I'm a flagrant creative, with a semi-empty nest, a handsome preacher-husband, and eight adorable grand babies.

While I am equally drawn to words and art, words are my defining first love, and a big part of my art form.  I'm here to encourage you with both paintbrush and pen. Hence, the paint brush and the ink pen in my sketchy little home-made logo:

I believe “if I encourage the women, I encourage the world”.

My main mission is the middle age woman.  This beautiful season of mid-life is under-celebrated, and under-valued, and the women do not get enough support.  

Middle age can be a gracious place. It is a “Promise Land…disguised as a battle”. To carry the Biblical metaphor further, midlife is a land where many of us now find ourselves walking, a place where the potential fruit is enormous - if we are willing to slay some giants.  

I’m busy doing just that (slaying giants) in my personal life, in my art, and through my writing and speaking.

I invite you to sit down, relax, and please overlook my hair (it is its own light source). Let's talk about the things that really matter - and laugh about the things that really don't.  

My Story 

(Photo cred: Sherwood Media)

Married for over 30 years to Pastor Tim Atchley, I am a late-blooming artist. A very late-blooming artist. I was nearer to fifty than forty before I ever opened a tube of paint. My first career was in banking (hilarious and short lived). Next, it was to home educate all four children, birth through high school graduation.

I thought I was left-brained, organized, and strong. I discovered I am, in fact, the opposite of all three.

There was a time when I thought I was above what many call a “mid-life crisis". I hadn't yet learned that a mid-life crisis has less to do with age.  It has more to do with how I handle dropping my plates.

A mid-life crisis has far more to do with the fact that many, many people are aptly able to keep a lot of plates spinning for a lot of years. But no human can spin #allthoseplates indefinitely.  Some people begin dropping plates in high school. Most people happen to be 35 - 50 years old when the breakage begins.

Eventually, a plate falls.  It’s a cherished and heirloom plate that ends up crashing, always.  And then all the other plates fall automatically when...

...you straight-up fail...

...a child fails...

...a child succeeds...then leaves...

...you get "that" diagnosis...

…a grown child deals with infertility…

...a parent dies...

...a dream dies...

...a husband is unfaithful...

...there is an ongoing health issue...

… “The Change” actually changes you…

...we discover we no longer love being plate spinners.

The true-truth is that most of this sort of breakage is no respecter of age, gender, or socio-economic status.  I know an eighteen year old who is dealing with crippling regret.  Is this person having a teenage crisis?  I know a seventy-something woman with a Master’s degree, yet who is wildly unhappy.  Is she having a geriatric crisis?

Of course not.  "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards", says the book of Job in the Bible.

My plates started hitting the concrete almost the day I turned 40.  Seriously, I turned 40, and the next day I had to buy readers. The day after that, my back went out, leading to years of chronic pain. And the day after that, all hell broke loose. 

I found myself wanting to fall asleep and never (as in, never-ever) wake up.  I didn't think of ways I could end my life.  I just didn't want to wake up to my life.  I was camped out at what professionals will tell you is the lesser manifestation of suicidal depression.  I didn't feel this way for days...or weeks...or even months.  The months turned into a year, and then it all kept going.  Longer.  Longer still.

I found myself in a place I had never been.  A place where I cried daily.  

Then...in the middle of all that...both identical twin daughters married in the space of one year (such joy...and stress) and my sons turned into quasi-prodigals. One son entered what has been a long battle with drug addiction.

Life.  Became.  Very.  Hard.

I was riding the Transition Train with no one to tell me that it would all eventually be okay.  

It was at that point, and from that place, that I picked up a paintbrush for the very first time.

In the middle of all that heartache, God had begun opening my eyes to the truths of grace, inside scripture.  I began to see the "finished work of Christ" as being truly finished.  I took up art as a means of processing the Jesus I was coming to understand in a fresh, new way.  

Lo' and behold, my art began selling, and has sold ever since. I have now self-published two books, plus written, filmed, and published four comprehensive online art classes (and counting) on The Jeanne Oliver Creative Network .

My art now lives in every state in the United States and almost every nation on earth! I have exhibited in some of Knoxville and the southeast’s best juried art shows, as well as spoken, taught art, and ministered to women in workshops held everywhere from North Carolina and Tennessee, to Vermont, France, and Italy.

All of it (I’m talking every. single. bit.) after age 45.

Suffice it to say, I have overcome overwhelming odds to be sitting here right now, this minute, and all by grace alone.

By.  Grace.  Alone. It was nothing short of a radical message of grace that could give me beauty for ashes.

Me, who thought I could never find out what a midlife crisis felt like.