Lisa Congdon’s creative journey is an inspiring one. With zero intention of becoming a professional artist, or an artist at all for that matter, she discovered a passion for illustration and writing quite late in the game.
“My start was very non-traditional,” she told Creative Boom. “I was just a regular, non-artist person (at the time in my early thirties) and I took a couple of art classes for fun. That was about 18 years ago.”
“I was basically just bored at my job, and going through some big changes in my life after a breakup with my partner, and needed something positive to focus on,” she relayed candidly. “So I started taking classes making art at my kitchen table.” But like all fairy tales (or modern-day success stories), what began as a hobby, concealed and pushed aside to the kitchen table, turned out to be the beginning of an incredible career.
Now with more than 350k followers on Instagram alone, Congdon is the author of eight books, with her commercial clients including giants like Comme des Garçons, Crate and Barrel, and Facebook, as well as institutions like MoMA and Harvard University. She was also named one of 40 Women Over 40 to Watch in 2015 and was featured in the 2017 book, 200 Women Who Will Change the Way you See the World.
“My mantra has always been, ‘Begin anyhow,’ and that’s because there is always a reason we can think of why we can’t do something, or why we’ll fail,” she says. “There is never a perfect time to do anything. So it’s important to just begin, even when you aren’t quite ready. And I did.”
Words to live by.
