In Her Words: Stephanie Linden, Artist, Revealing Possibilities With Light & Color
Family Physician Begins Her Second Act
People often don’t realize that medicine is very much a balance of left brain and right brain. So much of what you do, especially in family practice, is diagnosis. As a diagnostician, you have to look at the patterns. It's not like solving a math problem where there’s a black and white answer. You have to listen and look at the subtleties. There is a huge amount of art in the practice of medicine. There are also a lot of physicians who are artists.
Although I worked as a family physician for more than 25 years, I’ve been an artist my whole life. My mom is an artist too. I grew up with her painting and I started painting when I was as young as four or five years old. My mom didn't really teach me, but she gave me Crayola watercolors. When I was in high school and college, I played around with oil paints. My mother went to college at about the same time I did and got her degree in art, but she ended up getting a job editing publications and not using her art degree. When I was considering my path, she encouraged me to pursue my interest in medicine rather than take a chance on being a starving artist as I could always continue to do art as a hobby. I was influenced by that, and since I also really loved science and wanted to do something I felt was meaningful, I went to medical school and became a family physician.
Art has always been my release, my stress relief. It refuels me, but I had always thought of it as a hobby and hadn’t really considered doing it full time.
I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, and did my undergrad at Indiana University at Bloomington and then went to Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis for medical school. I participated in my first couple of art shows when I was in medical school. I had a painting in a student/faculty show. They had a local artists’ show in town too and I had a painting or two in that. After residency in San Francisco, I got married, moved to Michigan where my (ex) husband was from, had kids, and was thriving in my career. I had a busy practice in Michigan for about 25 years and I always painted throughout that time — less so when the kids were little and more so as they got older.
I absolutely loved being a family physician. But as you can imagine, it's very stressful and very time consuming. I made a lot of sacrifices. Art has always been my release, my stress relief. It refuels me, but I had always thought of it as a hobby and hadn’t really considered doing it full time.
I'm healthy and my kids are grown, so I'm low risk. It seemed like the right thing to do for many reasons. But something changed with people during CoVid.
About six years ago — I don't want to say I was getting bored — but I was certainly getting burned out. I started thinking about retirement and what I wanted that to be like. At the time I was also part of a great group of gals who were painting once a week and had formed a little paint and wine club. One of the women in the group is a professional artist and another has a day job but shows her work. In 2019, a few of these ladies convinced me to participate in a show and the response was great. It was exciting to think that I could retire and do some shows and make a little money. I thought it would be fun, but I wasn’t too serious.
And then CoVid happened. For me professionally, it was a devastating thing. While I didn’t realize it right away, for me personally it was also a gift. When the world shut down, we had to shut down our practice. We weren't allowed to see patients in the office for at least six weeks and we owned our practice. Suddenly, there was practically no income coming in. Meanwhile, my daughter was in college and my son was graduating from high school and getting ready to enter college. So, I had college to pay for and I got a two-week paycheck that amounted to $18.
I understand that there was a much bigger situation in the world and other people were really devastated, but it also really hit me hard. I worked so hard for so long and I ended up feeling like I had to work in the hospital on the CoVid floor and put myself in harm’s way to be able to pay my bills. However, I also had a sense of duty. I thought “This is what I trained for.” I'm healthy and my kids are grown, so I'm low risk. It seemed like the right thing to do for many reasons. But something changed with people during CoVid. It was so traumatizing to have patients that I'd known for 20 years be angry with me about things I was suggesting for their health benefit. Dr. Google has done a real disservice to the practice of medicine. In the end, it was CoVid that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I had been in practice long enough and decided I would have to figure out another way.
I continued to work part-time as a physician, taking tele-health visits for a while. Then, in September of last year, I decided to go full throttle with my art and quit my job.
At about the same time, I came across a school called the Milan Art Institute. They offered a year-long, online course that promised to teach you everything you needed to know to become a professional artist. It felt like kismet! I took the course and graduated two years ago. Although I was already proficient as an artist, it exposed me to different media and different ways of doing things. I was most interested in the marketing aspects. I met mentors who were making a solid living as an artist and I started to think I could really make it work.
During and after Milan, I continued to work part-time as a physician, taking tele-health visits for a while. Then, in September of last year, I decided to go full throttle with my art and quit my job. I don’t want anybody to think it has been easy. I put a lot of work into getting things in place and I’ve sold 29 paintings since October. There have been some months when I’ve been able to make as much money as an artist as I did in a typical month as physician.
Some of the skills that I developed as a physician continue to help me today as an artist. Because I owned a medical practice, I already had experience as an entrepreneur. I was already my own IT person. I managed my schedule. I made sure we had enough supplies. Most importantly, I have a strong work ethic and I have people skills. My experience connecting with patients when they are often at their most vulnerable has helped me connect with people who are interested in my art. There’s a lot of marketing that goes into being a professional artist, but people really want an emotional connection. Nobody’s going to buy your art if they just see it in a catalog of paintings.
Belle Curve Stories is about women navigating life with grit, grace, and growth. What do these three words mean to you?
Grit is the ability to face an adverse situation. I ran into the fire with CoVid. I assessed my risks – I knew I’d get paid if I worked on the CoVid ward. I learned a lot from that and I think overcoming resistance, that's where you have growth. I obviously got through a grueling residency program, medical school, and residency, you have to have grit and determination. Having graduated in the early ‘90s, things were a lot different back then, in terms of women in medicine, than they are now. You had to have that backbone to be able to get through that.
With grace, my thing is just to keep smiling. I try to always have a positive attitude, regardless of how bad the situation is. I really try to practice gratitude and see the best in people and the best in situations. You can choose if you're going to be happy or not. It's not your circumstances. I went to great strides to change my circumstances. I guess that's the grace is to be an example for people. I tried to be that example for my kids while going through a divorce and trying to be a better person.
As far as growth goes, we should always be seeking to grow as people. I'm always reading self-improvement books and mostly non-fiction. The world is constantly changing. With all the skills that I've gained, like how to make my website, navigating Instagram, etc., I'm still learning. Ten years from now, it may be completely different, so I’ll just have to adapt.
Also, I have not put medicine 100% behind me. I'm in the very baby stages of creating a digital course. When I was in practice, there were so many topics where I would provide patient education. For example, a patient would come in and their bone density tests would be low, so I would provide a little education on osteoporosis. I would diagram what the scores meant and talk to them about the medication options. That’s the kind of information I want to provide in a digital course format.
Growth is good, I’m always looking towards that next thing and not being satisfied with the status quo.
If you could go back in time and give advice to your 25-year-old self, what would you say?
To my 25-year-old self I would say “Believe in yourself. Be confident in who you are.” The world was different then. It's a lot easier to market your art with the internet. I don't really have to go to galleries. The world is at your fingertips now. So, I don't know if I would have made the decisions differently, but I would make them with a higher degree of confidence. I wish I had more self-confidence back then and really believed more in myself and my abilities.
Stephanie Linden, 56, practiced medicine as a family physician for more than 25 years before becoming a professional artist. She is a contemporary painter known for her captivating blend of realism and abstraction. Drawing inspiration from the natural world and everyday life, Stephanie meticulously crafts each of her pieces, incorporating elements of realism, such as lifelike figures and landscapes, with abstract forms and textures. She and her husband spend as much time as they can in the Sarasota, Florida area. Follow Stephanie on Instagram @stephanielindenart and visit her website at stephanielindenfineart.com.
