Earlier this week I came across a short video that opened with a phrase I suspect many of us have used privately about ourselves: a graveyard of half-finished projects. A guitar leaning in the corner. A half-built website. Sketchbooks that do not resemble one another. Tools and materials from an obsession that lasted six months and then gave way to something else. The implication was clear. If you were disciplined, if you were serious, if you were properly focused, your path would look cleaner than that.
I recognized myself in the image, though not in the shame attached to it, or at least not anymore.
For most of my adult life my studio has not looked linear. It has looked layered. Clay dust and wood shavings have shared space with encaustic tools, resin, paint and camera gear. A piece of furniture for my daughter’s wedding sits partly imagined while cabinet doors at school wait for paint that will outlast my tenure there. Some afternoons are given to handwritten letters. Others to cleaning and resetting a space so that thinking can happen again. From the outside, I imagine it appears scattered, as though I have refused to choose a single lane.
But standing inside it, it has rarely felt chaotic. It has felt cumulative...but sometimes still a challenge to overcome guilt for not finishing.
When I was younger, I measured myself against artists whose work read as unmistakably singular. The painter who found a palette and never left it. The photographer known for one subject and one kind of light. The sculptor whose exhibitions line up like a coherent paragraph. Their path looked straight. Intentional. Marketable. Meanwhile, my own shelves held evidence of multiple fascinations, mediums entered and exited, questions pursued and then absorbed into something else. It was easy, in those years, to wonder if I had missed the memo on how to stay put long enough to be taken seriously.
At sixty-five, that question has continued to soften. Age does that if you let it. It sands down the sharp edges of comparison and leaves you with something quieter, something more structural. I am less interested now in whether I should have specialized and more interested in what this layered life uniquely allows me to see. When you have lived long enough, you realize the real measure is not how straight your path looked from a distance, but whether it built a vantage point you could not have reached any other way.
Scaffolds Not Graveyards
The language of psychology would call some of this an M-shaped mind, multiple pillars of depth connected by curiosity. It would speak of far transfer, the ability to take an insight from one domain and apply it unexpectedly in another. It would point to neuroplasticity and the way novelty builds exploratory circuits while repetition stabilizes them. All of that is true enough. But what matters to me more now than the terminology is the vantage point those decades have built.
When I look back, what once felt like lack of direction and comittment to a medium begin to resemble scaffolding. And if I am honest, there are moments now when I cannot quite tell where intention ended and providence began. Some of the seasons I entered willingly. Others I would not have chosen at the time. Yet each one added height. Each one strengthened something I did not know I would need later. What felt random from ground level now looks almost arranged, as though the structure was rising even when I did not fully understand what was being built.
Scaffolding is not the building. It is temporary and often inelegant. You do not showcase it. You dismantle it once the structure can stand on its own. But without it you cannot reach the angles required to build anything complex. It holds you steady while something else rises. It allows you to work above your original line of sight.
The years I spent in the corporate world, coaching, or building franchises, were not a detour from art. They were scaffolding. Watching young people respond to pressure, to failure, to growth, taught me something about pacing and endurance that surfaces every time I approach a long project. The seasons immersed in art history were not academic indulgence. They trained my eye to recognize lineage and to understand that nothing is created in isolation. Ceramics taught me to respect heat and unpredictability. Wood taught me about grain, resistance, and the patience required to move with rather than against a material. Writing forced clarity. Teaching forced articulation.
M Shaped Mind
None of those seasons were wasted. None of them required that I abandon the others permanently. They were semesters or seasons, not graves.
The pain point for many artists who live this way is not that they have multiple interests. It is the suspicion that those interests have diluted them. That somewhere along the way they should have committed to one pillar and built it as high as possible, instead of constructing several and connecting them later. When peers appear to move in straight lines, it is easy to feel behind, as though coherence belongs only to those who chose early and stayed.
But height is not the only measure of a life’s work. Breadth, lived long enough, becomes depth of a different kind. It becomes perspective. From the ground, scaffolding looks messy. From above, it reveals what was being built all along.
This week did not belong to one discipline. I moved between mediums and tasks that would not fit comfortably on a single line of a résumé. Yet what struck me, more than the variety, was the way each thread informed the others. The way patience learned in one material steadied my hand in another. The way years of studying composition shaped the cadence of a letter. The way teaching continues to influence how I think about leaving something meaningful behind in a room that will outlast me.
That is not fragmentation. That is layering.
At some point in a long creative life, the question shifts. You stop asking whether you should have specialized and start asking what your layered life uniquely allows you to see. What patterns are visible to you because you have moved through multiple domains? What connections feel obvious now that once would have seemed unrelated? What redundancies have made you less fragile and more adaptable?
Quiet confidence grows from those questions.
Neural Networks
It does not require defending your path or arguing with a culture that prizes singular focus. It simply recognizes that coherence can emerge from integration as surely as it can from specialization. The earlier seasons of exploration were not evidence of distraction. They were structure being assembled piece by piece, sometimes unconsciously.
The graveyard metaphor assumes something died. Scaffolding assumes something was under construction. I know which interpretation fits my life more honestly.
I am less concerned now with proving range and more concerned with weaving threads. The work in front of me may still span mediums, but it is no longer driven by the need to try everything. It is informed by having tried enough to understand what matters. The energy feels different. Less restless. More integrated.
If you find yourself looking back at a shelf of former fascinations, resist the reflex to label them failures. Ask instead what they made possible. What angles they allowed you to reach. What habits of mind they strengthened. And then ask what you can see from where you now stand that you could not have seen without them.
You do not have to collapse your life into one narrow lane to be taken seriously. You may simply need to climb the scaffolding you have already built and look outward. From up there, the fields look different. The rows align. The wind still moves across them, but you are no longer standing in it wondering which direction to run. You can see the pattern. And sometimes, if you stand there long enough, you begin to sense that the pattern was never entirely accidental.
The view changes when you do.
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
The view Changes when You Do.
The State Medalist Portrait Series: An Introduction