Are YOU an Artist?

By BrighamB | June 9, 2025 |

Are YOU an artist?

A stormy June breeze wafted in behind my family as we “strollered” our way into the 437CO gallery off Main Street in Grand Junction to see the “Strength & Fragility” Exhibit by Ajay Gustafson.

Greeted warmly by Ajay and her lovely family beside her and behind her hung on the walls.

Immediately, I felt like I was getting an intimate look into what was most important to her.

Ajay's art didn’t highlight the sweeping drama of broken arms. She didn’t plaster the canvas with visceral violence of siblings pulling hair. Or the disturbing reality of life in a back seat with disheveled Cheerio caked car carpets so well known to parents.

No glitzy cars.

No magnificent mansions.

No sleek lines of high-heeled high-brow fashion so common on social media.

Instead, I felt whisked away to a humble home life full of love & cherished heartfelt scrapbook memories. The idyllic vision of motherhood after the mess is cleaned up. I saw a highlighted hope of humanity, simplified through the eyes of a mother and her children. Sensitive simple moments that make you remember to notice you are alive.

The subtle scenes were a contemporary & balanced breath of fresh air. Her homey style has a soft impressionistic feel almost like you slightly took a camera out of focus, or blurred your eyes for a moment, this allowed the edges ever so lightly to haze. Which for me allowed my imagination to fill in the blanks. The soft pastel light reflecting off warm hazy wholesome shapes. It is the calm before the storm and amidst the storm. Which for me reminded me of Live Photos on my iPhone where most of the frames have screaming, or kids not looking but for one millisecond everyone is content and smiling or at least present.

The moments she captured were moments of meaning almost like you opened up a polaroid photo album on a coffee table and found joy gazing in her scrapbook. Stories still kept alive which could have faded or easily been passed up but left you thinking.

Which memories would I frame?

Imagine your own moments distilled from a lifetime of capturing flickers of light in imagination. Which anchoring meaningful memories would you capture one soft stroke of oil on canvas at a time?

Ajay’s paintings had some wonderful examples:

Sticky sweet popsicles melting over your hand on a summer day.

Her son winning his sister at Risk and cheering triumphantly.

A father carefully bathing his baby boy for the first time.

Snapshots.

Shared heartbeats.

Where do you invest your heartbeats?

I whisper kisses on my child's bouncing forehead off my lips as I listen to Ajay share the backstory of her pieces accompanied by a momentary hailstorm. Whimpering winds pressing a tree rhythmically against the window as if it was saying “I want to see too.”

Suddenly ping pong ball sized hail pelted the window, and sidewalk. Yet we were safe and warm inside. The storm urgently knocked so loudly Ajay needed to speak up so we could hear why she chose these moments but then she quipped, to the audience.

“A little weather for drama”-AjayGustafson

Ephemeral moments like this you would have had to be there to experience.

“All these photos are through my eyes” Ajay said, and I realized as an artist yes we get to help others see what we see, feel what we feel and impress others through art. She expressed how artists have to ‘believe deep down that what we do truly matters’, that it’s significant.

Which made me think of my STORY framework, Who gets to tell you what is significant and what isn’t?

What you hang as your story and what is just a moment to be forgotten. Significance is the core of your story. Some moments matter more than others because we endow them with meaning. As we make it mean something we make it significant.

Moments of our lives sometimes fall like dust on a mantle, they accumulate, but if not recorded, are lost when it isn’t meaningful.

Art isn’t created—it’s witnessed & passionately captured

I was once encouraged to not focus on creating content instead to document things that inspire me. So If I take that a bit further Art is not in the creation but in the capturing of moments.

Yesterday, as I pondered the simple sweet sensations captured in my friend’s art, I was swept away to a memory my mother took with a camera and had commissioned and commemorated into a sketch.

It was me as a baby boy bathing in the back porch sink.

Art connects us

We lost her last June to cancer. That sketch lets me see myself through her eyes again.

I have an almost two year old sink bather of my own now. Art is a little different from reality because we miss the moment before and after. A tender treasured moment for me is often juxtaposed by uncontrollable piercing baby screams. A frantic wrestling with the faucet to find the temperature. Then the toddler flinging food bits on the floor knocking over dishes. Him "helping to unload" the dishwasher, which means a half hour of cleaning up a melamine bowl shattered like a bomb went off. Strong-arming the squirming slippery, salamander-smooth skinned sink bather. But for a milisecond life becomes art. That is what I see in this artwork.

Ajay says these moments together are called “Strength and Fragility”.

She has had some critics say her paintings are “fractured” but she disagrees, “because to be fractured means that they at some point were to be whole”.

The melamine bowl was fractured—shattered in an instant. But her art is more like the baby: not broken, not whole, but beautifully complex. A living, breathing moment held together by tenderness, not perfection.

For me, her work reveals a quiet tension—resilience intertwined with tenderness, each brushstroke balancing strength with vulnerability.

It reminds me of the strength a father has to have to restrain his boy like a football gripped tightly over the sink to hose him down with spaghetti meat sauce screams mixed with giggles. It’s a messy but essential part of life to take care of those that can’t take care of themselves.

I’m inspired to capture little moments that make life meaningful. It’s all within eyeshot if you can take notice.

As my artist grandfather Leonard Parkin often said, “The imagination is a place”.

After those moments pass it is that place of imagination we can visit to rewind the clock. Only there we can embrace memories as reality again. It is the place where we can select which image is on our life photo.

While I was in the gallery, I was asked a simple but profound question by a local sculptor. It actually inspired me to write this.

He said, “ Are you an artist?”

When did we stop saying yes immediately to being an artist?

Why do we feel the need to qualify the yes?

For whatever reason I felt I needed to qualify why I'm a performing artist, a speaker. Why didn’t I immediately say yes? I believe we can all choose to be artists. We all have the opportunity to be artists, poets, actors and speakers who express ourselves through multiple mediums.

For me, words are my paint, speaking my gallery, my life the masterpiece. Our life is a masterpiece in the making.

It isn’t just what you DO that makes you an artist, it is a means of expressing yourself.

Artists seek self expression and that is something that I am passionate about on and off stage.

I love impacting others to also live their masterpiece lives. To drink in inspiration, document discoveries, witness the whimsical and say “hail yeah!” to the storms of life. I’ve noticed as we cherish inspiration, God will know we are trustworthy to receive more of it.

So if you choose to be an artist remember it isn’t just about the fruits, It isn’t just what you paint, or sculpt or say that the world sees. Your measure as an artist is who you become. How you leave this world a little brighter, a little better, a little more thoughtful than how you found it. It is how you add color, texture, organization and passion to your life and help others see too. Artists GIVE vision they don’t just have vision. Anyone can have a vision. True Artists inspire vision out of others by vulnerably sharing their own. How you express the talents that God has given you, and you have chosen to develop qualify you to be an artist. So am I an artist? YES!

Don’t leave the world the same. I encourage you to paint your masterpieces. Please for yourself, live your masterpiece life.