About The Clock Lady

If you’ve opened this page expecting to read the typical “About the Artist” bio, you are going to be disappointed.  My name is JoAnn Shorter and the actual facts of my life are pretty dull. I can’t imagine that anyone would really want to read about where I went to art school, especially since I didn’t actually go to art school.

You see, for most of my life, I was an artist trapped in Corporate America.  Day after day, year after year, I put on a suit each morning and did my best to bring in the paycheck by conforming to what others expected.  Of course, I never really conformed all that well.  I always saw things, and usually did things, a little differently than everyone else.  Lucky for me, I had some great bosses over the years who realized that my creative streak was an asset, rather than grounds for termination.  So I was given pet projects, rewarded and even promoted, all because I just didn’t fit in. 

And for years I was ok with that.

Then my Dad died, and during the months leading up to his death, he shared things with me that shook my whole outlook on life.  He told me of the regrets he had about his life.  The chances he didn’t take and the dreams he hadn’t followed.  The things he wished he had said and done.  The opportunities that passed him by because he had been too cautious (and too responsible) to risk his family’s security.  Regrets that caused him more pain than the cancer that was eating away at his body.

That’s when I knew I was blowing it.  Yes, I had always been relatively successful, but I had always been using the wrong measure of success.  I realized that I had been playing it safe and that I didn’t want look back at my life with regret. 

So after much soul searching, I finally sat down with my husband and had a long talk.  I told him that kinda thought I kinda wanted to quit my high paying job as a mortgage lender and that I kinda wanted to be an artist, kinda.  And he looked at me and said something along the lines of “What took you so long?”

I should probably mention that I do, in fact, have the world’s best husband.  Eric & I were married in 1996 and he has always believed in me; encouraging and allowing me to make changes in our lives because he has always had more faith in me than I’ll ever really understand.  Though it may sound clichéd, he is my best friend.  We are serious homebodies but we laugh a lot and actually enjoy each other’s company.  We love our home in Marietta Georgia, though we miss our friends and family in the Northeast.  Our Pugs, Smooch & Buster, are our only children and you’ll find them on several of the clocks in my gallery.  They are pampered, not spoiled.

So, back to me and the clocks.  People always ask me how I came up with the idea for the clocks.  And the short answer is that they were a combination of little things I picked up along the way.  Everything from my high school geometry and photography classes to quilts I saw on HGTV’s “Simply Quilts”.  The original design was actually based on a kaleidoscope and grew from a project I created while working on a memory album for the co-founder of the National Association of Black Storytellers, Linda Goss.  The actual piece was painstakingly hand-cut with a quilting template from eight copies of one photo.  It took days, maybe even weeks to complete and I probably went through three or four sets of photos till I found the look I wanted.  It didn’t take nearly as long for me to realize that I needed to figure out a way to create pieces like this using photo editing software, as opposed to cutting up actual photographs.

What did take a while was to actually figure out how to do it, but once that hurdle was passed I knew I was on to something.  I researched materials, played around with construction methods, wrote a website and found myself a patent attorney.  I spent months doing the kind of things I hate doing but the public response to my clocks has made it all worthwhile.  And more importantly, I’m doing something I love and having a blast.  And that’s what it’s all about.