We were lucky to catch up with Sarah MillsBailey recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Sarah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you have an agent or someone (or a team) that helps you secure opportunities and compensation for your creative work? How did you meet you, why did you decide to work with them, why do you think they decided to work with you?
Alexandria Ballew, The Gypsy Curator, a San Antonio native and 2018 graduate of Texas State University in San Marcos, completed a Master of Arts: Modern and Contemporary Art and The Market in 2020, studying at Christie’s in New York. I met her shortly after she returned to her hometown to manage a local gallery which was exhibiting my work. As her business handle implies, she will promote her clients’ work near and far, forging connections between artists and collectors at whatever distance. Her enthusiasm and professionalism guided my decision to sign a contract with her. I like to think that her decision to represent me is based on the quality of my work.
Lee Bailey, my supportive husband, created my website and functions as my manager and source of inspiration on many levels. He is an accomplished vocal artist and musician with a finely developed sense of design. It was his appreciation of my paintings that gave me the confidence to go public as an artist. He encouraged me to approach the gallery that first showed my work, and where my path and Alexandria’s converged.
I paint sporadically as my pain level from rheumatoid arthritis allows. Lee can read my stamina level in a glance and step in to shoulder household or family related tasks when rest is needed. As a team we work together to set up displays at pop ups in local hotels, fairs, antique shows and interior design venues, even traveling to Pagosa Springs, Colorado to research inspiration for new work.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a native New Orleanian. Tourists tend to associate New Orleans with hedonism, but the true unfettered experience there is creativity. From early childhood I was soaking in the street performances and art installed on the Jackson Square iron fence in the French Quarter, while eating beignets and feeding pigeons. My initial lofty goals in life were to be a ballerina and to play the violin, inspired by the hats laid on the sidewalk for collecting tips. The unexpected was everywhere, from tutu man running in the yearly marathon to Ruthie the Duck Lady meandering through the Quarter with her duck following behind, and of course Mardi Gras with its costumes and dancing in the streets!
Like a circadian rhythm, the days, seasons and celebrations dictated the food and gave life its structure: red beans on Monday, fried chicken on Wednesday, seafood on Friday, extended family gathering on Sunday over midday Sunday dinner, crawfish in season, king cake but only beginning with Epiphany and ending with Lent. Everything happened around the framework of food.
Starting out in life in New Orleans is like a fairy godmother sprinkling a blessing of gusto over you in the cradle.
My upbringing had the effect of developing a mindset of eagerness to pursue my interests as I discovered them, not to meet expectations but to be myself.
I specialize in abstract and expressionism painting.
My abstract painting style gives free rein to personal expression covering every aspect of inner experience. My impressionism painting style allows a deep encounter with and interpretation of the physical world. The paint flows and layers as if on its own. Acting on the courage of my upbringing and the inner strength developed over years of adversity, I participate in the creation on the canvas, whether joyous or wrenching, without inhibition or stifling negativity. It just is.
Whether impressionist or abstract, my painting is a visual resonance of life’s deep currents of experience and awareness of experience. These are the vibrations that the very protoplasm of our being hold. The commonality of human existence leads the viewer (and hopefully purchaser) of my work to meet in themselves a surfacing of the same emotion and appreciation of their own unique growth.
Have you ever had to pivot?
In relation to my development as an artist, the most significant pivot of my life was shifting course from medical research to terminated employee, due to my daughter’s seizures precluding attendance at work. In that mystical way of even life’s hardships turning into blessings, it was my older daughter’s health challenges that led to the development of my work as an artist, to engage and encourage her in a creative response to difficulties. The two of us started with craft activities, revitalizing thrift shop finds, working with fabric, stencils and paint. We were transforming everything in the house with our own brand of interior design. There was no limit to what we would try to enliven the space. This led to a home based business of children’s clothing and gifts, but more significantly it fostered the artist perspective on life, which is ultimately that everything is the medium for creative expression.
By the time my younger daughter made her arrival, I was a regular at the art supply store and one day bought a canvas, inspired by an idea to decorate the nursery. And so in my case it was my love of others, these girls of mine, that led to my development and success as an artist.
Pivoting is turning to joy, like a plant turning to the sun, the source of energy and our ability to endure because, whatever is happening, we are determined to have fun and experience happiness.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Life is stressful and complex. It’s impossible to separate one story from my life as the evidence of resilience because it is all intertwined. Adjusting life goals as I adapted to chronic fatigue and the eventual diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, while guiding and protecting my older daughter along the path of her epilepsy diagnosis, took place in a whirlwind of activity. After a medical leave of absence from doctoral studies in microbiology and immunology at Tulane University, I brought my formal academic life to a close with a Master’s degree and worked in medical research in New Orleans and then in San Antonio. Coping with physical suffering, whether your own or a loved one’s, develops a sort of muscle memory, like an athlete’s, that carries you through the exertion, relying on an inner strong foundation. It’s a survival instinct that brought me through the ending of my first marriage and the formation of my second one and the devastating pain of multiple miscarriages in each. I think the essential component of resilience is identifying what gives you peace. For me and my older daughter it is trips to the beach, a place to drop anchor and rest. Amazingly, my younger daughter born 13 years after her older sister, has the same drive to go to the beach. My art is a reflection of deep emotional states and invariably references water whether in springs, rivers, lakes or the ocean. It’s fair to say that my art illustrates my resilience.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Lee Farrar Bailey