Phoenix Rising: Jennifer Moss on Creativity Through Crisis

In this episode of Painterly Life, host Shannon Grissom speaks with Jennifer Moss, a multifaceted creative who shares her journey through grief, the healing power of art, and her passion for empowering female artists through the Metta Gallery. They discuss the therapeutic aspects of jewelry making, sound healing, and the importance of nurturing one's creativity. Jennifer emphasizes the significance of finding personal artistic expression and the impact of community in the creative process.

Takeaways

Creativity can be ignited through personal experiences.
Art can serve as a healing outlet during times of grief.
Sound healing has proven benefits for mental and physical health.
Finding your unique artistic voice is essential for fulfillment.
Online resources can help anyone explore their creativity.
Women artists are significantly underrepresented in the art world.
Creating community spaces for art can empower individuals.
Metta Gallery provides a platform for female artists globally.
Art can be a refuge during challenging times.
Pursuing art can lead to personal growth and happiness.

Chapters

• 0:00 Igniting Creativity
• 1:36 Jewelry Making: A Journey Through Grief and Healing
• 5:42 Sound Healing: The Intersection of Music and Wellness
• 10:18 Nurturing Creativity; Advice for Aspiring Artists
• 13:03 Visions of Self: Empowering Female Artists
• 18:17 Future Aspirations: Focusing on Art and Community

Transcript

Shannon Grissom (00:05)
Hi, I'm Shannon Grissom. Are you looking to ignite your creativity? Or how about be inspired by a steady stream of muses? Welcome to Painterly Life, the podcast that celebrates those who create, inspire, and innovate. So whether you're looking to spark your next big idea, reignite your passion, or simply soak in some creative energy,

This is the place for you. Painterly life, where every guest is a new muse, just for you.

Welcome to the Painterly Life podcast. I'm your host, Shannon Grissom. Today we are back with amazing creative person, Jennifer Moss. She does so many genres. I mean, she's a writer, an artist, a sound healer, a techie like no other, and just a really good soul. Welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Moss (01:15)
Thank so much, I appreciate that intro, that's so sweet.

Shannon Grissom (01:18)
Well, you know what, you've done so much, ⁓ you've done a lot creatively, but you're also really willing to give back. You are on the board and have done a lot of work for Yosemite Sierra Artists and just you give back in so many ways. So the community is lucky to have you.

Jennifer Moss (01:38)
Thank you.

Shannon Grissom (01:41)
We talked about your earlier life and things that you did in our first episode. Let's start now with your jewelry making. I didn't touch on that earlier. How did that start?

Jennifer Moss (01:56)
It started because I had a friend who made jewelry and ⁓ it kind of grew out of grief. I lost my best friend ⁓ about 20 years ago. I lost her to suicide and she, her sister and I became friends after that to kind of share our grief and to remember Joanne. ⁓ And

We became really, really good friends and she was a jewelry maker and she's like, I just, want to teach you how to make jewelry. And I was like, that's pretty cool. And so we would get together for these jewelry sessions and we would go to the bead shows and it just became a thing that we did. It was an outlet and she said, ⁓ art is so important to me in my grief It really helps me get through life. And, ⁓ even in the hardest part.

And unfortunately, Susanna, Joanne's sister, she passed in 2016. And at that point I was just so devastated that I'd lost both friends and sisters that I put away all the jewelry stuff. Didn't want to touch it. Gave me really bad anxiety and depression. then COVID hit.

And so everybody's stuck at home and I had all this jewelry stuff and I was sick of being online. I couldn't stand all the contention and just like, was like, I can't do social media right now. So let me just get out this jewelry stuff again and just like go into my studio, get away from the screens and just tinker. And that kind of saved me during COVID, you know, and I'm like, you know, it's not.

I don't have to feel bad about it anymore. It can be honoring Joanne and Susanna. just, so I just started making pieces and pieces and pieces. And I ended up with tons of stuff by the end of 2020 that I had made, um, that I was like, okay, I really like doing this. And kind of my concentration was to deconstruct older jewelry or broken jewelry and then reconstructed into new pieces.

So that was my creative outlet during COVID was to just kind of, because it was away from the computer. ⁓ Photography, you have to use a computer for post-processing. Writing, you have to use it for writing. But this was something I could do that was screenless and I could just go and let my mind wander. And so that was really important to me during that time. And so now I have a back porch that's...

walled in and that is my studio. So I've got a little keyboard in there and I've got my jewelry set up and so that I created that as my studio space and I just love it and that's kind of how jewelry came about.

Shannon Grissom (05:05)
Well, I'm struck by the fact that you started creating it during a time of grief. Right. And your creative process is deconstructing and rebuilding.

Jennifer Moss (05:20)
Oh, you're right. Yeah, I didn't know how cool is that together?

Shannon Grissom (05:24)
That's just great.

Jennifer Moss (05:27)
Kind

of like a phoenix taking something that might be old or dying and renewing it. Yeah.

Shannon Grissom (05:33)
Yes, that's very cool. Thank you. Well, you can definitely feel it in your pieces. They're beautiful.

Jennifer Moss (05:40)
Thank you.

Shannon Grissom (05:42)
So now, now back to the metaphysical, we keep circ circling back to that because it's really not separate. It's in everything you do.

Jennifer Moss (05:53)
yeah.

Shannon Grissom (05:55)
Can you share a little bit about your sound healing and crystal bowls and your whole music background with the sound healing? How did that start?

Jennifer Moss (06:06)
Well, ⁓ again, with COVID a lot of things came out of COVID. One of them was like when the world opened up and we were able to get back together as groups. ⁓ I had this idea of creating a wellness center that had yoga and sound healing and meditation. We didn't have such a center in this small town that we're at.

So I took some money that I had saved up and I opened a sound and meditation and wellness center called Metta, Metta Yosemite. And ⁓ people really gravitated towards it. And during that time, I met a woman, Brenda Negley, who did sound healing. And she introduced me to the Crystal Sound Bowls.

And she showed me how she played them. And it just kind of sparked off my music training again. And I was like, this is so cool because there are actual medical studies and medical journals ⁓ that prove that the sounds from these crystal sound bowls can lower blood pressure. have physical effects. They can make you happier. They can relieve depression. They relieve anxiety. And I just.

found like the whole science of it fascinating. So I was like, well, I want to do this again, no more barriers. I want to try this. ⁓ So I took a course online from Berkeley College of Music called Sound in Healing and how music can heal just so many aspects of what's going on with you emotionally, psychologically and physically to some extent.

And at the end of that, I got my little certificate and I got a set of sound bowls and ⁓ started doing my own sessions for people and they just really loved it. And I love it. My animals love it. I feel like my cats get into it. They'll come around and just sit and listen to it. And it was just so fascinating. ⁓ Since then, Metta has had to close.

⁓ it wasn't making the kind of money that I wanted it to make. and also at one point it just flooded the whole studio flooded. And I took that as the sign from the universe that this project is over now and I need to move on. And, but I still do sound bowls in the community. do a monthly at the library and we get a really good turnout and people just love it.

So that's how I got into sound bowls. It kind of mixed my fascination with the metaphysical, although it's not really metaphysical, it's actually physical, ⁓ and my music training. And it just combined those two interests.

Shannon Grissom (09:13)
Wow. have you noticed, is there a particular transformation you've noticed with anybody attending these sessions that you'd like to share?

Jennifer Moss (09:24)
I think it, I mean, people get like really like buzzed, you know, and I think that's really cool. They wake up and they're like, whoa. But some people have said that they had ⁓ encounters with relatives who have passed, that they have visions. Some people feel like they've floated out of their body during that time. So I always tell people that at the end of the session,

When I ring this little bell, take time to breathe and come back to the room because sometimes you're gonna feel like you're floating out into space and just, you know, give yourself time to come back and open your eyes. So yeah, people experience some pretty wild things.

Shannon Grissom (10:09)
God, that's great. Wish I were closer. So. ⁓

Jennifer Moss (10:11)
I'd be there.

Shannon Grissom (10:18)
What do you, do you have any advice for people who are looking to hone their creative skills or to get in touch with their creativity? What would you say to somebody who doesn't think they're creative at all? How could they explore it?

Jennifer Moss (10:32)
Well, I'd say find something that you're fascinated with. Like I'm fascinated with paintings, like the cards that I showed you from the Masterpiece game, but I never really was drawn to doing that. I had to find my own art, something that jazzed me and just excited me and just set off those parts of your brain that said, yeah, this is really cool. ⁓ So I'd say find something that you're really interested in.

Take a class or two. mean, YouTube is free and YouTube has tons of tutorials. That's where I learned how to do lighting, you know, for photography, for portraiture. ⁓ I did a lot of online tutorials. It's there for the taking. So combine your training with your artistic ability. And I think that's, you know, I wanted to say you, had mentioned ⁓ having your right brain like buzzed.

But I think ⁓ in most artistic endeavors, it takes both parts of your brain. And I think that's why it's so fulfilling. You've got the whole technical part of it that you have to learn in any art. There's a technical part that you have to learn and be good technically at it. But then there's also the creative part and the expression. So I think that's what lights up our brain is that you're using both sides and they're talking to each other.

And so you get this, you know, euphoria that goes on when you when you're good at it and you're using both sides of your brain. So ⁓ I'd say it doesn't even take a lot of money. Just pursue what you can pursue. Buy some pencils if you want to sketch. Go to YouTube and look up some tutorials and just do it. You know, that's my motto. Just do it. What's the worst that could happen? You know? Yeah.

Shannon Grissom (12:28)
So you, you know, when you think about creativity and ⁓ you have morphed that into your Metta Gallery and I have found your online gallery to be a godsend for somebody. I'm a caregiver now and so it's hard for me to get out and do shows. That's just not simply not an option. Yeah. But what I love about your gallery is that you can participate from from wherever you are.

And so could you tell us about your gallery and how that got started and what you're doing?

Jennifer Moss (13:02)
Okay, so this is the third thing that kind of came out of COVID is during 2020, everything shut down and our local arts organization was not able to get together for groups for for our painting for photography groups, and we couldn't do shows. And so I was talking with my friend Wendy, who's also on the board, Wendy Denton, and we were kind of

knocking around like we really want to do a show primarily for females and that is because we were looking at some stats and showing that like 2 % of auction sales are works by female artists that although we make up 51 % of the artists in the United States only 11 % of works in museums are by females.

And ⁓ three to 5 % of permanent collections in US and Europe are works by female artists. And it was just, blew our minds that we make up primarily the fine arts degrees. We're like around 75 to 80 % of the people with fine arts degrees are females, yet we're so underrepresented. So we came up with this show.

And it was called Visions of Self and it was going to be all about self-portraiture and our experience as females and our environment and our emotions. And ⁓ we pitched it to Yosemite Sierra Artists and we said, we'll do this online. We'll make it an online show so anyone can participate. We don't have to get together in person and we can open it up to the world. And it was approved.

And so I was like, now I have to create something to show this works. I wanted it to be a separate site so we could open it up to other arts organizations. And that's how I created MettaGallery. So I used then my web development skills to create this online gallery called Metta Gallery And it was named after my wellness center, Metta Yosemite. And that's M-E-T-T-A with two T's.

And that means loving kindness ⁓ and empathy towards others. It's a Sanskrit word, Metta. ⁓ So I opened Metta Gallery and we opened visions of self to the women across the world. And we were so stunned. We got over like 250 submissions from 14 countries around the world. So women had something to say.

And the first show is still live. We've had five shows. in our fifth year in 2025. And they're all still online for you to see. And the one thing we wanted to include in this show was we wanted to include a vision statement that went along with the piece to kind of describe what it is and why you created it. So that's kind of what's different about Visions of Self than any other art show is that the female artists can

write a vision statement to go along with it. And they're also portrayed on there. So it was such a big success that we've been doing it every year since. ⁓ in December, we will open up for our sixth year of Visions of Self. Wow. Yeah. And since then, I had other arts organizations contact me about putting their shows up. We did the Madera County Agricultural Show.

It's just an easy way for galleries and arts organizations to have an online presence without doing it themselves. And then last year I thought, well, why don't I do some self-hosted shows too? Because that would be really fun. It's like, I don't have to wait for an art gallery to say, can we do a show with you? I can just have a show.

So our first self-hosted show was Feline because everyone loves cats, right? And I saw so much cat artwork online and on Instagram, I was like, I'm doing a cat show. And I donated a portion of the proceeds to our local SPCA and that was a huge success. And we are, ⁓ I don't know when this is going to air, but I just opened the call for entries for our second.

international cats show. ⁓ so we've been having hosted shows for the last year. And that's been so much fun. It's been a success. So that's Metta Gallery in a nutshell.

Shannon Grissom (18:03)
The gallery is incredibly inspiring, so I would encourage all of you to click the link and go visit and submit your work. So what's next for you,

Jennifer Moss (18:12)
There you were.

my gosh.

Well, I, what's next? That's what everybody asked me. I'm really excited to keep pursuing Metta Gallery and my photography as an art. So as I, mean, I am not retired, but kind of as I wind down in the business world, I do want to focus my time and my energy on art.

because that's what makes me happy. ⁓ And again, it kind of helps you through the rough times in the world to just be able to immerse yourself in art.

Shannon Grissom (18:58)
Yes, it really does. Well, thank you, Jennifer. You're incredibly inspiring.

Jennifer Moss (19:05)
you.

I really appreciate the outlet and appreciate talking to you and I miss you so much. I miss you too.

Shannon Grissom (19:14)
you

too and I miss the community up there there's just nothing like it. So if anybody ever gets a chance go check out Yosemite Sierra Artists they have a gallery in Oakhurst and the gallery is going to just inspire you like nothing else. So thanks for watching everybody thank you Jennifer and we will see you next time that's a wrap.

Jennifer Moss (19:18)
It is scri-