MEMBERS WITH 9-to-5's // Heather Ripley Balances Tax Law And Visual Art

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.

While a 9-to-5 job might require her to separate her creative and professional time, Ripley says her mind is often occupying both realms. She might be drawing on her notes during a stretch of tax research, or using the bulky Internal Revenue Code to prop or her art materials. "I can't just shut down the lawyer-y parts because I'm holding a paintbrush," she says. "Ah, if it were so easy!" But that overlap can results in some unique connections. "For example, my work includes line drawings where I set up arbitrary constraints or problems and then work my way through them," she says. "Not to say that law is a set of arbitrary constraints, but the notion of working in and through (even around—legally!) restrictions and limitations appeals to me."

Ripley was first drawn to 3rd Ward by Drink N' Draw. "Less for the drinking, more for the drawing," she says. "The existence of this low-cost, high-quality time and space to draw and engage with others was utterly fascinating." Since becoming a member she's found that it offers much more. "The simple premise of artists coming together, making art, and having a good time sort of sums up the place nicely," she says.

Her most recent project was crafting holiday cards for her friends and family. "I really wanted to do linoleum block printing, which I hadn't done since, oh, elementary school," she says. "As sometimes happens, the demands of law practice set me a little off-schedule with the cards, but I got them done!" For the last Member Show Ripley showed her painting Yeah, You (pictured above), which "considered the juxtaposition of being loud/in-your-face with being quiet/subtle, definitely a tension I experience in my lawyer life."

"That dichotomy is something I want to examine more," she says. "And there's a modest queue of portraits to get to." Ripley will surely explore and expand her work this year, but, as always, she's also keeping her professional work in mind: "April 15th is just around the corner!"

Check out more of Ripley's artwork below:

-- John Ruscher