Artist AnnMarie Young: Alaska Called, She Responded

By ARTHUR H. BLEICH

The day after AnnMarie Young graduated with a Studio Arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin, she was on a flight to Fairbanks, Alaska where she hoped to spend the summer painting landscapes. But first she had to find a reasonably-priced place to stay which isn’t always easy to do in the 49th State, known for its high cost of living.

Luck was with her, though, and she found a little cabin in the woods for about $500 a month. There were a few drawbacks. It had no running water, which required weekly trips into town to fill up water jugs, and more frequent visits to an outhouse down a dirt path from the cabin. And it wasn’t unusual for Moose or two to occasionally pay her a visit.

But she loved it and it inspired her to paint as never before. “My project for the summer,” she recalls. “was to paint 100 Alaskan inspired postcards which had already been pre-ordered on my website with the help of social media marketing.” This was a switch from her usual routine at her studio in Austin where she usually worked with oils on large canvases or wood panels.

AnnMarie was no stranger to the business side of art. When she was in high school her mother encouraged her to exhibit her work at a neighborhood crafts fair and fronted the $50 fee for a booth. “I had a fold out table,” she recalls, “selling smaller watercolor acrylic paintings ranging from $10-$30. Then I laid out a blanket and placed some of my larger paintings out for sale - closer to the $50 - $100 range.”

Although she can’t remember how many she sold, it was enough to get her to step out of her comfort zone and become an entrepreneur. She recalls that in high school she was never any good at sports, dancing, singing, or playing instruments. “I was always the artsy kid in class, the go-to girl when the group needed someone to draw on the poster board for a project. My only talent was art.”

Then came college and with it a stint with the Air Force ROTC program which she soon realized was not going to work out too well. “The more I hung around the ROTC students the more I realized I just didn't fit in and I would not make the cut to become an officer in the Air Force. Embarrassingly I had the lowest ranking physical fitness scores in the whole unit.” So she dropped out and decided to focus on art.

Unlike many of her fellow students, AnnMarie decided to make an effort to sell her work and began by creating her own website and then using TikTok to get her message out. “I made short catchy videos featuring my senior thesis paintings in the background, a few funny videos about being an art major, and some ‘watch-the-process’ type videos.”

But despite posting as many as three videos a day, financial success eluded her until one memorable night. “I had a video go 'viral with 60,000 views and every painting on my website sold out before morning. I had learned to stay consistent in my marketing, kept-posting, grew an email list and then, suddenly I had created a loyal following.”

So when Alaska beckoned, AnnMarie was ready for a challenge. She was two months from graduating when a friend of hers who’d gotten a summer job in Alaska, asked her if she’d like to join her for three months. Having always loved to travel, she viewed it was a serendipitous opportunity “to give being a ‘working artist’ an actual shot before trying to settle on a big girl job.”

Building on the success of selling paintings on her website, she came up with the idea to do an Alaska Postcard Project. The plan was to pre-sell 100 had-painted, 5x7-inch watercolor postcards that would be mailed to her subscribers during the summer she planned to spend up north.

“I started promoting this,” she recalls, “on social media with the goal of selling them to people in all 50 US states. I made marketing videos for about a month and was able to pre-sell all 100 postcards for $100 each before I even boarded the plane to Alaska. That gave me $10,000 in my pocket as a working artist directly after graduating – it was awesome!”

Now, almost four years out of college, AnnMarie, 24 is living and painting in Anchorage, a beautiful coastal city of about 290,000 with a good climate, spectacular scenery and year-round cultural events. She is selling her work worldwide and has clients who have begun to collect her paintings. She also recently had a one-woman show at a prestigious local gallery.

She remembers the early days when people would ask her what she did for a living and she would say she was looking for a career in the arts, possibly teaching or working in museums or art galleries. “However the truth was I just wanted to be a painter,” she says, “and once I started telling this to myself and to others, it became real.”

RESOURCES:

Visit AnnMarie's websiteto see more of her work.

Original Publication Date: August 04, 2024

Article Last updated: August 04, 2024

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