Let Me Tell You All About It.

I can't believe I'm coming up on 10 years of being a makeup artist.

I fell into my career kind of by accident, or maybe, if you're a person of faith like I am, you'd say it was a God thing or it was fate. That might sound hyperbolic or pompous given the fact that I don't work in an industry where anything is life or death. To me, it's not about the work I do that makes me sometimes sit in my car and shake my head in awe and appreciation. It's not how I make my living doing something I love, it's not even some of the people I've worked with or the places I've been (even though there are certainly noteworthy ones I'll never forget). It's how my career came to me. It gives me confidence and a sense of purpose, and it propelled me out of somewhere dark and dangerous. 

I was born in Houston, Texas two an alcoholic father and a mother who was also a substance abuser. Nobody remembers their early life but hearing from both of my parents it is clear that times were very hard. My mother says my father couldn't hold a job and was neglectful. My father says my mother was unfaithful and was so deep in addiction she would leave me with the neighbors for days. We moved to Minneapolis when I was 6 months old, and while I've had other places I've called home, that's really where it all started and where my life was formed. My mother left my father and remarried. Her new husband adopted me. He was abusive and a drug dealer.

I will spare you a longer sob story than there needs to be. The Reader's Digest version of my life is that while I had a pretty brutal upbringing, adulthood and parenthood open your eyes to the good things your parents did. The biggest thing my mother and father did for me was told me I was smart and capable, and they did this not only through their words but also in their actions. My mother and I would spend hours in the kitchen at the table painting plaster cast Christmas ornaments to give as gifts. When I wanted a book, anything involving playing or listening to music, or a theatre class, my father always said yes. When I left home at 15, I didnt think I was pretty and I had been taught I wasn't valuable, but because of the very people who abandoned me I knew I was smart, I was resourceful, and I could survive. 

My first job was at a drug store in the cosmetics department. Every day after school I would get on the 21A bus and ride it to work. It was the mid-90's so I think the child labor laws have since changed- but I worked til 10:30pm every night and then took a bus back to the shelter where I was living. All those days I spent straightening lipsticks caused me to daydream. I loved all the colors and all the freedom there was to do whatever I wanted with all these different products. 

When my life began to stabilize I thought about social work but I knew it would burn me out. I did a variety of different jobs in early adulthood, but a friend talked to me about alternative modeling in the early 2000's. It's kind of old hat now, but back then it was quite a novel thing to have a budding industry of tattooed, pierced models with brightly-colored hair and costumey lingerie. This also happened to be at the same time professuonal-quality digital cameras entered the market at a price a lot more people could afford. The trifecta that tied these two things together was social media (back then it was Myspace). I was all over it. It allowed me to be creative, I felt beautiful for the first time in my life, and I made a lot of money. When I became a single mother of two kids it was my only job. What had become a fun side-gig was now the way I was surviving and supporting my children, and things got dark quickly. When you're desperate you'll do more to put food on the table. I didn't become a porn star or a prostitute but I would buck my instincts and shoot with a "photographer" that I had a bad feeling about but pushed through the gig because I had to pay rent. 

Reflecting on those times now, I think of the women I worked with or alongside who moved to LA thinking they'd become rich doing porn, I think of the men I worked with who ended up with rape charges filed against them, and I think of the shitty photos I had taken of me and how truly heinous my makeup was. But the major silver lining was that I was an artist working in what would be a golden age of visual platform that was accessible to nearly everyone. When I would post photos, people complimented my makeup. I always did it myself and I tried to have fun with it. I liked coming up with themes and storylines and ideas. Then one day I did a shoot that had a makeup artist. I asked her if she lied her job. She said, "Angela, in this world, sometimes the photographer gets paid, sometimes the model gets paid, but the makeup artist ALWAYS gets paid." I wanted out of the role I was in, but I wanted to be a part of the same creative process. I started going to school to learn makeup, and because of my connections in modeling I was able to assemble a walking portfolio of (terrible) images with my (awful) makeup artistry. I was getting paid makeup gigs sporadically before I even graduated. 

Getting around was hard because I had no car. I moved around all the time. I had two kids to look after. The economy really sucked. I took a job at a makeup store which was accessible on the bus line. When I got off the bus for each shift, rig before I walked through the mall, I would blast "My First Song" by Jay-Z. It makes me giggle a little, and I don't know how I stumbled on the song in the first place. But it resonated deeply with me. "When I was born, it was sworn/I was never gonna be shit, I had to pull the opposite." Even working 10 hours a week, sleeping on a floor and wondering how I was going to live, I knew that by all accounts I should have been dead, in jail or addicted to drugs with the background I had. My parents made me, and their behaviors broke me, but they also cultivated something I don't think a lot of people have. I've been frustrated with the speed and which things progress, and I've felt hopeless like everyone has, but I really do think I always had the knowledge- not the idea, but really knowing- that I was smart enough to figure it out. My father used to say, whenever I wanted to dress up or wear makeup, "it's more important to be smart and to be a good person than it is to be pretty." Did I rebel and become a makeup artist, playing with pretty things all day? Or did I take what he said and use it to propel something I indeed believed was valuable despite what he said? I cant say for sure. Maybe a little of both. There was definitely a desire to prove to the world and to myself that I was not a victim of circumstance or a product of my upbringing. 

I began creative directing and makeup for model photography with my boyfriend at the time who was from the east coast. We were both new in the game but we were hungry to make what we saw in our heads and I think the times one of us would doubt ourselves, the other believed in us and would push us both forward. We wanted to be the absolute best at what we did, and we knew that at that time in our lives we needed each other creatively to advance. We worked in New York, we worked in Boston, we worked places we wanted to visit and booked people who wanted to start out in modeling. When our relationship ended I left the world of model photography and started working as a makeup artist for the biggest cosmetic retailer in the world. That's a fancy way of saying I worked at a makeup counter. I was devastated but this company was prestigious and I learned so much about my craft. I met and made friends with people who inspired me and continue to do so. One day a woman came in and asked if I would come to her hotel on her wedding day for her. I remember exactly what I said: "Um, I guess so?" It was the first step in a new chapter in my life. That was 4 years ago and since then I've become a full-time freelance makeup artist. A huge focus of my business is wedding makeup, but I also do makeup for television and I'm back in model photography as well sometimes. The best part of my job is the freedom and control that I have over what I do, and the extremely close second which is essential for the first to exist at all, is connecting with women and showing them that they're beautiful. Not "making them beautiful," but showing them, is something I believe in with every fiber of myself. Seeing functional families gathered together for a wedding, seeing people in love getting ready to publicly commit to one another, seeing a woman's fantasy for herself come true and being allowed to be a part of that are all tremendously healing for me. 

I hope you'll join me on my future adventures, read my thoughts as I bring them to be seen, and engage with me on this platform. I do believe that we as artists and creatives have potential for a huge voice here, and to connect with one another to make each other even better and even more inspired.