Cat's out of the bag

Uh. Oh.

I’ve been living two lives, and today they have come crashing into one another like tectonic plates moving at frightening speeds.

Juno AKA Junebug - author

I am a 3D animator by training. Well, if you look back thirty years or so. Before that I was (and will now have to cop to being), a musician. Before that, a professional ballet dancer, later a biotech instrumentation designer/builder, jewelry designer and other less glamorous adventures, but let’s leave that for another day, shall we?

My late husband and I started and I continue to run Arkitek Scientific, a 3D company focused on creating visual explanatory content for the sciences and technology. arkitek.com for those of you who might be curious. All well and good, my enthusiasm for this field has never waned, and I hope to continue doing it for a long while to come.

But music popped its head up again six years ago, like a tall poppy, and has turned into the most productive musical period of my life. Tall poppies have the propensity for getting their heads whacked off. Unsure of the reception by the scientific community that we were also (gasp) artists, we hid the music under a very thick blanket.

But things were percolating under there in a big way. And, like anything that grows, animate or inanimate, there comes a time when that blanket gets shoved aside.

That time has come. Oh my God. I just posted a confession of same to LinkedIn, the very people in my orbit who generally hire Arkitek to create animations. Is this professional suicide? Possibly, but the weirdness of living two lives has produced the need to come clean.

Hello, my name is Beth Anderson, and I’m an artist.

(and may I just clarify that, yes, we HAVE been artists for the past 30 years at Arkitek, but commercial artists. There is a huge distinction between that, and doing whatever the hell you like.)

It used to be that society thought that being good, or at least having an extreme interest in more than one thing, resulted in a dilution of effort, a muddying of the waters. One simply couldn’t be productive in more than one realm, ever.

I do believe that mindset has shifted, but has it shifted ENOUGH? I still see people being branded as twinks if they dare to step out of their prescribed lanes and embark on another path.

So, to anyone out there who happens to stumble upon this missive, thank you very much for reading this, and hopefully, to entertaining two ideas:

1. that art is intrinsic to who we are as humans, and to live without it is to experience a horrible non-life.

2. that people can, and often do, more than one thing well in life.

I leave you with one more link - nequalsnine.com

Off we go… thank you again.

n=9 is a collection of artists who create eclectic, alternative rock songs influenced by many genres - rock, fusion, EDM, metal, cinematic and blues. Constructed with heavy gauge frequencies, built to last.