Faith, Hope and Aspirations

When I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I had urges. They just wouldn’t be ignored. There was a Saturday TV show in the Fifties that captivated me. Draw with Frank Webb. He exuded confidence and made me feel I could do this. All I knew was those pesky urges wanted something creative to do.

I was always building stuff in the backyard, aware several skills were lacking since whatever I built kept falling over, obviously more knowledge was required. That of course would take years of study to acquire.

I needed something right now to busy myself until that could happen. I discovered that drawing, especially when Frank showed us step by step how to do it, gave my creative passion a needed outlet, and this seemed manageable.

But it was in the fifth grade that I discovered my real propensity for arts and crafts. After hand building a ceramic candy dish, rolling out the clay, pressing the Oak leaf just right so all the delicate veins transfered to the damp clay, carefully cutting around the edge of the leaf then shaping it into a useful vessel, was a delicious experience for me. My instincts woke up.

It was experimenting with glazes that inspired me the most, because everything, including the dried clay, was gray, I had only my imagination to guide me, the jars were marked, dark green, and light green but were both gray, so my inner eye had to visualize if I paint dark green on the edge then slightly blend and bleed into the Lighter green and add just a touch of orange in the center attempting to make it look like the leaf in my minds eye. When it was fired the glaze would melt into itself, and what excited me was that serendipitous magic that brought it to life.

It was a careful labor of love. But when the pieces came back from the kiln, mine was not with them, very disappointing I was so anxious to see how my clever technique worked, it turned out it ended up in another class. It was eventually found mixed in with the adult classes’ finished pottery. Wow!

Pretty high praise for an aspiring ten year old, I was officially a budding artist. And as it turned out that inner eye was spot on, it was a beautiful glaze. All the rest of that year, it was full throttle letting my artistic mojo work at every opportunity.

Especially helping with classroom holiday decorations, Valentines, Presidents’ Day, Easter you name it, it had my creativity stamped all over it. The encouragement came from my teacher, the marvelous Mrs. Thurman she became my second art mentor, of which there were many to follow.

Jump ahead to two marriages and three children later, Marin County, late 60’s, I wanted to get back to satisfying that urge that seemed to relentlessly follow me. I decided to go to Art school, and fortune smiled on me. College Of Marin had an amazing Art Department.

Probably because it was just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, and the raw beauty of Marin County attracted the best, most accomplished artists to teach there, I took every art class they offered. The passion was strong but the direction needed guidance. What ever class I took became my obsession until it was mine to excel in. Painting, sculpting, pottery, photography, my appetite was insatiable.

I was an experimenter and because of that my teachers encouraged me. Mr, Wiedenhoffer the ceramics instructor built a special dark room and ordered some liquid emulsions just so I could experiment glazing my photographs onto ceramic sculptures. That was fun.

Even with all my expert training in such a variety of disciplines, I still had not considered art as a real profession, one that could support me anyway. For some reason self doubt and the feeling I just wasn’t successful artist material plagued me. School was over, and in time, so was my marriage, I had choices to make.

Eventually fate moved me to South Lake Tahoe where my first two kids lived, their dad was a saxophone player and took a job with a band for six months in Florida, so I moved into their modest single wide trailer and did my best to be a mother to my three amazing kids.

While there I met, Lawrence Kennedy, a Paraphysiologist, where he was speaking at a lecture,. We struck up a conversation, his theory of harnessing the psychic energy fascinated me. I wanted to know more, so he invited me to attend one of his classes. When he discovered I had artistic abilities he agreed to a trade, posters and photos for class tuition. Art was always opening new doors for me. It was like a universal passport.

Soon after he hired me to be his Production Manager, managing his upcoming lectures, he rented booths at Psychic conventions drumming up clients to take his classes in spoon bending, and pyramid power. I did all his posters, radio spots and booked halls for his lectures in Occult studies, it was the 70’s, it was a hot topic. This is how I eventually landed in Los Angeles. But that is another story needing to be written. And what a fascinating adventure it was. That story has since been written and can be read here

Now living In L.A. I took jobs as receptionist or secretarial office work to pay for expenses, but always on the lookout for ways to utilize my artistic prowess.

I rented a garage right on the Venice Canals and set up a studio to carve stone sculptures on weekends, working a job during the week to pay for it.

It was while working as receptionist for an Airplane Leasing Company in Beverly Hills that my boss learned I could sculpt and commissioned me to do a portrait of his two children In bronze. Wow, what was to follow was the beginning of the rest of my life. I accepted of course and thus began my romance with bronze sculpture.

The bust turned out beautifully and was so well received that they gave me a six week paid vacation to go to the town frequented by Michaelangelo, Pietrasanta, Italy to study his technique of marble carving, They hired me to carve a monumental size Eagles head for their foyer.

I signed up to take a sculpting course so I could learn the Italian Technique of marble carving. I carved 550 lbs of Carrara Marble into an Eagle’s head. Ah Italy, romantic, historic Pietrasanta, translated means sacred stone or spirit in the stone. Another fun story waiting to be told. So many lives... I must hurry.

It seems all I had to do was surrender to my passion to have the courage to quit my day job and re-enter the world as a committed working artist. It was equivalent to having the rug pulled out from under me to see if I could land solid on my feet. Scary. My teen daughter had chosen to stay with her father living in the Redwoods, when I decided to move to L.A. I was thirty-three and free, twenty-five years later about to unleash the eight year old artist in me. I was pretty jazzed.

My first job as an artist was to apprentice at the bronze foundry that produced my first bust of the children, and with my experience in photography, and graphic art, I proved to be helpful in promoting the sculptors by creating their portfolios.

I was trained at pouring, cleaning, trimming and gating the waxes, preparing them for a ceramic shell to be baked and wax melted waiting for the molten bronze to fill the negative space that became the sculpture. Bronze is a labor intensive medium. I knocked off the hard shells and grounded off the gates used to feed the bronze to the sculpture. Grueling, gritty, dirty work, I loved every minute of it, loved the power tools. It was liberating, I was learning from the bottom up, in time I became a patina artist, and was actually requested by some of the regulars wanting me to put the finishing touch on their sculptures. Clearly my inner child was out to play.

Part of the perks of the job, was being able to sculpt and produce my own work, I did office work in trade, (new twist) to pay for the cost of the bronze and molds, I did all my own grunt work, and soon became the resident in-house artist, ready to help clients needing a commemorative work for their city. One such commission was sculpting a larger than life bust of Ronald Regan for the Monticito City Hall, as well as a bust of Pappy Boyington the WWII Black Sheep Squadron hero. In Tucson, AZ

As soon as I made up my mind to follow my heart’s desire and wake up my childhood dream, the doors just seemed to miraculously open and the fears and self imposed limits disappeared, Poof! out of mind, from then on my self doubt turned to ‘of course I can, no problem’. My destination was decided I was at last Jan Portugal, a bona fide artist, for real and true. All it took was to make that initial decision.

Now I had a body of work to market. So deciding to skip the middle man I opened my own gallery. It was often touch and go, the rent on the gallery was higher than any I had ever paid anywhere and in the charming but less than affluent town of Dayton, the oldest town in Nevada, I had a hard time surviving with Walmart as my competition but if you want living proof that God provides it’s me.

That was fifty years ago, during those many years as a working artist, I have managed to support my self, open two art galleries bought a modest house and now about to turn eighty-two I may have slowed down, but the creative force is still urging me on, and thanks to Vocal for this chance to turn my adventurous life into a storytelling art.

Vocal has given me a new venue of expression and I’m forever grateful for the encouragement. It feels as if this latest craft will only get better and more interesting as I continue to recall a lifetime of adventures. I have so much to share.

My parting advice is time worn and age old, learn all you can about your own passion, invest in yourself, be inspired, dream large, trust that God will provide as long as you are willing to stay in the game. With all that, failure is just not an option.

...to be continued.

If you enjoyed my story you can view my writing portfolio here.