Juliene Sinclair is a Bozeman-based artist who believes in fiercely pursuing your dreams. For Juliene, this includes a combination of persistence, patience, perseverance, failure, hard work, trust, doubt, self-forgiveness, and self-motivation. She turns boring walls into epic attractions, and in this week’s episode she shares her journey following her inspiration, and the twists and turns along the way.

Juliene has always been an artist, and as a kid she drew, painted, created and imagined. As she shares in today’s episode, as she got older, art fell by the wayside. It wasn’t necessarily her passion, and like so many of us do, she chose to go in a different direction. She found herself studying international business in Spain for her first year of university, then moving to Southern California and spending a few semesters at community college. From there, she applied to an environmental engineering undergrad program. She picked painting back up as a hobby, but at the time it wasn’t her main focus - and she continued to work towards becoming an engineer.

It wasn’t until her first job as an engineer that Juliene realized something was missing. She wasn’t happy or fulfilled the way that she had hoped or anticipated, and she started playing around with the idea of having a side hustle in the hopes that she could start painting again. In the meantime, she sat for the professional engineering exam - and she failed. It was devastating, but she continued to work towards becoming licensed and she took the exam again. Regardless of whether she wanted to be an engineer or not, she knew that she wanted to prove to herself that an artist could also be an engineer. (P.S. she passed!)

During the months that that she was studying to re-take the exam, Juliene was able to fit in her first (unpaid) mural for the City of Bozeman in one of their parks, and in some ways the rest is history. She won the Bozeman Beautification Award, and she leveraged that award and press coverage to get her first commissioned mural in downtown Bozeman. She realized realized that creating art wasn’t supposed to be the destination, it actually needed to be the journey no matter what her circumstances were.

“Sometimes our own voice and vision gets bogged down by everyone and everything around us. I found though that if you focus your attention on settling the chaos, clarity will emerge. The clarity that emerged for me was the notion that if you can’t be where you love, then you better love where you are.”

— Juliene Sinclair

Tune in on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7bZHrtjAzbksbLWNaak1NM

Tune in on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stories-of-inspiring-joy/id1510488632

To learn more and connect with Juliene and her work you can visit her website www.julienesinclair.com and follow her journey on Instagram @julienestudios

Stories of Inspiring Joy is a production of Seek The Joy Media and created by Sydney Weiss. To learn more and submit your story, click here.