a different room in my head.

So, I talked with a mentor this week. Told him about the struggle. Asked how to handle branding when your collections don’t visually connect.

His answer was a new beginning for me.

He said the “find a lane” advice was designed for artists trying to earn the approval of gallerists and curators, people who manage inventory and need to pitch work to their existing collector base. It’s about their convenience, dressed up as strategy.

But I’m not playing that game. I’m building direct relationships with collectors through my own platform. That changes everything. How could I not have realized this before?

Then he said something I’ve been turning over in my head ever since: The brand isn’t the style. The brand is your mind.

A small painting I finished for a friend. It folds into an envelope

Malcolm Gladwell writes about psychology, then crime, then sports, then music history. Wildly different subjects. But every book is unmistakably Gladwell. The brand is the lens. The curiosity. The way of seeing. Gerhard Richter paints photorealistic work and pure abstraction, sometimes in the same exhibition. He didn’t pick a lane. He picked a philosophy.

My mentor put it this way: Your brand is the neurodivergent, synesthetic, experimentalist mind that refuses to be imprisoned by a single medium. That’s not a liability. In direct-to-collector relationships, that’s a magnetic story, the real you, raw and authentic.

People don’t want products. They buy stories they want to be part of. And the emotional pull isn’t “I consistently make blue abstracts.” It’s something far more compelling: I experience the world differently. My brain doesn’t separate photography from painting from sculpture the way most people do, it sees all of it as one language. My collections may look like they came from different artists. They didn’t. They came from different rooms in the same restless mind.

That's a story someone tells at a dinner party. That's the story that makes a collector, not just a buyer.

I tell my students a version of the same thing all the time: celebrate your differences. Your unique attributes aren't liabilities. Don't let anyone minimize the only-one-of-you that exists.

Which brings me back to Grand Island. I was able to spend several hours at the Stuhr Museum on Friday while I had some down time. It's a living history site just outside town, prairie buildings, old railroad town, the kind of place where you can hear wind through cottonwoods and imagine a century falling away.

I walked. I sat. I wrote. A travel story started taking shape, something for the second mailing of Unhurried Letters. It has nothing to do with painting or cold wax or resin. It’s just a story about a place and a moment and the particular quality of light that afternoon.

And that felt right. Not like a distraction from the "real" work. Like another room in the same house.

Stuhr Building entrance with Wings on the Platte Art Show set-up.

Unhurried Letters lives in that same house. The monthly envelope with a handwritten travel story, a fine art print, a regional recipe card, and a postcard that can be kept or shared with another. All of it something beautiful to hold and more importantly, the nod of encouragement, the excuse to take 15 minutes out of a day just for you. It ships in two weeks. Several of you have already decided to try it. For those still curious, the link is at the bottom of this post.

But here's what I really want to say, and it's not about the envelopes. If you've ever felt like your creative interests were too scattered, too inconsistent, too hard to explain, I see you. The world loves a neat story. It loves artists who make one thing, reliably, forever. And there's nothing wrong with that. Some people are built for lanes.

But some of us aren’t. Some of us have brains that move through mediums like weather through seasons. Different, but all part of the same climate. All coming from the same place.

Maybe that’s not a bug to fix. Maybe it’s the whole point.

The brand isn’t the style. It’s the mind. It’s the restless curiosity that keeps circling back to one question: what happens if I try this?

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

P.S. — Unhurried Letters ships in two weeks. Founders pricing is $15/month. A handwritten travel story, a fine art print, a recipe from somewhere far away. Twenty minutes once a month, in your hands, asking nothing from you but presence. If that sounds like something you need: Unhurried Letters