Heather Ripley's Yeah, You.

A lot of the 3rd Ward members we feature on this blog are full-time creators, spending their days adjusting lights and snapping shots in the photo studio or forging and crafting things in the shop, but many other members come to 3rd Ward to pursue passions that fall outside of the scope of their day jobs. Take Heather Ripley, for instance, who spends her days as a tax lawyer but is also an active visual artist.

One might not typically imagine a lawyer shedding business attire for an artist's clothes at the end of the work day, but Ripley sees her professional and artistic pursuits as quite similar beyond that surface level. " My hope is to fully invest in whatever is in front of me at the moment, a quality that both creating art and practicing law often demand," she says. "That level of investment can be tough to achieve and sustain, especially with a million other things going on. But there is a cycle of intensity, restraint, and release common to both fields, and I want to learn as much as I can about how those patterns play out. Plus, art and law each entail creativity, problem-solving, setting priorities, and communicating with an audience."

Hit the jump for more about Ripley and the relationship between her work and art.