Hello everyone!
I’m Sara Kate Hannon, an artist in Austin, Tx. Thank you for stopping by my open studio and scratching your email on my sign-up sheet or reaching out on social media! (Or maybe I added you because I know you just love the sound of my words!)
Just so you know, no one calls me Sara Kate, but it follows me around because of the “@gmail” and “.com” of it all. It’s just Sara. Some people, including myself, call me Sally.
For a while I pretended Sally Juniper was more than just my Instagram handle, it was my art making alter-ego when I needed to distance myself from Sara, who I thought was just some massage therapist who never figured out how to be an artist. When I got a job at a spa with too many Sara(h)’s, I became Sally there, overlapping my identities. Sally Hannon, lmt. Who was I!?
For years I felt disjointed. There was the Sara who went to art school (BFA, SAIC 2002) and there was the Sara who went to massage school (Center for Massage and Natural Health, Asheville, NC 2005).
I believe that I was called to become a massage therapist. As someone who didn’t like touching people or being touched, I most definitely did not chose it willy nilly. I felt as though it were a part of my path. A path that has leading me here to proclaim:
Energy is real, man.
This is something I had been embarrassed to admit because I thought it made me a *gasp*
hippie.
A hippie dippie massage therapist? No thanks. I’d rather make sarcastic remarks about patchouli and bare feet on pavement.
But the truth was that I was swimming in the energy of other people. Something in their shoulder might make me want to cry. Something in their neck would give me a headache. Their buzzing head would give me anxiety. I learned to tap into something in me, a calmness, to manipulate the unseen.
One day, in the not so distant past, I declared to my husband Kris, “I feel energy. It’s what I do. Fine, there, I admit it!” He gave me the look that says, “Uh, yeah, you’ve been saying that for years.” And I gave him a look that says, “Well, yeah, but now I’m saying it saying it!”
If I could finally admit to this, then could I admit to the energy that exists when creating art?
Prior to going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at 19, I had not taken many art classes. I had been a desperate teen. Scribbling, “I need an outlet!” in my journal between drags of clove cigarettes and swigs of Southern Comfort. I went to Emerson College in Boston for 2 years before dropping out for a year of smoking real cigarettes and glugging jugs of Carlo Rossi. Somewhere in there I started experimenting with photography, collage and drawing.
I was perplexed that I got into art school. That now I’d be an art student like those cool kids that went to the Museum School or Mass Art. I wondered why they accepted me.
If I could have made one guess, it would be that they understood the feeling I got when I made one particular photo collage in my portfolio. I had taken a bunch of self-timed pictures of myself in front of my dog scratched bedroom door. I wore a weird nightgown I got secondhand and in some of the poses I donned one of those clear masks with red cheeks and blue eye shadow. I didn’t know what I was doing, but once I started cutting the photos up everything fell into place. It ended up a collage of a three-bodied girl in front of a big door. It felt destined. It felt bigger than me. Could the college admissions team see that?
I didn’t know what to do with that feeling of creating. Surely it wasn’t meant for me. So I turned it into something negative. I never told anyone about it because I was embarrassed, like they would know that I was not special enough to be an artist.
I had other experiences making art where I felt like I was in cahoots with something outside of myself.
(I have told this story maybe once in the past and it was not my to my husband who I told it to yesterday. He laughed so hard. This made me laugh because I hadn’t realized that it could be a funny story, I was so wrapped up in how pathetic it felt.)
Once upon a time, I stayed at SAIC late into the evening to draw. I made this big swirly head with multiple faces and eyes. But did I make it? I felt like my hand was at the mercy of something else. Thus, through whatever logic I had, I was convinced that I drew GOD. I became convinced that since I drew GOD I was surely going to be murdered on my way home that night. (Huh!?) When I wasn’t murdered (phew), I felt like was delusional. And yes, I felt embarrassed and ashamed that I could think I was so important that I could draw GOD!
(I will briefly point out that at this time my mom was home in our 19th century Connecticut barn house deeply into automatic writing. She would close her eyes, put pen to paper and channel Rodrigue, a Mexican painter who died in the early 1900’s. I was like “cool”, but also was like, “Come back to earth, dear mother!” So me thinking I was channeling something felt very familiar and very fraught. Those years were quite ungrounded for the Hannons. )
That drawing was chosen by my professor, Rebecca Shore, to represent the class in a show at the end of the semester. “Yeah, uh, it was picked, uh, I don’t know why. It’s not good.”
I know that what I just described, the out-of-bodiness of it, is a flow state. I was facinated by the artists who would let themselves go there. Who could talk about it, explore it.
I could not.
Art school also put a damper on the freedom of that feeling because there were so many opinions on what art it; what’s “good”, what’s “bad”, what’s “lazy”. I became convinced that there were strict worldly landmarks that I needed to achieve before I could call myself an artist. The perfect line, the perfect composition, the perfect colors. All of that seemed very out of reach to me. (As perfection is known to be.)
When I first started massaging, you’d often hear me ballyhoo, “It’s like art school critique all over again! But this time it’s massaging a person who is JUDGING everything I do!”
Cue snoring client. JUDGING!
Over the course of years I was able to quiet that thinking. I learned to go with the flow, get in the zone, embrace my inner hippie. “Ooh, what’s that smell? Patchouli?”
Here’s where that massage critique that I so feared actually served me. If you get into that zone in massage, there is someone else who is appreciatively receiving it and they let you know how great it was, and you say, “I thought so too!” and you thank them for being so great.
It took me years to realize that this interaction was truly happening. That it wasn’t some script we’d all been handed about a massage. We were able to find ourselves in a place without words, that exists nonetheless.
And that’s where I find myself now, as an artist.
It is now in my art studio where I enter the place without words and let the energy flow forth.
September 25, 2023 was the last day I gave a massage.
………………..
Remember that drawing I did that didn’t get me murdered? It was all faces and eyes and swirls. I’m still at it.
The two paintings shown above were chosen to be in Undercurrent! The opening reception is this Saturday May 4, 3-7. If you are in the area please stop by!
And you know what? I’m proud of myself.
(oh my god it is so hard not to delete that!)
Thank you for reading!
I hope to send this out on some regular basis. Maybe it’s more of a blog than a newsletter….all I know is that there is still a part of me who knows that when I was whining about needing an outlet I always knew that writing was an outlet I really enjoyed. (I am bad at grammar, but I am trying to not let that stop me!)
……………………
Here’s some things I’ve appreciated lately-
—The illustrator Julia Wertz! I enjoyed her graphic novel Impossible People: A Completely Average Recovery Story so much I hightailed it to the library to get Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City. She’s very good at letting herself be herself in some way I am appreciative of.
—The show Girls5Eva on Netflix. This 90’s girl finds it hysterical.
—MFA Houston. I just drive 3 hours and blammo! World class museum. All of the special exhibitions up now are stellar!
—I listened to Flea’s memoir Acid for Children. It’s funny and tender and full of a lot of drugs. Which then lead me to listen to Patty Schemel’s memoir Hit So Hard. Hers is a more tragic drug story. She was the drummer in Hole. When she said, “I just wanted to make music for 15 year old girls who hate the world” something in me broke open. I was exactly 15 when Live Through This came out. I loved the screaming and the swearing and the anger. But as a 15 year old girl who hated the world I of course felt unseen. Now I see I was seen. Thanks Patty Schemel!
—My sweet cat Goma
Beautiful stuff, my friend. I’m going to frame your piece for our new home. Thank you so much for being in my life.
i’m so happy to be able to get to know you. I think we’re cut from the same cloth, you and i