From Corporate Life to Creative Freedom: Artist Emily Sabino’s Bold Leap

Today I have with me in the studio, Emily Sabino, who, I'm not sure exactly what your title is, but I know that you are an individual who is an abstract, you are engaging in abstract representational painting. So you're an artist, So I think that's what I will say. I'm in the studio here with Emily Sabino artist. Thank you. It's great to be here. Yes. Well, you and I have had the good fortune to overlap many times over the years, mostly through the Portland Art Gallery, but then most recently, I think the last time I talked to you, you had had this major life change and I thought, wow, this is an individual that I need to get to know a little bit better because clearly she has been just blooming creatively. So let's start there. Let's start with what in 2025 is new and interesting for you? Well, I quit my kind of big bad day job that I'd had more or less since 2011 and kind of dove into painting full time, which was not an easy transition, but I'm really glad I did. Well, and not only was it, so for 15, you were doing this work, but you were doing a really different type of work. Creative, but I wasn't painting Right. I was a director of pricing and project management at a very large international law firm, and so there were just all of these hops through different departments there. But it was no matter what my job title was, I was pretty much a crisis manager. So people may remember during the pandemic, a lot of different companies thought, oh, we're going to go under, we don't know what's going to happen. But in legal, what happened was a lot of that upward transfer of wealth that happened meant that there were a lot of companies that wanted to big fish, eat little fish by a lot more companies. And so law firms were just hugely in demand after they had fired about a quarter of their staff. So those of us who were doing this work suddenly had three times as much work and a lot less people to do it. So that meant that then they had to hire a bunch of other people, and those people didn't really know what they were doing. And so you'd have these mistakes that were million dollar mistakes sometimes in billing or with rates, whatever. And so then I would kind of get called into sort of forensically, figure out what happened, try to contain the problem, and then find a way to break the news to the various parties that needed to be alerted to that in the way that sounded the least horrible. So yes, it was a lot of creativity and figuring out how to do all that, but it didn't leave much room for painting. So I'd only get an hour, two hours tops in the morning. And in the last year that I was working there, I barely, the job kept encroaching on my creative time and it just got to the point where I was starting to breathe funny. And I remember calling my mom and saying, I've got this presentation for art that I've got to do and I can't seem to get it done. And she said, Emily, you are not having an art crisis. You are having a work crisis. You need to quit that job. So I thought, alright, okay, I am going to just dive into the unknown. I'll just do it. So that's what I ended up doing. So Emily, how did you end up going in the direction of that job in the first place? What was it about Your, Was it educational? Was it professional? How did you So I get along really well with lawyers. I always have, I like the sequential mind and the problem solving that they do. And a lot of 'em are very good writers. So I used to do a lot of project work before I met my husband. They pay really well. So I'd have something expensive I wanted to do and I'd get these project jobs and that would cover the cost, and then I'd try to take a month or two off to actually do the thing I wanted to do. And that worked great as long as I was single. The problem happened when I got married, so I love my husband and I wouldn't be me without him really. It's just when you are single, you can be bopping around here and there and kind of living a bit of a wayward, itinerant lifestyle isn't that fun and exciting, but with two people it's too much stress. So we needed something a little more stable and we needed a focus because we're two very creative people. So we thought, oh, okay, we're going to have a recording studio. And he looked at me and he's like, well, you're the native English speaker, so how about you go get the full-time job? And so I said, okay, I'll go do that. And I thought one year I'm going to do it for one year. And I got this job that is the story of this episode here. And in the process, that was the most broke I've ever been actually when I got that job because we got all the equipment we needed for the recording studio, and then I'd get my paycheck every month and I was working crazy hours and in five minutes we would have nothing again, be paying off all these, I got all these credit cards, like the 0% things to finance this recording studio. So we paid it all off, but it was like, what? This is crazy. So we had a band, we were rehearsing, we were going out and doing shows, we were writing music, and then I was working these 50, 60, sometimes 70 hour weeks. It was nuts. So yeah, I don't even remember the question now, but that's how it all started and I just didn't really leave. They paid really well, and ultimately my dad got sick, so we moved to Maine and they let me work remotely. And so it was some more stability for us and you get used to having a little bit of extra money. So it was like, oh, but the more time went on, I was writing less and less songs. I was painting less and less because each department I was in, somebody would promise me the next department's going to be less work and it would be more than the one that I left to the point where it was just like I'd have these little, all I could do at the end of the day was watch plane crass investigations or something like, oh, it's sequential and you can tie it up with a bow at the end. And then I'm like, what is wrong with this? I'm only getting an hour in the morning to paint and I'm having to scrape that. And so I needed to be more in touch. You just described getting to the end of the day and really only having the brain with to just watch. I know plane crash investigations. How did that work into your ability to even give yourself enough creative space in the mornings to paint for an hour? Because I know when I've had jobs that were all consuming, pulling back the time to write for me was the time was hard enough, but then it would take me a long time to get my neurons lined up back again so that I could actually put something out into the world that made me happy. Yeah, I think what I did was the first thing I started painting on painted pottery a lot simpler. And you have the element of surprise with a kiln anyway, so I didn't make any of this stuff. I would just paint on it and that was simpler. And then I was like, okay, this is fun, but I really need to start painting. Painting. I just started working small and I thought I need to do stuff that is a dream. You kind of download it so you don't have to think. It's not a thinking process, it's a come through you first thing in the morning when you're not really awake anyway, so you've got that sleep time that you've regenerated and I read somewhere, give your best time to your art. So I thought, well, that's got to be the morning because my eyes aren't tired from looking at monitors all day. And so I would just get these little intuitions, paint this and just let my hand go and not think too much. And if it was small, I could get it done in a day, in a morning and then wait until the next day to see do I like this and make any final things. So I just painted really small all I could do. So the best thing about leaving is now I can paint big and take three weeks or a month to work on something. Got the time to let things like you said, sort of marinate and not be so time constrained. Talk to me about the pieces that we have here. I mean, they're so beautiful, and when I first looked at them, you sent some ahead of time immediately to me, it felt aligned with this sort of herbalism tradition, which I know that you are also interested. I don't know that it's specific to herbalism, but the natural World, the natural world and the cycles and the seasons. I just think there's a lot going on that when you're rushing around, maybe it starts to feel like, oh, we're born and then we die and one life to live. And I don't really think, if you think about seeds and about cycles of plants, I don't really think it works like that. I think seeds look dead. They're crumpled and shriveled, but they've got DNA in them and they create more life. And so maybe it's like we have many lifetimes. And even when you get a little bit older, then you've got kind of a richness that comes from within. And I just think plants kind of show that they show the whole life cycle in seasons. And to me that's a very hopeful message. And this one in particular is called path forward, and I really have been thinking about where are we as humans right now and what plants would be useful for us as an inspiration to move forward in a way where we work together and we think about longevity of good ideas that work for a lot of different kind of people. Maybe people don't see that when they look at it, but I was like, that's what I think of when I see it. This is elderberry. It blooms in the spring, you can make a wine out of it with blooms, and then in the fall it creates these purple berries. And if you make, a lot of people historically have taken that as a health elixir to live a good healthy life. You don't want to live a long time if you're sick all the time, you want to be in good health. So I just think it's a hopeful plant and it's kind of pushing, it's making a new space in reality, it's making an opening for something positive and new. That's not one side or another, it's just its own thing. And I think a lot of times when cool inventions happen, they take an old tired argument and they're like, yeah, that's kind of irrelevant. Now we've got this cool thing that's going to help us. It's going to make us inspired to think in a different way, think of new possibilities, get excited about something instead of just fighting. So that's not exactly all that I was thinking when I was doing it, but that's of what's in my heart. And it was more just like, oh, I see distance. I see a road and a plant that's here to help us. I love What you're describing and the visual metaphor that you're putting out there. And it is something that I've also thought a lot about. And actually I think this was the reason that you and I was like, okay, now is the time that we need to get Emily on because we were having a conversation around work that I've been doing and I was having a hard time putting words around it. And you're like, oh, so it's a yin process. And I was like, she totally understands. She understands this idea of that sort of drawing in and things that need to emerge and then understanding what comes as a result of that. And when I look at this, it is an interesting mixture of sort of yin and yang because you have the sort of drawing in, but then also the fruition and the glow and the glow and the seed is very, of course, that very in, but then growth and blooming, that's very young. So I think we are in a world, and it sounds like your job is similar to jobs that I've had that are very sort of outward energy focused. Everything is big and bright and crisis and this and that, and being able to have even the temporal availability of resources to contemplate a different way of approaching life is not always easy. Well, but see, before I did that job, I was kind of more in the mode that I am now. I'm just a lot happier now I have more focus with what I'm doing, and that's the part that wasn't there when I was younger. So I did a lot of wild and crazy things, but now I'm kind of more like a pancake. I'm sort of right in the middle and maybe not as exciting my current life, it's like, oh, I just spend a lot of time in the studio and then I go out to openings or whatever. But I understand the unstructured time thing and set some goals and make some things happen. But when you're in the studio, let things flow, have a yin approach, but make sure you have the yang goals at the same time. So it wasn't hard that way, it was just a little scary like, oh, what if I screw this up and I don't paint? What if on day one I'm done with the job and the problem wasn't the job, the problem was me. That was my big worry was am I going to screw this whole thing up? A lot of things had to align where I could actually leave and not be in financial trouble or something. So that was scary. But I very clearly remember the last day of the job, I packed up all my stuff and in the morning I drove it over to send it all back to them. Here you go. Here's all your gear that I used. And then I went right into my studio and there was this pile of ideas that have been patiently waiting for some time. And so they just started coming out and I'm like, oh, wow, I actually have a trajectory and I have themes that are going. And that's the thing I didn't really have before. I mean, I painted, but not like I am now. So I don't think I could have done this any sooner than now. Well, something that has Struck me in my own life is that financially there are things that when you're earlier on professionally, they just do need to put money towards. So for me, it happened to be medical school loans that I needed to pay off and also children and mortgages, things like that. And so it did make a lot of sense at the time to really engage in a corporate medical structure because that is just what worked out financially. And that's not a bad thing. And you do learn things from that and you do engage in a way that I found very rewarding in many, I would say I really hated doing the job for most of the time I was doing it. I loved the people I worked with, but I really didn't love the culture. But I think looking back now, I can say it's helped me so much because I got a lot of confidence once you're used to dealing with million dollar mistakes and how are you going to talk to this person that's billing over $2,000 an hour and how you talk to the clients and all this stuff and you manage to do that, and it's like these planes coming in to land and they're coming in every 60 seconds. You kind of can't freak out about the thing that's five minutes away because you're busy just making sure the stuff right in front of your face. Once you do that enough, I just stopped being so afraid to put myself out a little more. It's like, what am I going to lose here? What's the worst thing that's going to happen? People are going to think I'm a total goofball. I already am a total goofball. What do I have to lose? And also just how much you can get done in a day. That's the other thing. I've always been a hard worker, but this was just crazy. So I thought, all right, I know I can do this stuff. I know I can do it. Let's just see if the flow is there for me. So I'm grateful. This has only been since May 1st, so I'm still in process and unfolding and all that, but it feels very different than before. And like I said, a lot of things align to make this right time. So if you're listening to this and it's not the right time, don't feel bad because it wasn't the right time for me for a long time. I guess I just needed to have that time there to develop some stuff that was kind of missing. And I think that that is exactly the point I was trying to make. So there's the financial reasons why you go into something, whatever it is, whatever your life needs at that moment. But also you are building skills You are building confidence. And it's not that anything's really wasted, not you spent 15 years and you didn't get anything out of it. It just when you kind of realize, all right, this particular plane has landed, I am getting off because I need to move into my next life. And I think that that actual physical sensation that you just described is something that, I mean actually towards the end of the job that I left, then again, we're talking our parallel paths here. I actually was literally getting chest pain. And I said to my mother, I said, mom, I could be having heart attack right now because I feel like is a physical sensation. And it was such a, your head may be able to lie to you, but your body is not going to lie to you. This is not where you need to be anymore. And it's interesting which part of your body you feel the pain in because different people feel it in different areas. So that's interesting that it was heart area for you. It's almost a heartbreak if you don't make the change. And it is more lungs for me, which is kind of a little more sorrow that I was worried that I just was never going to get a chance to express myself artistically in a more committed and focused way. So tell me about this other piece, because the story around the first one is so powerful and this other one has A very different feel to it. This is called Once an Ocean and it's circular, so I'll hold it over here. That one, I was listening to a podcast called Dialogue Works. They were talking about Iran, and I just for a lark was like, I'm just curious to see what kind of beautiful Iranian flowers there are. And I was kind of looking at some of that, and they have these cool lilies and tulips and stuff, and I just thought, those are so cool. I'm going to find a way to put them into a similar format. And I just got thinking about a lot of the arid, more arid areas. They probably at some point really were an ocean. If you go to New Mexico, you'll find fossils. That's what they're called of fish and stuff. So I just thought, well, that was once an ocean and there's beautiful things in every part of the world. And so I don't know, I just, that's what I was thinking with that one, but it's still got that same, let's split what we know and make some room for something new, something beautiful. There's a third way we don't have to be fighting. So I just always think about that Knowing that your mom is Yes. So lucky. Are lucky. She truly is a wonderful person and also beautiful artist. She works a lot of nature into her pieces. How were you influenced by being around her, doing the work that she's done for such a long time as you've continued to evolve your own art? Part of it was seeing her working in her studio, and she said a very cool thing to me that I never for forgot. In fact, I wrote a song about it. She said, doesn't matter the mood, you go when you go into your studio, when you come out, you'll feel better. Which is kind of like saying, don't be dependent on a good mood to paint. Just go in there and have faith that, and when you get out of your own way, stuff will start flowing. So that was a huge help. She actually, in the town we used to live in, she formed this thing called the Emerson umbrella. So up in Belfast, there's Waterfall Arts, they did a similar thing. It's when there's a school building that the town isn't using anymore. If artists are smart, they jump at the opportunity to make that into artist space, and usually the town will sell it to 'em for a dollar, and then they have to assume the expenses of upkeep. So she did that at a time when, I don't know how often that was happening, but I saw her have to write notes and go up in front of a whole bunch of people and give a speech. And so that's where her studio was. So I saw that that was pretty cool. And the other huge thing that she did for me was she just was always saying, look at that field. Look at all the different colors in the grasses, or just look at the trees. Look, when the wind blows 'em, there's one color underneath the leaf and one on the other. She just was always without meaning to maybe telling us to notice how beautiful all the colors in nature are. And so it's just hardwired into my brain. One of the things I've really enjoyed about knowing your mother for a while is seeing the way that she's moved from one set of subjects to another set of subjects, but then she'll weave some of the first subjects back into later pieces. Birch trees are very prominent, rivers are very prominent, and then they kind of recede and something else comes to the forefront. But then always this just colors and colors and colors show and your pieces are very, very different. But I love all the motion and the colors and thank you. It really feels unique, the work that you've done. Thank you. And I know that with your mother, it was also fascinating to me that you could have pieces that were so unique but also have some similarities. I would say that I have witnessed her going from more representational to more abstract. She goes back and forth, and each time she returns to the representational gets a little deeper because she's been going in an abstract. And likewise with the abstract, it gets deeper after she's spent a time in the representational world. And I think artists that have different stuff they work on, probably they might struggle a little more with Ah, why all these different things, but it's just how she is. And then there's other artists that just do one thing and they do it really well. It's just a little bit more narrow, but it can be awesome too. So you bring to your art whatever is in you. And yeah, my mom has different areas of your life that are different. So you're seeing that in the style of the work. But you can always tell a Jane Damon, and hopefully you can tell my work. It's me. Yeah. It's like, ah, that looks like me. So tell me about your music. Is that still strong for you? Right now? I am kind of all in on the painting, and I'm very grateful to my husband for being patient because I know we're going to do music again at some point. I know it. I have a feeling like it's going to come in a few years. So he's right now being the primary wage earner. And I think at some point we're going to both of us be in a place where we're not doing the day job grind. And I think at that point we will start putting music out again in a, I'm not going to give up on this either, but right now there was such a buildup of stuff that hadn't been expressed for so long. I'm just kind of like, I can't do anything except for be thinking about the art right now. Did the two of you meet through music? Before I met Lenny, I had this strange, I'd say about three months before I met him. I had a strange pull to learn Spanish. So I have a lot of Colombians in my family through marriage, so I'd always heard Spanish, and I have an affinity for languages, but I hadn't really ever committed myself to becoming fluent. And I thought, this is not okay. I need to do this right now. And so I just became obsessive about learning Spanish, and I thought, boy, I need a new musical partner. I really need that. And then I thought also, I need a romantic, I need a boyfriend who doesn't speak English and speak Spanish. I think it's either I have to go to a foreign country and just live there where nobody speaks English or I need a boyfriend that doesn't speak English. I kid you not. Three months later, I get a ticket to go to this performance at Berkeley College of And there I met my future husband playing all these mesmerizing andean instruments. I was blown away and he was kind of like two in one. So we just started playing music together, recording together. I had all these songs and I have kind of a soft singing voice. It's got a good tone, but it's not super loud. I'm not a belter. And a lot of the anyan instruments to pan flutes and bamboo flutes and then tarango and classical guitar, they're soft. And so you can create these songs that are kind of like a river flowing and it's handed off to the singer and then it's handed off to the instruments. And a lot of Andy and music is that way. There'll be some singing and then there'll be some interludes, and it's not just four bars of a guitar solo. And then no, there's all this rich tapestry of different instruments, and he plays all these instruments. So I mean, I was just like, wow, my whole world opened up when I met him. It sounds like for you, you need to be aware of how you conjure things up. If you ask for this, there are times when what I want seems to align with what is in store for me, and those happen really fast. And there's other times I desperately wanted things and they just didn't happen. But that was one that I think was going in the direction that I was supposed to go anyway, so it was really weird. I was like, wait a minute. I asked for those two things and I had this weird job before I met Lenny too, that I got hired to sit in front of a phone that literally never rang, and there was internet there. So I remember discovering this little thing called, oh, it just went right out of my head, oh, it's like a thing for slang in foreign languages. I had it, and then it went out of my head and I just was on it all day. I was like, all right, okay, there's two things I need to do. I need to learn all the words that are stuff that I'm interested in. If you study languages in adult ed or whatever, it's all travel stuff. And I'm like, I'm not really traveling. I need music stuff. I need emotional stuff. I need thought stuff that I care about. I want to know all of those words. And so I made a list of all the words that I use, and I looked 'em all up. And then I was like, all right, now I've got to read a book in Spanish. So I did that and then finally I'm like, I just have to start speaking. So I was home living by myself, and I think my neighbors thought I was nuts. I'd just sit there and try to talk in Spanish. So that's what I did to learn. So by the time I met Lenny, I was able to be weirdly wrongly, but you could still understand me, conversant. And he was patient with me. I'm like, you got the point. But it wasn't quite right, like when a pie falls over or cake and then you write it and try to make it look like it didn't fall over. It's a little weird, but it did the trick. We were able to communicate. Talk to me about moving back to Or moving to Maine. Oh yeah. You hadn't moved here Before. Well, my dad got Alzheimer's and a wonderful thing about having a Latin husband, family's very important in South America, central America. And so completely, he looked at me and he said, we should move up now because we're going to have to struggle a little to settle in, and we don't want to be doing that. And it's total crisis hour, so let's move up now before things are really, and then we can be there to help. So we just moved, I don't know, I told my job, I'm out of here. And then my last day they're like, Hey, would you be willing to work remotely? And I'm like, yes, I would. So that's what we did long before. So yeah, I was just home. And then I would go over and we call it dad sitting, and he had one of those long Alzheimer's things. It took a while before it got really bad. So it was like every month or so you'd notice more things that were marking the disease, taking its effect. But I wouldn't really trade that time because I just got so much time with my dad and he was a happy Alzheimer's patient. Sometimes if you have a lot of unresolved stuff, you end up kind of, but he was really a wonderful, it was a good experience for all of us. So I don't regret us sleep really well at night. I remember going to visit your mother and father and was, I think he had been diagnosed, but he was with your mother showing us around the property. So there's this and there's this, and come over here and here's Jane's studio. And I just really enjoyed being with both of them because there was just a lot of love and caring and it wasn't as though, here's this person with this problem, it's just, here's this person and here we are. Right? Yeah. He had really good language ability. So for a long time when he would forget words, I could tell because I knew him well, when he was diverting to a different bridge, that bridge was blown out. This was like he would have five ways to be able to say things. So even if four were blown out, he maintained that for a long time into his disease and he'd make us laugh a lot. Well, I can recognize this in the time that I had with my father because he ended up with cancer that went to his brain. Wow. And so I could tell things were not going well because clearly he was a physician and he was very intellectual. So the same thing kind of happened. I love what you just described. That bridge is gone. That bridge is gone, that bridge is gone, but then this other bridge is still there. And it still was a really wonderful experience to be able to interact. Whatever bridge was left, however they show up, it's still the time that's still really important. So the fact that you moved back before things got really terrible credit my husband with that. And it is really important. I think when you come into a situation when things are already in crisis, then you don't get to appreciate the final time with someone. That can be quite beautiful. And I will there, the law job did help me with all that too, because near the end of my dad's life, we were in the habit of making sure mom would go away for a week or two, once every three or four months, so much to be the primary caregiver. So she went off to Ireland and my dad fell and broke his hip, and I didn't really want to tell her. I was like, God, she just got away from all this. I didn't know it was so close to the end. So there's a lot of things you have to do when you have an elder parent with a sort of, we don't want to prolong things that don't need to be. You just have to jump through a lot of different little circles to kind of rules with Medicare and hospitals and all this. And I just remember I was camping out at the fifth place that I had to be. He couldn't go back to the place he was, and I thought, geez, my law job really has prepared me for this. It's just one thing after another. And I'm just like, alright. I just call work, be like, Hey, I'm doing this other thing today. And it's just work. It was like, okay, we got to go over here. We got to beg this person to get him there, but we can only do it in this window. And I got to call Medicare and I got to call the hospital. And I'm like, yeah, that doesn't phase me. So I guess it was good for that. But I did call my mom eventually. I was like, you might want to come home. This is kind of serious. How did she respond? She came home and was great. I mean, yeah, she was great. It was a weird, magical thing all the way that that happened. So it's too long to go into, I don't want to bore you, but it worked out. There was an angel on my shoulder or something that kind of made it all work that he was able to go back to the nursing home where he was and spend and do hospice there. It was crazy. I think the other thing as I'm hearing you talk that I'm reminded of is at least my e