About Ann Rea

An Ordinary Artless Suburb

I grew up an ordinary, artless, segregated white suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

Alcoholic family dynamics, and a British tradition of suppressing emotion, made a perfect recipe for my long struggle with anxiety and depression.

Channeling Unwelcome Feelings

Bored with school I chose to channel my unwelcome feelings into art.

A scholarship to a prestigious art school started my journey.

For five years I learned how to make art, not how to make money.

When I asked my professors about making money with art, I was dismissed.

An Impractical Practical Long Detour

I graduated. My student loan bill arrived.

Needing to make money, more than needing to make art, I abandoned art and moved to California with my seemingly steady handsome new husband.

Reluctantly, I took a practical job at a dull and militant computer company to pay my student debt and the mortgage for our new track home in suburbia.

While I endured two hour-long daily commutes to a grey-base colored office cubicle, my closeted alcoholic husband’s abuse emerged.

He falsified my signature on credit card applications, hid the bills, our track home entered into foreclosure. I needed a divorce and a place to live.

I asked for my family for help, their words, “You’ve made your bed, now you can lie in it.”

With no money or home, I took job with a relief agency and traveled from one natural disaster to another.

I enrolled in a self-development workshop in San Francisco where I met a writer experiencing “writer’s block.”

A week later I visited a childhood friend in Ohio.

She suggested that if I took up art again, I won’t be so sad. I ignored her.

We meandered into an art gallery and came upon a luminous sea scape painting.

Tears fell down my face. Then I noticed my friend’s misty eyes and we both stared laughing.

“What was that?” “Whatever it was, go get the watercolors you have hidden in your trunk and let’s paint.” I said.

In the moment after I decided to paint, I looked up. Ten feet in front of me stood the writer I’d met one week earlier in San Francisco, over 2000 miles way.

It was unreal. “Hello. Do you still have writer’s block?” I asked.

His forlorn reply. “Yes.”

“Because you’re just not writing.” I thought.

My friend and I sat in a garden by the art museum with her cheap watercolor set and for the first time in over a decade I painted, with ease.

What My Famous Mentor Didn’t Teach Me

After I returned home, I painted weekly.

I mustered the courage to seek help from Wayne Thiebaud, an American art icon, whose paintings were selling for over $1,000,000 at auction and a touring retrospective of his life’s work was displayed the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He said, “You’re talented, you should pursue painting full time.”

“But how will I make enough money?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m not a businessman.” He replied.

“The tax man sure thinks you’re businessman.” I thought.

So I started studying marketing.

Going Around the Art Establishment

Wayne Thiebaud revealed a persistent disconnect between making art and making money.

His glowing letter of recommendation, moved art galleries to crack open their doors. Sometimes I got paid, sometimes not.

So I went around them. I sold my painting myself and kept all the money. Some artists where jealous, some scared.

Kickstarter Before Kickstarter

While working at a music distribution company, and selling my art, my other mentor Gregory Kondos invited me to a painting retreat in the south of France.

But the following week my seven-year relationship ended abruptly and Napster finally annihilated the company where I worked.

I had to come up with the money to go to the south of France or lose half of of my large deposit.

I sold French chocolate from my office desk with a sign that read, “Send a kid to France.” My co-workers bought all of it.

I wrote a letter to everyone I knew offering to create a small painting in the south of France, made especially for them, if they enclosed $500 in the self-addressed stamped envelope by the following week.

My envelopes returned with enough to pay for my trip to France, a side trip to England to see the nice side of my family, and I earned a a profit.

All before Kickstarter.

Snotty Scotty

After returning from France I took a job as a project management consultant at Pacific Gas and Electric working for a manager who was aptly nicknamed “Snotty Scotty.”

He kept asking my about my relationship with Jesus, during my billable time.

I respectfully changed the subject.

Then he waited until everyone had left the office and he silently backed me into a corner.

So I threatened to kick him, got around him, and I vowed to never to return to an office.