Turning 40 and Becoming an Artist

Forty Drinks

Turning 40 and Becoming an Artist

Joanne Morton declared herself an artist when she turned 40. She spent the summer with a friend in Miami painting, drawing and photographing mangoes that fell from a neighbor’s tree into her backyard. She always hesitated to call herself an artist, but here she was spending a month drawing mangoes. Joanne didn’t think she could draw, so how could she be an artist? A wise friend of hers told her, “Joanne, you can draw. You just have to accept the way you draw.” At 45, she left her apartment of 16 years in New York City to travel the country and begin an interactive community art project, which she’s still working on to this day.

Guest Bio

Joanne Morton is an artist, speaker, event producer, creative expression strategist, and community engagement activist. Originally from the Midwest, Joanne spent many years in New York City until 2010 when she was inspired to become a traveling artist. Joanne uses art, gratitude, laughter, and visualization together to encourage conversation and action to create hope for ourselves, communities and world.

Her art and events help people activate positive energy within themselves so they go from feeling stressed and frustrated to feel relaxed and motivated. When people feel relaxed it Resets Energy, Creates Ease and Sustains Success in their lives thus giving them motivation to collaborate to create positive change with others.

Joanne is currently working on her interactive community engagement art project CIRCLES OF HOPE: Co-Creating Positive Change. When we can see our collective vision, it inspires action and solutions that uplifts others. Everyone is invited to be a part of it - reach out to her online!

Declaring Herself an Artist

Joanne turned 40 in 2005 when she was living in NYC. She remembers asking her friends to kick in money so she could buy a 40-gig iPod to celebrate her 40th birthday.

Joanne moved to NYC when she was 29 and spent her 30s enjoying all that the City had to offer in the late 90s and trying to figure out who she was. When she turned 40, she felt something shift; she says she felt like a woman for the first time.

The summer before she turned 40, Joanne was in between jobs. A friend invited her to spend the summer in the sunroom at his house three blocks from north Miami Beach. She sublet her apartment and headed south for the summer. She thought she’d work on a one-woman play she had started. Instead she started painting and drawing and photographing mangoes in the backyard. She had always hesitated to call herself an artist, but here she was spending a month drawing mangoes. Joanne thought she couldn’t draw, so how could she be an artist? A wise friend of hers told her, “No, Joanne. You can draw. You just have to accept the way you draw.” (Which is, BTW, pretty damn good advice for any of us on any subject!)

So Joanne decided to start calling herself an artist. Meanwhile, she had been studying manifesting and the law of attraction. When she returned to New York in the fall, she manifested an amazing art studio in Chinatown.

Joanne mentioned the book Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, in which one of the characters says, "Everybody needs a hot job, a hot apartment and a hot lover." Here she was at 40 with all three and experiencing a blossoming of her work.

A Time to Leave

Joanne believes in “divine time.” By 2009 she had given up her art studio and was trying to make everything work in her tiny, sixth-floor walkup, but it just wasn’t working. So she decided to give up her apartment of 16 years and travel the country with an art project she wanted to create.

Two days after her 45th birthday, she left New York City and headed south to Atlanta and then Tybee Island, outside of Savannah. What she thought would be a couple days turned into six months that she spent writing and painting and sketching out, imagining and manifesting what she wanted her life to look like.

Her parents gave her their old minivan, which gave her the ability to travel. She picked the car up in Ohio, went back to New York and got whatever would fit in the car out of her storage unit and left the rest behind. Then she started driving south, just in time to chase the fall foliage down the East Coast. She spent another year in Savannah and, in 2012, she decided to hit the road.

Joanne traveled by herself for about six months. She invited people she met along the way to contribute to a hanging mobile interactive community art project. She asked people to share their visions, messages and dreams for the planet, the people, prosperity and peace. She spent her 46th birthday at the Grand Canyon and then headed back to Savannah, where she currently lives.

Joanne cautions people against saying “never” because you just never know. She never thought she’d leave New York and she never thought she’d live in a small town, which Savannah is.

Intuition = Inspiration

In her mid-30s, Joanne started to tune into her intuition, which led to a transformative experience amid the chaos of 9/11, which she watched from the roof of her building. She was heading back down the stairs to her apartment and felt a “whoosh” go over her body and heard a voice say, “this is an opportunity for world peace.”

As she walked to work the next day, taking a path through Union Square, she saw so many handwritten notes of peace and hope. And she realized that everyone who had seen the news was sending love and compassion and peaceful thoughts to New York City, which she touts as an example of collective consciousness.

In recent years Joanne has recognized that, if you have the ability to talk about this kind of stuff, then you should because the more people who are talking about positive energy, magic, passion, love, peace and gratitude, the more we can work together to accomplish those things. Whatever your skill or talent is, that’s what you can bring to the table for the good of the world. (Don’t ask her to do any bookkeeping for the good of the world, btw.)

Joanne says it’s important to listen to that inner voice, even if it doesn’t make sense. Listen and then figure out how to apply it to your life. When we don’t listen, we get a little crazy. When you start feeling that little “errrt,” what is it that you should do?

When Joanne became an artist, she started by painting big colorful pieces. She played with splatter. But after leaving her studio space, she evolved to smaller abstract paintings on which she overlaid words and affirmations.

In 2011 Joanne was painting in a studio space during Arab Spring and she got another “whoosh” of intuition or divine guidance and heard ‘peace is possible’ and ‘we’re here to love.’ Those sentiments have pervaded her work ever since. In 2015 she took part in a Kickstarter that asked people to make 100 pieces of something. She painted 100 pieces that said ‘we are here to love’ and she’s still working with the phrase to this day.

Circles of Hope

Joanne’s interactive community art project is called the Circles of Hope, which takes the concept of a vision board and breaks it down into circles strung together into a hanging mobile. As she was traveling, Joanne asked people she met to make a circle. By the time she returned to Savannah, she had collected almost 400 circles and started doing installations and exhibitions of the mobile, which hung from the ceiling with 7 circles per strand. Visitors could walk through the mobile and move among the strands, seeing what other people wanted to create or manifest. She says it’s powerful to see what other people want to create in the world. And anytime she exhibits it, she also invites visitors to add their own circles to the project.

She started the project in 2010 and hopes to continue it through 2030, making it a 20-year project. She’s also started thinking that it would be cool to make it the world’s largest hanging mobile, co-created by people from around the world sharing their intentions for people, prosperity and peace.

Sponsor

The Forty Drinks Podcast is produced and presented by Savoir Faire Marketing/Communications

Find Joanne Online

Website: www.joannemorton.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/positiveenergyartist

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/positive_energy_artist/

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