Art, Emotion & a Fire Evacuation

My name is Mika (me-kuh) Harmony and I was raised on the island of Maui and started drawing and painting at a young age, inspired by the beauty around me. When my brother Dylan and I would walk to our elementary school we would choose the “beach way” or the “street way.” I didn’t even realize that was unusual until our family later moved to California.

I struggled to enjoy school as a kid. The rigidity was rough for me, but that was before I knew that I was a free-flowing artist who didn’t enjoy such square boundaries (no coloring outside the lines was the first lesson I wanted to unlearn in the 4th grade). 

What I did love in school was writing and illustrating my stories. It was such a treat to take a thought in my head and get in onto paper: like a silly story about talking blades of grass. It all started with crayons and I later moved on to watercolor paints. To this day, I am still up to my eyeballs in watercolors and loving every minute of it.

I was encouraged to be creative as both my parents’ backgrounds were in the artistic field; my mom is an award-winning photographer/printmaker and my father was an accomplished songwriter/producer.

After 13 years calling Hawaii home, our family moved to California. Fast forward many years later and I ended up working in conservation for a non-profit (The Nature Conservancy). It was a wonderful job that had moments of creativity, but sadly, after a change of management and structure in the organization and after about a decade there, my job was going to change and would require working even longer hours and at another office in Los Angeles. I was never going to be a full-time career person, it just didn’t resonate with me. The job had changed so much from when I started, so I took the opportunity to start out on my career of being a full-time artist. It was scary and exciting!

My last day at work was on a Thursday (Sept. 2012) and then my FIRST solo art show was that following Friday! 

I was both terrified and excited. In fact, I spent a day in bed in tears prior to making the jump. It was a slow-going process to become an artist. I had no idea what to do first. I even mistakenly neglected to get my business license in a timely manner and I didn’t realize I needed a Sales Tax certificate, either.

The hardest part of running a business was not knowing what to do first and the best part was just figuring it out as I went along. I am a reformed perfectionist and sometimes it’s just better to jump in and do the best you can do and adjust along the way.

Once I sold my first painting at an art show I started to exhale and feel like everything was going to be ok. My boyfriend and I invited everyone we knew to the first art opening. I kept joking that at least I wasn’t a Realtor because it’s not as if I was asking my friends and family to buy a house…just some art. 

I am so grateful that it took the push of a changing career to finally choose to make my own living and be my own boss and go for being a full time artist. Even when things are happening that aren’t ideal around me (job changes, life changes, etc.), I try to remember that these things aren’t happening TO me, they are happening around me and in my life. The situation can be crummy, but if I can try to adjust my attitude it can help propel me forward and keep me from getting stuck in feeling bad about myself.

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