We were lucky to catch up with Olivia Tang recently and have shared our conversation below.
Olivia, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
The biggest risk I’ve taken in my life so far was leaving my career in fashion to become a full-time stay-at-home mom. Back in 2017, I had just graduated from college and was offered a job as an Assistant Designer for a big fashion company in San Francisco. I was scouted at my graduation showcase and offered the position straight out of college. It was the dream – a Singaporean girl, living in a big American city, working in fashion. The world was my oyster. A year into my new job, my husband and I found out we were pregnant. As much as I was thrilled at the prospect of being a mother, it also took me by surprise. I stuck it out at my job throughout my pregnancy and after my daughter was born, but I was struggling to do it all. I was torn between the career I dreamed of having and the new life I was taking on as a mother. 6 months after returning to work, I resigned to stay home full time with my baby.
I remember feeling this immense sense of loss, like that was the end of my career and wondering how I would find my way back on the path I had worked so hard to get on. It was bittersweet because I was, in return, getting all this time with my daughter, time I knew I wouldn’t get back if I had chosen to keep working. I have to admit, I lost myself in those early years of motherhood. That, and navigating the pandemic with a toddler threw my life completely off balance. I knew I had to find an outlet for myself, a place where I could nurture a sense of purpose outside my parental duties. That’s when I started drawing again. Art fell into my lap as a cry for help when I least felt like myself. I remember spending every minute of alone time I had drawing. Whenever my daughter was asleep or if my husband took her out to the park for a few hours, there I was, drawing my heart out. I didn’t know where it would lead, I just knew it was connecting me to a part of myself that had gone dormant for much too long.
Fast forward 4 years, and a second baby later, I have my own little studio and a practice I’m proud to call my own. I’ve spent all this time honing my skills and finding a sense of style in my work that feels authentic to who I am. I’m at a point in my journey where I’m still figuring out where passion and livelihood intersect, but I’m confident that will come in due time.
Olivia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Hello! I’m Olivia. I’m an artist and mother of 2 young kids. I was born and lived in Singapore all my life until I moved to San Francisco for college in 2015. I studied Fashion Design at California College of the Arts and worked in the fashion industry for 2 years before becoming a full-time homemaker. I’ve been living in the Bay Area for the past 10 years and work out of a small studio in Berkeley. I create mostly gouache and acrylic paintings. A lot of my work revolves around organic shapes and lines found in nature. I’m especially drawn to the shapes of flower petals and leaves as a repetitive motif in my paintings. I enjoy painting the same shape in different ways over and over, each petal building on the last one. I see it as a form of meditation and a way to allow my intuition the freedom to guide the outcome of each piece.
As AI becomes more prevalent, I find myself being drawn to more analog methods of creating. As opposed to feeling threatened by it’s existence, what feels natural to me is going back to the skill sets that set us apart as artists and finding ways to keep them alive. I’ve been really into linocut printing this year. Carving blocks and making small batches of hand-pressed prints brings me so much joy in our increasingly fast-paced world. There’s something about intentionally slowing down that really changes the thought behind a piece. I think we value something more when we are aware of the time and care put into creating it.
As a creative and a mother, my world is constantly changing. As the kids grow and evolve, so do I. We don’t talk enough about how hard it is to preserve the integrity of our individuality, all while shaping the lives of little ones. I believe finding something that makes you feel grounded and connected to yourself makes all the difference. Our kids want to see us as our best selves, the same way we want to see them thrive and flourish in life.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
My daughter is really into superheroes and loves pretending she has different special powers like super speed or the ability to freeze time. Creativity feels a lot like a super power to me. Being an artist takes me into a world outside of the one we live in, into one of my own creation. It gives me the ability to exceed what I thought I was capable of and make the rules as I go. I love being surprised by my ability to create something out of nothing. As adults we don’t create as many opportunities for ourselves to play as children do. I love that I get to do that as an artist. Doing what I do also allows me to blur the lines between my “job” and my life at home. I love having my children with me when I’m working. I think it’s inspiring for them to see me in my element. Not just the person who feeds, clothes and bathes them. I feel most like myself when I’m painting and my kids get to see that version of me. That’s definitely a super power in my book.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
There are so many challenges in the human experience that hold us back from pushing ourselves to greater heights – the fear of failure being a big one. I’m partially color-blind and it always amazes people when they find out because you could never tell from looking at my work now. I remember doing a color matching exercise in art school where we had to match various skin tones to the models in magazine tear sheets. Somehow, mine would always turn out green no matter how hard I tried.
It’s funny looking back on it now, because those green-skinned ladies haunted me for years to come. I convinced myself to live in a world of black and white. I started off only doing black and white drawings in Sharpie because I was so afraid of handling color. They were beautiful but I soon found myself feeling stuck and tired of the work I was making. There came a point where I made a choice to confront the fear of my limitations. There was no way I would grow as an artist if I kept letting my color-blindness define the possibilities of my work.
Once I took that leap and started experimenting with color in my paintings, it opened up so many avenues for play and exploration, and eventually led me to find my style. I developed a system for mixing color that would help me create palettes and color ways for my work. Understanding basic color theory helped me take a more calculated approach by planning out the ratios of color I was mixing and have a more predictable outcome. What shifted was also the view that my perspective of color is different from anyone else’s. So rather than striving for the perfect color match, or letting fear stop me from even trying, I accept that every color I mix is going to be different than the last and that’s perfectly fine.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @oliannetang.art
Image Credits
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