We recently connected with Emerald Barkley and have shared our conversation below.

Emerald, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I think there is a lot of pressure to learn skills, and in particular art skills, as quickly as possible so that folks can turn around and start to make a living (or at least extra income) as soon as possible.

I understand the need for this, and I don’t want to take away from this need, or the ambition that folks may have to work hard and quickly towards a goal. I also think that placing an emphasis on learning skills as fast as we can has the downside of de-emphasizing the joy of learning that process, and the voice that can be found once you slow down.

A question that I get all the time is “How do I find my voice as an artist?” and I think one of the best ways to do this is to slow down with your process and take the time to push it in every direction. How can you expand on this new thing that you learned? Where can you take this technique, and how does it relate to the ideas that you are seeking to express?

I think that an open curiosity and a willingness to explore and play are essential skills to creative work, and that curiosity and exploration are so often the first things to go when people focus on speed.

As far as obstacles go, I think that time is a huge obstacle. In today’s world where artist’s need to be a marketing team, a social media manager, a blogger, and entrepreneur, a purchasing specialist, and an accountant, there never seems to be enough time to dive into a deeper creative space.

This might sound counter-intuitive, but I have found that I have to schedule in structured time for creative play, otherwise I am never able to get around to it. Having time set aside on my calendar is the permission I need to tune out other responsibilities that demand my attention, and for a hour or two I just play.

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

Hello, my name is Emerald, and I am a watercolor painter and bakery enthusiast in Northern California. I use personal symbolism to explore themes of vulnerability and strength, as well as the longing to be understood that is deeply embedded in the human experience. Bones, flowers, animals and birds find their way into my work, helping me to weave a narrative around our journeys to become our very best selves.

Color and light play an important role in my work, and there is nothing I love more than building slow washes and glazes with watercolor. My values are rooted in ideas around courage and compassion, and in the importance of a heart well and truly burnished. I like the color in my work to glow, as I think that we do, when we are operating kindly and with radical f*cking tenderness.

While I am primarily a painter, I am also interested in how to create small experiences for people to engage with their own sense of deep self, and to discover what they value in their relationships with self and community. This is leading me down a rabbit hole of exploration of art as an artifact in daily rituals, and art as a political voice.

At this time I sell original paintings, prints, stationery, and clothing on my website. I am so, so thrilled to be stepping into the stationery scene. It probably sounds nerdy, but with how much communication is done through our phones and computers, I am excited to offer the tools for more analog ways to communicate. Journaling has also been a huge part of my own creative practice, and being able to offer my own journals to kindred hearts is a special sort of chef’s kiss.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

If I could go back in time and steer my younger self to one resource above all others, it would be the importance of a creative community. As someone who struggles with social anxiety, I have had trouble asking for help most of my life, and it has led to a mindset that I have to do things on my own, or that the resource of other people’s experience is off the table for me.

That couldn’t be further from the truth, and once I got intentional with cultivating relationships with other artists, I feel like my work took off. Being able to talk about creativity, inspiration, trends, business, and best practices with people with folks who largely had wildly different approaches to their work, and most importantly, were outside of my own internal dialogue, opened up ways of thinking, creating, and marketing that would have remained out of reach otherwise.

I think that one of the best things that we can do, as creative people, is to build community with other creative people in both online and physical spaces. The more varied and different, the better. It’s easy to think that you need to seek out creatives who work in your particular style, but I learn so much from people whose practices are nothing like my own, and they are often the one’s that get me thinking about how to push my own work in new and different ways.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

This is an interesting question, because I think we are seeing a bit of a creative renaissance happening at the moment. I think that people are waking up to the fact that cheap goods are exactly that – cheap goods that are mass produced. With so much of our lives lived online, I feel like people are again finding much joy in physical, handcrafted items that are well-made and unique.

I think that one of the best things that people can do to support artists and creatives is to engage with their local creative community. Shop at pop ups, go see local plays, go to local gallery shows. Support museum functions and enroll in local classes. Support the artists in your area, and make it a place where they can be successful because they are embraced as vital and necessary.

Folks can also apply that mindset to online behavior as well; shop with handmade makers, and share the work of artists that you like in your online spaces. Attend online events put on by the people you follow and spread the word. Support your favorite creators on places like patreon or kofi if you are able.

It often seems like people aren’t engaging online anymore, and by that I mean that people go on to social media spaces for passive consumption because it’s easier and it gives our brain that dopamine hit without having to work for it. Passively scrolling through our feeds is mildly entertaining and has the added value of allowing us to disassociate from our own troubles for a minutes at a time, I’d like to encourage folks to start engaging with the things they like again – it makes a huge difference.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.emeraldbarkley.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/emeraldbarkley
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VanadiumTaintedBeryl
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmeraldBarkley1
• Other: https://www.patreon.com/emeraldbarkley

Image Credits
Kayleigh Shawn Photography (this is only for the photo of myself, all other images are my own artwork.)