Meet Bridger: The Story Behind LocalArtist

I've been a creative my entire career. For over 15 years, I've worked as a photographer, retoucher, and creative director in Los Angeles. I've shot celebrities, retouched campaigns for people like Britney Spears and Celine Dion, designed for clients like Audible and Universal Music Group, and had my work show up in places like Billboard, Variety, and MTV. From the outside, it probably looked like I had it all figured out.

But for a long time, I didn't.

For about seven years, I dealt with severe anxiety. And I don't mean the kind where you get nervous before a meeting. I mean the kind where your baseline, every single day, feels like you're hovering at a 95 out of 100, with 100 being a full-blown panic attack. That was just my normal. Morning, afternoon, night. It was constant, and it was crippling.

I got really good at functioning through it. I kept booking jobs, kept delivering work, kept showing up. But the quality of my life was terrible. I wasn't really living. I was just surviving and getting through each day.

Eventually I hit a wall. I knew something had to change, and I started making shifts one at a time. I started taking fitness seriously. I cleaned up my diet. I got sober. And I picked up a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

If you're not familiar with The Artist's Way, it's a 12-week program designed to help people reconnect with their creativity. It involves daily journaling (called Morning Pages), weekly reflection, and something called Artist Dates, where you take yourself out on a solo creative outing once a week.

The journaling alone was transformative for me. It gave me a place to process everything I'd been carrying around for years. But the Artist Dates were what really opened things up.

See, the thing about spending 15 years as a professional creative is that creativity starts to feel like work. Everything I made was for someone else. Every project had rounds of approvals, layers of feedback from talent, stylists, editors, brand owners. I was a chameleon. I could create for anyone's vision. But somewhere in all of that, my own voice got completely lost.

The Artist's Way helped me see that. And the Artist Dates gave me a way to start finding it again.

My first Artist Date class was a pottery session at Bitterroot Pottery here in LA. Wheel throwing. Making a bowl.

I remember walking in not really knowing what I was doing. But I got my hands in the clay and something just clicked. It was so physical and organic and calming. There was no client giving notes. No approval process. Just me and a lump of clay and the challenge of keeping the thing centered on the wheel.

Was I great at it? No. Not even close. But here's what mattered: I didn't care. One of the biggest things The Artist's Way teaches is that perfectionism kills creative projects. You have to let it go if you want to actually make anything. And in that class, for maybe the first time in years, I did. I just played. I experimented. I let it be messy and imperfect and fun.

I left that class knowing I wanted to do it again. So I booked another class. Then another one. Sculpture, glass blowing, more pottery. I started filling my weeks with creative experiences that had nothing to do with client work and everything to do with just enjoying the process of making something.

The idea for LocalArtist didn't actually come to me during a class. It came to me at home, thinking about working out.

I had just started taking my physical fitness seriously, and I was thinking about how gyms are set up. You walk in and there's a section for cardio, a section for weightlifting, a stretching area. They offer classes for spin, yoga, aerobics. Everything is in one place under one roof, and you just pick what you're in the mood for that day.

And I thought: why doesn't that exist for art?

Imagine a place where you could walk in and choose between pottery, painting, music, cooking, photography, textiles. All of it available, all in one spot. That would be incredible.

Now, realistically, putting all of that under one physical roof would be nearly impossible. The materials alone would be a nightmare. But I realized I could create that same experience digitally by connecting people with studios and instructors who already offer all of these things across the city. One platform, every creative class in LA.

That's where LocalArtist came from.

These days, outside of building LocalArtist, I still have creative practices that are just for me. I do a lot of visual journaling. Collaging. I'll sit down with a stack of magazines/books, some glue, markers, and just make something with zero intention of ever showing it to anyone.

It's completely different from the work I do professionally. There are no rounds of feedback, no approvals, no collaboration. It's meditative. It's entering a flow state and letting everything else fall away for a while. No pressure, no outcome, no audience. Just play.

That's what dropping perfectionism looks like for me now. It doesn't mean making bad work. It means creating more and creating faster and not worrying about what it looks like at the end. It means choosing the feeling of play over the feeling of work. And it's so much easier to get lost in a flow state when you're not carrying the weight of perfectionism around with you.

LocalArtist isn't a business idea I came up with on a whiteboard somewhere. It came out of a really difficult period in my life, and it's built on the things that helped me get through it. Art, community, play, healing.

I know what it's like to be a creative who's lost their voice. I know what it's like to struggle with your mental health and not know where to turn. And I know what it feels like to walk into a pottery class for the first time and realize that making something with your hands, even something imperfect, can genuinely make your life better.

That's what I want LocalArtist to be for people. A source of joy. A reason to get off your phone and go do something real, in person, with other people. I think about how this platform might introduce people to their future best friend, or their partner, or just give someone a reason to leave the house on a Saturday and try something they've never done before.

I think about the connections that could form and the domino effect those connections could have. I think about the art therapy that naturally comes with a concept like this. The whole thing is a hundred percent me. It's the most authentic thing I've ever built. And I have a feeling it's authentically a lot of other people too.

If any of that resonates with you, come check out what we're building at heylocalartist.com. Browse some classes. Come to a Meetup. Say hi.

I'll see you out there.