We were lucky to catch up with Tony Sobota recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Tony thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a Nashville based painter, and together with my incredible wife we are doing our best to raise a child, who is on the autism spectrum.  I’ve been a professional artist nearly all of my life, but it’s only recently—since the pandemic—that I really started discovering what lights me up as an artist.  I love studying lighting throughout the day, particularly transitions, edges, and color spectrums.  I could spend the rest of my life studying color and its effects on our emotions.

And I’ve realized the importance and power of finding what you love and keeping it close by. An artist’s personal curation is crucial in today’s everything-all-at-once world. I’ve never been more excited get into my sketchbook and just play. If you look at my (Instagram) feed it’s obvious I’ve been exploring in recent years rather than doing the same thing over and over. I’m still searching and finding my voice even if people tell me my work looks distinct. My paintings have taken different forms the past few years from grids to cityscapes to weird mushy figurative stuff and even completely free-form improvisations. The past couple months things got a little passive aggressive, I started using snarky text in contrast with ‘cheery’ compositions.

The craziest thing about this exploration phase has been that focusing on my personal work has also led to my greatest years of sales and the largest commissions of my career. I honestly did not expect that. But as one of my mentors says – “Your (art)work is the artifact of you coming alive.”

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I started my career as a theme park caricature artist and I still do caricatures at parties and a few fairs. As a caricaturist it’s easy to get in a rut of thinking “I’ll just play it safe and do what I think the customer wants” – and this type of thinking might be lucrative but it kills art. I’m not saying what the client wants isn’t important, but the best artists work from a ‘center’ – and that center is usually not the brain of another human, especially a “non-creative”. And like Seth Godin would say – trying to serve everybody you end up serving nobody. So while doing creative work on demand often involves client expectations, the thing I’ve had to un-learn is that those client expectations are not the ultimate guiding force of the work. The ultimate guiding force of the best work happens between the artist and God. This means only the artist and God knows if you’re truly pushing your best work or if you’re just hiding. While client expectations—especially for commissions—are important, I’m learning to sort of put those on the shelf for the bulk of the while I immerse in the work. There’s a great risk there because in the end on paper you’re ultimately held financially accountable to the client’s expectations. But the best artists have a distinct voice, and the best clients will value that voice and give an artist liberty in service to the work.

Contact Info:

• Website: tonysobota.com
• Instagram: @tonysobota
• Facebook: Facebook.com/tonyscaricatures
• Linkedin: TonySobota
• Twitter: TonySobota
• Youtube: tonysobota

Image Credits
All photos copyright Tony Sobota