LR: Miki mentioned how the two of you met and how you became part of her book. What is this journey mean to you?

Photo by Miki Turner

LH: I’m just proud to be in the company of these women. They are such talented women. What I was really happy about, just on a personal level, that at the end she switched my photograph to me in front of the painting. She said, “This is who you are. This is your true style.” The other one was the actory shot. Through this journey we became friends but we weren’t friends before this. We are friends kind of because of this book. She had watched me, she knew how much I didn’t want to act anymore, how I really, really wanted it to change. It’s scary to do something like that later in life. She watched me grow and struggle as an artist, and watched me in my studio. She’s always been supportive and telling me, “You are really challenging, keep going.”

And I watched her with this book and it was the same thing. I was like, “Get this book done. This is time. You are ready.” She really changed the book and made it less of a celebrity book into a really beautiful book about a lot of different women from different backgrounds, different walks of life, and different ages. To me, the book is personal because so much of why I actually left acting and went to painting is because I started to really think about how do I want to spend my time. I was thinking about it in my late 30’s and I thought about it a lot when I had children. Unfortunately, when you are on TV you spent a lot of your time in your trailer. And I’ve seen some interesting parts for older women but not enough to want to stay in it. This is where I am. I haven’t been on an audition or considered acting in two years.

LR: Well, some might consider it as a loss but you have to go with your heart and instinct, which is what you’ve been doing.

LH: For me, to paint is a real gain for everything. It’s a gain for my whole life, for my children, for having time with them and for my soul, my spirit. I really, truly don’t see myself on another TV show ever. I want to grow old as a painter. I want to grow old as a woman painter. I want to be creating a product outside my physical body. I want to produce a product I control. I control my art. I control the minute I go in. I don’t want to be owned by a network or anything. I think something in the universe sort of shifted for me and I think you have to pay attention to that. Art was a new career, there was no guarantee.

I’ve been acting for twenty years and I’ve managed to make a great living for twenty years so it was something I could’ve come back to, but every time I read a script it just felt like a chore. Whenever I was painting it felt like a love. And now I just know that if I was lucky enough to do that with acting, maybe there was a shot so I just took it. I knew it was going to be rough. It’s probably still going to be rough to a certain degree. It’s crazy but it’s also great. “Let Me Fall” sold for over a hundred thousand Euros and that’s incredible. That is a huge price point break for women and I was so emotional signing that painting because I couldn’t believe that we had this incredible show and this was happening. There were actually people bidding over the art in Italy and it was so incredible. Nobody from the film world at all. These were European collectors.