How I came to be not-yet-an-artist

by Joy Hecht

I don’t call myself an artist. Not yet. I’ve dabbled throughout my life – graphic design, watercolor, sewing, mosaics - but I’ve been an economist for the past thirty years, not an artist! So how did I land up exploring a new career at age 64, creating collages of places I’ve been or places I’d like to be, and wondering whether at my age I could possibly go to art school? When I was young, I was fascinated by graphic design. I invented typefaces in the margins of my class notes, and designed posters for the choral group I sang with in college. But I let my mother talk me out of a scheme to ditch my grad school plans to study art in Paris. That was a good choice, on the whole – I spent a very interesting thirty years traveling around the world working on environmental policy and economics in the developing world, and was delighted to travel through Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Somewhere along the line, I took up watercolors. I came across the urban sketchers, people who sketch on site and share their work with each other on the internet. There are urban sketchers all over the world; I joined them in Jakarta, Paris, Beirut, and London. It was a lot of fun, though my work wasn’t much good. Then a few years ago, I followed an impulse to depict the city where I happened to be at the time in collage instead of watercolor. To my surprise, I liked the result much better. In watercolor I never knew when to stop, I didn’t manage colors well, and everything came out muddy and overworked. In collage, somehow I understood how to define shapes and structures, and the white space took form as easily as the objects within it. So I kept at it. I quickly built up a supply of materials to work with – newspapers, advertising flyers, manila envelopes pinched from my office, junk mail, take-out menus. When people brought chocolates to share at work (traveling consultants have a great tradition of bringing chocolates from the duty free!) I scavenged the bright shiny wrappers. When flying, I searched the freebie airline magazines for good colors, and tore out the pages that interested me. Where local languages used unfamiliar alphabets, I collected pages of text that offered useful patterns without being readable, at least to people from western countries. In time, I found that I wasn’t gathering enough of key colors – muted greens for landscape, dark reds for brick, wispy grays for clouds, blue-greens for the sea – and I took to putting paint or ink or pastel on newsprint or printer paper, to get the shades I really wanted.

Most of my collages are of cities, which have always fascinated me. After first trying this out in Beirut, I went on to depict New York (where I grew up), St. John’s Newfoundland (where I live now), streets in Paris, markets in London and Harare, canals in Amsterdam, and on occasion even the countryside. After a few years, having accumulated a fair number of collages, I began to think about selling them. So my work is now in two galleries in Newfoundland, has been in a few local shows, and I sell both prints and originals – not only to my friends, either. ;-))) Most exciting to me was that my collages were chosen by Link NYC to be shown on electronic kiosks all over New York City, and for two weeks my vision of my home town could be seen by millions of people! Recent events have changed my patterns. When the COVID lockdowns struck, I couldn’t do collages on site, and accepted that I’d have to work from photos. In some ways that’s actually been great. The urban sketchers groups who used to meet on site took to zoom and sketched from google street view. That meant we could all get together with sketchers anywhere in the world, without getting on a plane first. So I’ve been meeting regularly with the Lebanese and the Chileans, and have made collages of towns in Chile that I’d never even heard of before.

These days I also don’t have much consulting work, so I figured that it must be time for a new career. Which is how, at almost 65, I’ve decided that for my next act, I’m going to be an artist. I don’t want a hobby in my retirement, either; I want a career that I enjoy and other people value. For that, I have to get up every morning to and go to work creating art - and creating a new enterprise that gets my art to the people who want it. I have lots and lots to learn, both about art and about the business of art, but it’s certainly interesting! Soon I might even start calling myself an artist. About the author: Joy Hecht is an artist and environmental economist living in St. John’s, Newfoundland - but hoping to return to her home town of New York next year, pandemic permitting. You can see more of her work at http://joyhecht-arts.com/.

Beirut Corniche (2017) – Beirut is a wild and crazy city – but also a beautiful place with spectacular views of the Mediterranean coast. The white structure farthest to the left in this collage is the grain elevator that was spectacularly destroyed in the explosion that rocked the city in the summer of 2020.

Ile de la Cité (2019) – Iconic view of Paris – what else is there to say?