Jenny Southlynn Savage

I attribute my success to my imagination. From the time I was a little kid, I always imagined that I could achieve things beyond my circumstance. When I was little, I believed I could jump off the Empire State Building and survive, or jump out of a tree and survive. That was my imagination at work. I had this personality trait where I would dare and try anything because I believed I could achieve it. It's kind of a loose screw, really. Once I got going, I believed I could do anything, and I did many things in my community. I could gather people, and I could talk them into things, and I could make things happen that way. That imagination and belief in myself, that's what drove everything I accomplished.

The best career advice I've ever received is to persist. Just be persistent. If you have an interest in something, don't go halfway, go all the way. And if you persist at something, you'll be successful at it to some measure. I believe that.

I think persistence is the greatest thing. If you find an interest in something, really hanker down and give yourself to it. Explore it. And don't allow criticism to deter you, because it's typically the uniqueness of an individual, when that is sparked and allowed to flourish inside of oneself, that's your gift to the world. That's the part that you share. That's the part that other people respond to. And that takes persistence, and you develop confidence over time, as long as you persist at what you're doing. When you do have to take risks in revealing yourself, and sometimes that's the uncomfortable part, you learn to live with the uncomfortable feelings. Either you're gonna be uncomfortable and stay in that place, or you're gonna be uncomfortable and face it.

I think the biggest challenge is that artists are a dime a dozen these days. Everything is being done through social media now, like the Wild West. My work is probably viewed by people literally all over the world, but I don't know who they are. You can put your work out there every day, and thousands upon thousands of people are seeing it and scrolling right past it. It's a crapshoot. There's a lot less paper out there and a lot more digital everything, so there are certainly a million opportunities to have work expressed digitally. But we're almost overstimulated with the visual, and everybody is walking around with their phone in their hands and their face on that screen. There are almost too many opportunities. Zeroing in on something and figuring out your niche, where you want that work to be, and how big or how small you want it, that's probably the biggest challenge for artists today. Do you want your work the size of a phone screen, or do you want it filling a whole room? That's the question.

In my work and personal life, just being a good, caring, civilized human being is most important to me. During summers when I used to work with special needs kids through the Park District, one of the camp leaders would get the kids to say every day: treat others the way you would want to be treated yourself. That just struck so deeply with me. Just being kind to one another. It doesn't mean allowing people to walk all over you, but if everyone treated each other the way they would like to be treated themselves, the world would be a much better place. And if you could teach that value to special needs kids, you could teach it to everyone. Supporting my grandchildren and great-grandchildren is very important to me, and that's usually just with words, being very positive and affirming to them so that they grow up with self-esteem and confidence and kindness. I will always tell them when I witness an act of kindness from any of them, how great they are.