We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dannie Niu a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dannie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

Yes, of course. People change their minds all the time, and I do too. When I was in high school I would think I might have a stable job, a stable income, stable insurance, and then have a stable life in the future. But as I began to formally start my professional career, I began to realize that I might not be quite right for having a stable job. My parents were both college professors, and for them, they have very flexible schedules, so as far as I can remember I never felt too overwhelmed by clocking in and out. When I started taking on some freelance work during my undergraduate time, I found that I was excited by the projects that freelancing brought me as opposed to the regular daily punching in and out of work. For example, on a Friday night, I would get a job from an ad agency that required me to finish drawing a storyboard for a mobile phone commercial by the next morning. Or, I would be asked to finish 3 children’s picture books in 6 months, etc. I can’t guarantee that I will start at 8 am and finish work at 5 pm, I may need to rush at 2 am and submit all the work by 6 am. Everything was uncertain and challenging, but at the same time, it was very fun and made me feel like I was being valued. I’m lucky I recently got a full-time job. For now, I need it. But I’m already thinking about quitting. Because I just graduated, I think I need to experience what this full-time job brings me, and then maybe after a year of this, when I’ve gotten my training and all kind of experience, I’ll quit it and go pursue what I want to go after in my plan wholeheartedly.

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

Since my father was a college professor and oil painter, I was always next to him from a very young age, watching how he painted. He would always spread his aesthetic ideas to me, consciously or unconsciously, which made me have a keen interest in some classical oil paintings. At the age of 4, I started to learn the violin, but it was also because of my father that I started to get into some pop music, such as Michael Jackson, whose music established my taste in music afterward. When I was a kid, I always liked to scribble, and I even created cartoons and tried to submit them to magazines during elementary and middle school. But because of my parents’ requirements, I needed to keep my grades good, and if my grades were not good, all creative work would not be allowed. So until high school, I got good grades and even wanted to become a lawyer or a financial analyst at that time. However, the moment before I was about to take my college entrance exams, I made the decision that I still wanted to be able to work with a brush in the future, so I enrolled in a university with an art department.
My creative inspiration comes from many sources, but my main influence is music. When I hear a good song, with or without lyrics, I form a picture in my head and want to paint it. I also like to explore emotions, and I have a lot of complex emotions in my work. I don’t like to create dark and scary things, because I have too many good expectations for life, and even if I can’t achieve them, I hope people who see my paintings will feel a little bit of warmth in their life or human life.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

NO. I don’t like NFT. This is the more traditional side of me, and I accept it as something new and cool. But has NFT really helped artists? Has it made life better for artists? What I see so far is just a bunch of rich people partying and entertaining, NFT is still far away from the masses. In the future, it will definitely have a place, but for me, I can’t accept it 100%.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

One of the things I feel the most is that sometimes many people will feel that art is very profound, a world they can’t understand, and for many people who are not in the art field, they will feel that artists are a bunch of weirdos or that artists are a bunch of very unique people. Such thoughts always make me sad, and I think it is a misunderstanding. I always correct people around me when they call me an “artist” and I tell them that I’m an ordinary person, but my profession is painting, and that’s what I do for a living, just like you can do code things in the computer for a living and he goes to the office to work for a living. The only thing that might be different is that art people tend to be more sensitive and they will take the little things around them and turn them into inspiration for their work. There are many such misunderstandings. I also had a period when I was very stressed, very sad, and grieving, and when I tried to tell my emotions to someone I trusted, he thought I was a person with a mental illness, and he even thought I was autistic for no reason. This is one of the misconceptions that we need to face as artists. Many people think that being an artist means that they must be mentally ill, and even if sometimes they are just having a normal emotional outburst, they are still interpreted as “psychotic”, so I hope that more people will not be so harsh on artists and try to be more honest. Art people are also a group of ordinary people living on the earth, and they are just a group of people trying to find the common sense of human emotions. :)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dannieniu.net/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannie.niu/

Image Credits
All rights reserved by Dannie. Niu. 2022