You have an 'About' section on your website that is essentially blank. Why don't you share more about your journey and who you are on your website, are you naturally pretty shy or do you like to tell people about yourself?
I’ve been dragging my heels on getting the business side of things set up for a while, my goal for the summer! That said, I am bad at self promotion, and have dealt with imposter syndrome throughout my artistic journey. 'Younger' me never wanted to make art my job because I didn’t want to take the joy out of it. Now me realizes that’s stupid, and I should be getting paid for doing the thing that gives me joy. It’s time to move past my hang-ups and jump into the deep end.
At what age did you decide you wanted to be an artist, were there any life events or things that happened for you that helped you realize this was your calling?
I’ve done art in various forms from a super young age. My parents still have a watercolor framed that was done by 3yr old me in their downstairs bathroom. My dad is a writer and also has a degree in fine art, so he both taught me the basics and encouraged me to keep going and keep improving. After I graduated college, and got into the retail grind, I lost my artistic drive for a while. Don’t really know why or how, probably a combination of exhaustion and depression if I had to guess. I was in a pretty rough place mental-health wise, my anxiety was getting really bad, and I just needed to do something to get out of that funk. In 2017, my mom gave me a moleskin art journal for the holidays like she often did, and I decided to commit to drawing in that journal every single day until it was full. And then surprisingly I actually followed through on it. That daily practice got the juices flowing again, and I started painting, first with acrylics, and later with watercolor. Once I found watercolor, a medium I used to be afraid of by the way, everything shifted. Watercolor is an exercise in letting go of control and working with what’s there. Quick decisions are necessary, and you kind of have to lean into mistakes. It’s almost become a metaphor for my mental health journey. [oh hell yes we had her ask her dad to take a pic of the watercolor on his wall!]
Has art lost some of its power to inspire, because of all of the tech, content, and info that people see and hear everyday? What role do you think art will play in a future where AI can generate images in seconds?
Real art, and by real I don’t mean professional, I mean art made by human beings of all skill levels, will always have the ability to inspire and awe. AI can be a helpful tool in some circumstances, but art generated by AI looks and feels soulless. We could talk for an hour about the ethical implications around how AI engines are trained, but that’s not the point. In order for art to make you feel something as the observer, the artist needs to feel something while they’re creating it. An AI engine can’t feel, so how can the images it generates make you? That said, the idea of having to “create content” to make my work visible to the wider world is frustrating, mostly because it feels like I am stuck doing something silly when I should be focused on my craft. The flip side of that is I reach a much wider audience than I would without it. Necessary evil I guess.
If you could have been born in any timeframe in the history of earth and lived until you were 100, when would that be, and what would you do for that 100 years?
That’s a hard question to answer. I’m a woman, a lesbian, married to another woman, and I’m masculine presenting. I don’t know how well I would have done at surviving a hundred years in another time period. That being said, I’m aesthetically inclined towards the medieval period but that’s probably just the sci-fi fantasy/dungeons and dragons nerd in me talking. I’d definitely learn how to sword fight and knowing me, I’d probably start an uprising by teaching the common folks how to read and write. Education is the enemy of oppression.
If you and all of your art were buried in a volcanic plume of ash and preserved 2000 years, when they unearthed you and your art, what would you want them to know? What could a future archaeologist learn about today by seeing your art, or what would you hope them to learn?
A lot of my work is about finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, creating worlds of whimsy or hiding little secrets in plain sight. I like thinking that people see something new every time they look at one of my pieces. That spirit of play, spirit of childlike wonder, that’s what I want to evoke in my work. That’s the way I approach the pieces I create, and I love seeing others get joy out of discovery. I don’t know if that archaeologist would get a whole lot about the world I live in, but they’d probably get to know me pretty well.
