When Jessica Hitchcock was the director of finance and human resources at arts nonprofit Craft Alliance, she’d often wake up at 4:30 a.m. to put on white overalls and grab a paintbrush. On lunch breaks, she’d pick up prints, pack and ship them, then run back to work until 5 p.m.—just to head home and paint until she fell asleep.
Her husband, noting how much energy she already spent on her side business, asked whether there was any way she could create art full time. The daughter of a painter, Hitchcock knew in high school that she was a gifted artist but instead followed her love of accounting and business into a career in finance. Naturally, she told her husband she’d crunch the numbers.
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“I heard about people making it full time, and I thought, ‘People can really do this? I need to do research,’” Hitchcock recalls.
Craft Alliance was the job she’d dreamed of in college, allowing her to combine her passions for business and art, but she yearned for the next chapter. “I felt like I was losing opportunities by not painting,” Hitchcock says. “Other people realized my potential, but I don’t think I realized it myself.” Then, last November, she gave Craft Alliance her notice. By February, she’d launched her full-time art career.
Today, Hitchcock’s schedule is 60 percent business, 40 percent making art. She paints live at events (which she likes for the interaction), does her fair share of commissions (pet portraits can be the most stressful, she says), was published in the U.K.’s House and Garden after the magazine found her on Instagram, and enters open art calls (which landed her art in an Iowa hotel).
As for the pieces themselves, Hitchcock can’t help but paint in vibrant pinks and teals (“My studio’s a little dark, and that’s part of why my paintings are so bright”), working off her own instinctual color theory. Once, at a live painting event, a guest congratulated her on finishing a painting as the artist took a step back. No, there’s still something missing, she replied—“Your eyes know what they want to see.” Her pieces, which lean abstract, are always created as part of a collection.
“When I’m really moved to paint something, I don’t want to do just a one-off,” she says. “There’s still more in me that needs to come out.”
