Featured Mom: Woodcut artist Andrea Rich

Photo courtesy of Andrea Rich

Readers: The Featured Mom series profiles women who are raising children and doing something else as well -- running their own business, doing charity work, or in this case, practicing an art. For the month of October, to celebrate Open Studios in Santa Cruz County, the Featured Moms will all be artists at different stages of their careers and parenting.

Santa Cruz woodcut artist Andrea Rich's grown daughter Lily is a fixture at her yearly open studio. Rich's studio is another building in back of her house, so Lily mans the house while Rich greets visitors in the studio.

"I can't be two places at once," Rich says. "She knows the process and can speak about it so she's been a real asset."

Lily ought to know the process -- she's been part of it from birth.

Rich says that although she had practiced various arts before she had Lily, it wasn't until she was pregnant and working at her husband's medical practice that she saw the possibility of doing it full-time.

"[My husband] said I could stay home with the baby and I thought this would be great," Rich remembers. "I had a vision of putting her under the table and I'd be able to work all day without realizing you don't have more than 15 minutes at a stretch."

She laughs at the memory of her naivete, but then adds, "I worked at the kitchen table, and did it in 15 minute stretches!"

Nevertheless, the difficulties of being a stay-at-home mom were energizing to her. "I thought, now I'd better produce," she says. "I've been given this opportunity that most artists never get, so I'd better make the most of it."

Cranes in the Mist by Andrea Rich

She got serious and professional about her art, getting portfolio reviews and marketing advice from professionals in San Francisco. She took the advice to focus on one art, and saw success pretty much immediately.

"I just focused on woodcut prints and I started producing, and started showing and entering competitions," Rich remembers. "It went pretty quick. I remember Michael Bell telling me that if you had 10% of people interested in your work you were doing well. I was at 10% from the start, so the 90% rejections didn't hurt so much."

In the meantime, she had a young child to care for. Rich says that the main thing that helped her along was the support network she formed in her neighborhood.

"I was real fortunate too because where I live here on Western Drive in Santa Cruz, I had neighbors who were artists and working at home," Rich says. "Somebody would always be home to watch kids, if you had to run out and do something. That make a big difference, to share the childcare."

One of the ways that Rich integrated her daughter into her work was to teach her the art and have her work alongside her mother. At least one time, this led to a short professional career for her daughter.

"I took her down to an art show at the San Diego Zoo," Rich explains. "She did a print of her own, a little camel print, and I let her show it. Carol Channing came through, saw Lily, so she had Lily explain to her the whole process and bought one of her prints. I think she met Betty White -- she remembered her from some TV show she'd seen."

Rich says she's fine with the fact that her daughter followed in her father's footsteps -- she's now finishing her training as a psychiatric doctor -- rather than pursuing art. "You have to spend a lot of time with yourself to do art," Rich explains. "She's a little too social for that."

But Rich says that her daughter's experiences as a child have definitely influenced her education and the decisions she's made. "She got an art education, another way of looking at the world and seeing things, a different perspective."

Introduced to travel with her parents, Lily now travels a lot and has found her knowledge of art useful on her trips.

Rich says that Open Studios is a great way to introduce children to art. "We had the most fun with Lily at Open Studios when we'd take her down to the artist preview at the Art League and let her pick a studio or two that she wanted to see," Rich says. "I went with her one year and she picked an artist that I probably wouldn't have gone to. He was doing artwork with found objects. I hadn't been real turned on by the piece, but she wanted to see it. He had all these little things he'd found, and he had a lot of really interesting work. She was so pleased that we all liked it and that it was her choice."

Despite her success as an artist, Rich says Lily comes first.

"We always consider her our greatest work of art. She's definitely her own person and has her own taste. But I think she enjoyed growing up with an artist mom."