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

Rhys, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I am not a person that typically dwells on what could have been – I tend to believe that all of our previous decisions and experiences mold us into the shape our present takes – but as an artist in my 40s with just over 3 full years consistently showing my work, its something I get asked a lot. I think as humans we tend to believe that our lives have a set course and that once we embark upon it and commit ourselves to following through, it becomes ever harder to see how we could change things. To be honest, that is a big reason why I am so open about my life, because I want to live as an example of finding your way later on in life.

My grandfather, Jerry Meatyard, was a multi-talented artist best known for his metal sculpture. Growing up around his work, which was so imaginative and fanciful, it was nearly impossible not to want to also create, and I did so at every opportunity. Unfortunately, my life did not follow the path I had expected and I left home at 15. I married and had children before I was legally an adult, and spent the next 20 years making the responsible choices. I went to school for visual art in my 20s as a single parent, but as anyone with children can tell you, its a real challenge to commit to passion projects when you have to worry about paying bills and keeping small humans alive. There were many long years where I wished I had not discovered my love for art at all because it felt like something that would always lead to disappointment and missed opportunities. So, I focused on my professional career as a graphic designer and let the years pass me by.

Then in my mid-late-30s, a terrible and wonderful thing happened: I had an identity crisis. My children were growing up no longer needed me as they had, I was in an unhappy relationship, and I suddenly realized I was living in a body and a life I did not recognize. I slipped into an addiction to the prescription medication I took for chronic pain, and blew up my life. I spent 20 years as the strong responsible person who overcame incredible odds, and I let everyone down. I worked two jobs while going to school full-time and raising three children, and I finally had to admit I did not know who I was or what I was doing. I went to detox and re-learned how to live. I spent months in withdrawals, with long nights worrying over how I could ever make amends or create a life I wanted to live. Looking forward seemed entirely too terrifying to contemplate, so I gave myself a deadline of five years. Five years to repair my family, find myself, and to make a life worth living. Five years to discover and take chances. Five years to live, and then I was allowed to give up.

Well, five years came and went about two years ago now, and since we’re all here reading about it, its pretty obvious that I started to figure things out. I finally accepted that I never felt an affinity to my gender at birth, made changes to transition into a body that finally feels like my own, and changed my name to my mother’s family name. I downsized my life and went fully freelance with my design work to make time for creating. It was by no means a straight line from there to here, and there were many times where I backtracked to correct course and questioned the wisdom of what I had done, but in the last three years things have really begun to take shape. While I still rely on the professional graphic design to pay the bills, my art is growing to be an ever greater part of my income and life. I participate in gallery shows regularly – at least one to two a month – and am building a cohesive body of work. I am finally a person I am proud of. I am a person my children are proud of. I may not be where I might have been, but I believe I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

As it says on my social media bios, I am an artist, illustrator, and graphic designer, but that doesn’t tell you much about what I actually do! With very brief intermissions, I have worked from home for the last 12 years, and to keep myself sane, I treat everything as my job, with a rotating list of “most critical” priorities. The bulk of my work is graphic design, which I’ve done in some capacity since 2004. I work with a lot of higher-end jewelry designers and retailers to retouch photos, create ads, and design catalogs. As you might expect, that is not always the most creatively rewarding part of my work, but it has greatly influenced me as an artist.

I have not discussed it here yet, music is the other great love of my life. I have never been inclined to making it myself, but as the creative director of the independent record label Friend Club Records, I get to put an image to the music. I work with the musicians to create album art, put together the print layouts for physical media, design other merch like shirts and stickers, and largely help them build their brands as artists. I used to sketch the art from my parents’ records as a child, and worked at a music venue as a teen, so this is truly fulfilling a lifelong dream. Beyond that, I still take on select freelance clients, and design logos and branding, which has always been one of my favorite parts of being a designer. I recently had the opportunity to create a logo for Meatyard Ybor, named after my grandfather Jerry Meatyard, the future home of more than 50 affordable art studios and gallery space in historic Ybor City. My grandfather helped to found the El Sama art collective there in the 1970s and taught art at the HCC Ybor campus for many years, so it was a great honor to get to be a part of preserving his legacy.

Last but definitely not least, I am constantly making art. I like both digital and traditional media, so when I am not illustrating an album cover in photoshop, I am gluing watercolor paper to wood panels and bringing fantastic scenes to life. I love cats, classical art and mythology, and a general sense of fun and irreverence so my work includes everything from the Fates reimagined as trans people to a spinning sun with the face of Jack Nicholson from The Shining. I work primarily in watercolors, but use gouache, acrylics, and colored pencil when the composition demands it. I also include found ephemera like old maps and sheet music in my work, and often take chances on untested things, like the lenticular piece I made for a Mize Gallery show back in 2019 that showed a different image depending on which angle you viewed it from. 

I show regularly at local galleries, but have taken up participating in more art markets this year, where I sell prints of my work, shirts, pins, stickers, and an assortment of music from Friend Club Records. I am always willing to have a conversation so please stop and say hello if you see me on the town.

Overall, I am just here to have fun. After losing both my grandfather and mother in March of 2016, I realized how truly fleeting life is and that a chance not grasped is a wasted opportunity, and I intend to die knowing I wasted none of them.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Buy more art! It pains me to see people spending their hard-earned money on mass-produced decorative work from discount and home stores when you can go to nearly any independent creator and get a print for a similar price. Target and Pier-1 do not need your money, but your local artists do. I believe there is this false idea in society at large that either the price of art is out of reach for the average person, or that the art you can buy affordably from local artists is somehow lesser in quality, and that is simply not true. Even if you can’t afford a large original, most artists offer smaller pieces or prints that keep art accessible. Your local artists, by and large, are more than happy to discuss their work with you, and you do not need a formal art education to understand and consume it. So much of our media tends to create this wall between people and art, and makes it feel like it is this snooty world gate-kept from the everyday person, and that does a terrible disservice to both the artists, art, and the public who could be enjoying it.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Covid did a real number on my business. I was just getting on an even keel with my freelance work when everything shut down and I had to either adapt or become destitute. Prior to March 2020, I was focusing much less on my own art and put most of my effort into my graphic design services. Although it is a somewhat saturated market, there are always businesses looking for graphic work and it felt like the safer option. When that abruptly dried up, I had to make some hard choices about what I had to offer that no one else could, and the only thing I could think of was my art. It was a huge gamble, but I was lucky to get a PPP loan that kept me afloat during the worst of it, and I pivoted a lot of my effort towards creating art and offering that and my illustration skills instead of logos and print design. While I still do a lot of design work, its split about 50/50 now with my art and illustration and is growing much more quickly than the design business. Overall, I am grateful that I had to make that choice because I might have remained too afraid to really commit to it otherwise.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://themeatyard.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_meatyard
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meatyardart
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheMeatyard
• Other: https://friendclubrecords.com