It took Aleta Pippin 10 years to decide it was okay to be an artist.

Nationaly recognized as an astute businesswoman, she didn't know how to relax and become her most authentic self. These days she is gaining the attention for her art that she already enjoys in the businessworld.

Pippin says she has finally learned to paint from the heart and not worry about what other people think of her art. But getting to this point didn't come easy.

Pippin's odyssey of self-discovery began when she moved to Santa Fe in 1991. "I think we boomers are constantly searching for greater meaning; I know I spent my whole life wonderfing who I am," the 56-year-old says.

"Remember EST?" she smiles. "I've been on that bandwagon myself."

Pippin maintains two websites - The Authentic Entrepreneur (no longer) with programs for discovering a business self, and Innersources (this one is now dedicated to my art), the publishing arm of The Authentic Entrepreneur. She has written books like "Sit Still and Succeed," "Say Yes to Success NOW!" and "7 Habits of a Centered Person" that are sold on that site.

She knows her subject. In 1984, during a cyclical downswing in the oil and gas business, her husband, Corky Weaver, was forced to lay off Pippin, his vice president for administration and investor relations, from his Houston-based company, Weaver Exploration.

Moving On

Looking for a business of her own, Pippin purchased a small executive suite business. After nine months of working 12-hour days, six days a week, she looked at her options: "all two of them - close the business or expand."

She opened the larger Front Office Business Centers. Shortly after that, Weaver joined Pippin and she brought in a general manager. By 1991, she had expanded Front Office to four locations in Houston, and Pippin and Weaver could pursue their dream of living a semi-retired existence in Santa Fe.

But this admitted Type A+ personality got the bends trying to decompress too fast. She had a hard time adjusting to life without a DayTimer. "Who am I?" she wondered. "What do I do?"

She saw the name Roberta Harris in a small ad for painting classes, recognized that Harris was a fellow-Houstonian and, on an impulse, signed up for the class.
 
It wasn't as wild an impulse as it seemed. When Pippin was a child, she loved to draw and paint. But her family background, she says, was "very naive."

"We never went to an art gallery, never went to a museum. I had no idea what the options were for art. It didn't seem like anything a person could actually do," she says.

At age 18, right out of high school, she married and went to work. Two children came along, and her career in business continued and grew.

"From 18 to fortysomething, I would pick up a pencil every now and then and draw something. I draw very realistically."

Exploration

In Harris' class, Pippin started by painting faces and then included landscapes. "I couldn't do it as a hobby, though," she says ruefully. "This was my temperament. I couldn't just enjoy it. I thought I had to make a living at it."

When she wasn't an instant success as an artist, she quit painting and began searching for - something.

Call it midlife crisis, empty-nest syndrome, menopause or just existential angst, Pippin dragged the patient Weaver through two moves in Santa Fe and four in other states, looking for her elusive self.

"I spent 10 years wondering what I am supposed to be doing with my life. I spent a year studying to be a Unity minister, and when I wasn't accepted to seminary right away, I decided that wasn't it.

"I moved us to California in 1997 to join the National Speakers' Association, and never made a speech. I wasn't happy in Southern California - we were too near the ocean and it was gray all the time - so we moved further north in California. Then we went to Las Vegas, Nevada."

There, she started painting again, but wasn't happy with her work or her studies. Finally, pulled by love for Santa Fe, Pippin and Weaver returned to New Mexico in 2002.

"Sometimes you need to leave to know what you've left behind," she says.

"I finally realized that we can second-guess ourselves forever, but we're not realy here for a purpose but to focus and in that focus our God-self flows through and that becomes our purpose," she says. "I make art. Maybe it's my age or where I've evolved to, but I've finally quit questioning it."

Finding Direction

With this new hard-won wisdom came liberation as an artist as well. Back in 1991, Pippin had taken her self-described "sweet little bucolic paintings" to a master class taught by Alex Shundi. He looked at them for a long time and turned and asked her gently, "Why are you painting these?" She was devastated at the time. "I don't know what else to paint," she told him.

"Abstration wasn't something I was drawn to," she says, but Pippin listened closely as Shundi taught. "He helped me to understand that even in abstraction we're still in our imaginations, that the colors and shape still have to be right."

Coming home to Santa Fe three years ago, she remembered those lessons as she sat in her studio carved out of a guesthouse on her and her husband's property. "I realized I was really tired of visually replicating something all the time. I needed to experiment."

At the same time, she switched from oil to acrylic paint and decided to push the new medium to its limit. Soon, Pippin threw away the brushes, too. Her new works, which she labels, "controlled chaos," are poured paint on canvas or paper. They have been getting larger and larger. Lately, she has been adding a high gloss with resin or acrylic airplane gloss.

She shows constantly with the Santa Fe Society of Artists, of which she is president this year, and as a member of the limited-partnership Artistas de Santa Fe Gallery.

Ironically, now that Pippin has let go of the need to be commercially successful, the new paintings have sold to individual and corporate collectors as her earlier work never did, drawing prices in the high four figures.

The paintings have been praised as "joyful" and "healing."

For Pippin, it is finally all about the art.