Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lauren Asta. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Lauren, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Taking a risk, especially a creative one, is something everyone should do at least once in their lifetime. I also think women should cut their hair super short or shave it at least once in their lives. It’s exhilarating and freeing; not unlike taking a risk. Because it wouldn’t be called “taking a risk” if it wasn’t something that went against something safe or perhaps even “normal”.
Taking a risk is taking a chance on yourself and what you have to offer the world. If you are preparing to take a risk with your art or creativity, you’re saying to yourself “what I have to offer is valuable and worthy of sharing.” Though you wont know unless you take the risk to share it or put yourself out there for a dream or goal.
Taking a risk isn’t always a sure bet, but it is the most important step towards finding success. Maybe you fail at the first go. This should be celebrated and not seen as a setback. Failure helps us determine what is and isn’t working for the public, the consumer, and even yourself. Failure gives us time to reevaluate, adjust, and try again.
One should know that taking a risk comes with great responsibility. It can be addicting and wonderful to find your own unique path. However, it requires a lot of energy, patience, reflection and personal growth.
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.
My name is Lauren Asta. I am a muralist and artist. My art and murals are well known from San Francisco to Chicago to New York City- and beyond. I specialize in illustration, doodle art and public art. I thrive on the creation and accomplishment of public art and its process: connecting with people, building community, and contributing uniquely and positively to the world.
The way we are fed information plays an important factor in how we respond to any public message. It is my goal to convey information, whether it’s heavy or light with content, in an attractive and animated way. Creating public artwork allows me to visually stimulate an audience and if I’m lucky, inspire them with my cast of characters doing what they do best; being humorous about the human experience.
Art creates an emotional connection within us. Art allows us to pay attention to our environment, to be connected to it and thus be connected to each other. I want my time here in this lifetime to be special and meaningful. Using my emotional and human experiences through art allows me to make my mark in this world. My desire to contribute something positive and worthwhile is so strong, one might say art is what makes me feel human.
My murals are all hand painted freestyle typically without any aid of a sketch, projector, or traced outlined. The fact that I work completely freehand, and by myself, attracts a large audience. People are in disbelief most of the time that I do not use an aid in my work. My extensive experience in public art over the last 10 years has built my confidence in understanding who I am as a public artist. I know what an honor it is and how big of a responsibility it is to be a public artist, I know what supplies I need, what an appropriate amount of time is required, and of course I know many methods on how to apply my materials effectively. I have had enough “trial and error” experiences to know what works best for me. Collaborating with clients and communities can sometimes be consider an artists worst fear, but for me it is an exciting way to nurture my desire to grow as an artist. Understanding a persons desire and creating a “product” from both our minds is a challenge that I am always willing to accept and excel at. The mural process is quite simple for me… I need paint, no rain, a blank wall, a scissor lift and time… I typically start in the bottom left corner and work left to right, up to down (imagine a typewriter).
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist (or creative) isn’t always “rewarding” (that is, in the traditional sense you see). The rewards aren’t always “gratifying” or “positive”; or at least at first glance. Here is where I would love to add and clarify that discouraging or unsatisfying results from your art career can be just as useful as satisfying and positive ones. They are fuel for the fire. Things or experiences like failure or rejection make us feel alive, They are emotions and tools we must use in our art to invite an audience in. To have your public relate; because let’s face it, life in general isn’t always rewarding. Thus if we can help communities engage thoughtfully with our art, no matter what the process was we went to go through to get there, then that indeed is the ultimate reward.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
I would love to share a few excerpts from a commentary I read in 2019 that can express my thoughts quite poignantly on the subject matter of the “creative journey.” Jodi Rosen wrote an incredible article titled “Does ‘Creative’ Work Free You From Drudgery, or Just Security?” in The New York Times Magazine. A few of my favorite selections follow:
““Creative” is a fixture of the self-help industry, touted as a secret to success and a key to enlightenment on podcasts and websites and in books like “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” And in recent years, creative has made a grammatical migration, crossing over from adjective to noun. A creative is a kind of worker, or rather many kinds of workers — a catchall that takes in web coders, graphic designers, copywriters, actors, painters, D.J.s, cocktail mixologists, Instagram influencers and all the rest of the culture-and-information-industry professionals that the sociologist Richard Florida famously called “the creative class.” Creative is not just an attribute. It is an identity.”
“Creative” can be traced to the Latin creare, meaning to beget or to bring forth. In philosophical classical Latin, the verb was sometimes used in reference to the ultimate creative act, divine creation. The English adjective “creative” dates to the 17th century; it was likely during the Enlightenment that it gained wide use as a descriptor for human endeavors, often artistic or literary, that have qualities of originality and excellence. Today, in any case, we deploy the term far more promiscuously. A label once reserved for the grandest artistic undertakings and the most exalted creators, from God to da Vinci to the mother who birthed you, is now applied willy-nilly to such activities as scrapbooking and bicycle-frame building, to the person who pulled your morning latte or designed the logo for your calorie-counting app.
“This democratization can feel absurd, but it strikes at a deep truth. Humans derive meaning and pleasure from making stuff. To engage in even the smallest acts of creation — molding a clay bowl in our hands or shaping an idea in our minds — is to perform a conjuring trick, to experience the mysterious and sublime power of bringing a new thing into existence…”
“But there is an airy spiritual component, too: a belief that anyone can be an artist and, ideally, everyone should be. This is the principle behind much of the self-help “creativity” industry — the notion, promulgated in best-selling books like Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” that every person contains vast reservoirs of creative potential. To access your creativity, Gilbert maintains, is to self-actualize. This, she writes, is “the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?”
It’s hard not to be skeptical of a sentence like that. In fact, the sickly odor of snake oil hovers over much of the “creative living” enterprise. It may be no accident that one of the most forceful formulations of this thesis arrived in Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” the 2012 pop-neuroscience book that was recalled by its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, after it was discovered to contain Bob Dylan quotes of Lehrer’s own invention. The prosyletizers for creative living proffer a slippery hard sell: You can tap into your creative side if you just learn how, preferably by buying this book or attending this workshop.
Of course, this egalitarian theory of creativity ignores everything we know about the apportionment of artistic gifts, the fact that some people are simply better at making things than others. It also elides the structural impediments — the lack of free time and ample resources and good education — that prohibit millions from pursuing an origami hobby, let alone finding a career in a creative field.
Faith in creativity can be especially robust among those blessed with talent. Consider Kanye West. There’s no doubting his creativity: He makes great records, designs strange shoes, summons outrages from thin air. He also maintains one of the world’s most arresting Twitter feeds, where he boasts about his sneaker enterprise (“the creative make the final decisions here”) and offers homilies to his peers: “As a creative your ideas are your strongest form of currency.” In October, he took to Twitter to renounce his high-profile flirtation with Trumpism: “I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative!!”
Many people would love to do the same. For millions, “creative” has talismanic allure. It holds the possibility of a more meaningful and exciting existence than what was available to previous generations. It points to a new kind of middle-class dream, one free from wearying manual labor or the white-collar drudgery of cubicles and spreadsheets. It promises a career, a life, that makes room for self-expression, imagination, even beauty.
But “creative” is often a red flag, a signpost marking an insidious trade-off. A “creative” job listing may lure you to pursue your destiny, freed from old social strictures — but also freed from traditional benefits and security. For the privilege of doing “creative” work, we are asked to accept conditions of financial anxiety and precariousness that in previous times were unthinkable to the gainfully employed. “Creative” puts lipstick — or, more precisely, a pair of Warby Parker eyeglasses and a sleeve tattoo — on a pig. It dresses up a ruptured social compact, the raw deal of the gig economy, as bohemian freedom.
The struggle to make ends meet while making good work has long defined the existence of those who choose to live as artists. Today, countless freelancing creatives are tasting that desperation, often while doing “creative” grunt work for big corporations. The repercussions ripple through the economy and through personal lives, and, yes, sometimes they pop up on the internet. Caroline Calloway has been cast as a villainous “scammer,” but the truth may be more complicated. Like so many young people — like, for that matter, so many middle-aged people and senior citizens — she is navigating a system that promises rewards it cannot deliver to people with entrepreneurial spirits and artistic inclinations. The message we are sending to creatives is clear: It may not do much for your bank account, but your work will enrich you emotionally. Besides, shouldn’t you be grateful to earn any money at all for doing something you love — something creative?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/magazine/creative-work-corporations.html
Contact Info:
- Website: https://laurenasta.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauren_asta/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-asta-788a7126/
Image Credits
Lauren Asta