ECLECTIC WRITER

Living her innate Passion

In 1987, it was the words of a fourteen year old in her art class which suddenly confronted Pamela Carter with her life-changing question. At the time she was demonstrating portrait drawing to her secondary three students, when a boy exclaimed, "Miss, you’re really good ! You should become an artist and sell your drawings!"

It would take another ten years before Carter decided to give up teaching and start living passionately by embracing her art full time.

Now when she looks back at what is history, Carter has no regrets. In fact she has words of wisdom for those who are caught between the complacence of the security of a job, and the angst of their unfulfilled passion in life.

"There is nothing like the routine of a job that robs you out of your innate passion," she says. "I had to find out what it would be that made me jump out of bed in the morning and do it."

With no prior planning at all, Carter found herself looking at a light at the end of the tunnel, and felt she should get out while she had her wits about her. She admits that leaving teaching to become a full time artist was one of the most daring yet the best things she did in her life.

Pamela Carter,1967 alumni of Concordia University, Montréal, has been working in the pastel medium for 18 years. The seeds of her life changing decision were sawn in February 1987, when she took an intensive workshop with Daniel Greene, a world renown New York artist.

"That week, in the company if equally passionate pastelists changed my life," recalls Carter. "The kind of person who lives in the present, I had no ideas of quitting teaching. Yet here I was, confronted with a very strong appeal."

Having decided to immerse herself in her art, Carter took an early retirement from teaching in 1997 and hasn’t regretted move for one moment.

"I’m quite a dynamic leader and I never really knew that," says Carter. "A lot more of the emotional and the spiritual side of my personality is coming out and being validated by my peers. I’m better now in every way than I ever was. I gave my best to teaching and I valued it. But at certain point, the returns weren’t worth it."

She gets a lot of pleasure from teaching adults who have been waiting all their lives to do what they want to do.

"They are so hungry and starving," she says. "They’re not just painting pictures, there’s a poetry into it."

As an artist Carter feels that her evolution is just at the beginning. She can see how it is developing and where it is going. That may be why she feels that everything she does in her life is now connected and her life is a hole instead of disconnected bits and pieces.

"I don’t want to waste one second of my life to an unappreciative audience - be they students, family, or whotever, "she says. "Whatever society you’re brought up in, you’re stamped with guilt for not doing what you’re assigned to do. But once you break the conventions and step out of that mould, you can find your purpose and follow it."

Pamela Carter’s list of accomplishments is long and impressive. Her prize-winning paintings have been exhibited and collected throughout Canada and in Europe; and have been shown at the National Arts Club and the Salmagundi Club in New York. She has been invited to demonstrate her techniques at international conventions in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Rouen, France.

While she continues to find delight in painting, she also makes time to teach and give workshops where she can share her techniques and insights with students who return year after year to benefit from her generosity and joy of living that are so beautifully reflected in her works.