Today we’d like to introduce you to Brittany Wilder

Hi Brittany, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?

I’ve wanted to be an artist since I was a kid. In my fourth grade yearbook, we had to list what we wanted to be when we grew up, and under the picture of little me was “Artist”

I was really lucky to have amazing art teachers as a teenager, and I ended up applying to attend the Oregon College of Art and Craft right out of high-school. I learned so much during my undergraduate, and got to work with so many talented faculty members and peers. OCAC taught me a lot about fostering a flourishing studio practice, thinking critically, talking and writing about my work, and maintaining high standards for both concept and presentation.

My undergraduate degree was structured to have a year-long thesis similar to a MFA, which meant I graduated after spending a year building a body of work, writing a thesis paper, and exhibiting my work.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?

What art school didn’t teach me was how to actually support myself as an artist. By the time I graduated I was already pretty deep into the starving artist mindset. There was no part of me that thought I would ever be able to support myself as a working artist.

As a result, my biggest struggles in the last decade have been trying to build a financially stable life while devoting a significant amount of time to my studio. While there are definitely artists who support themselves fully with their creative pursuits, I think it’s very common as an artist to cobble together income from different sources so you can focus on your art. Which is exactly what I did. This left me a lot of room for overthinking my choices, if I should or shouldn’t build a career outside of art, if I should try to sell what I was creating, along with all of the tumult that comes with being a person in their 20s.

This kind of sustained lifestyle and mindset is pretty grueling after a while, not just financially but also on ones self esteem. I’ve never thought of giving up art, because I don’t think being an artist is something you choose—you just are one, or you’re not. But I won’t lie, there have definitely been some years I wished I studied computer science.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?

I work primarily with text and image. I’m a trained photographer, and for many years my work was almost entirely photography based. In the last half decade it’s been significantly more fluid in terms of medium. I’ve made sculpture, published poems, embarked on year long projects, and more.

Most recently, I’ve spent the last year and half working on an ongoing painting project titled (Today is). I call it painting, but it would probably be more accurately described as “conceptual lettering”. Every day that I’m in my art studio, I hand paint the phrase “and it never will be again” onto a 7×5 in piece of paper. The phrase—meant to end the sentence “today is” as in: Today is June 6, 2024, and it never will be again—is partly existential, partly hopeful. It’s a record of time, an attempt at remembering. Essentially, proof that I was here.

Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?

By far the best resource I can recommend is to find and/or build a creative community. Whether that’s IRL, on TikTok, Instagram, Substack, etc. Make friends with other artists! Start a critique group! I’ve found artist friends on all these platforms, and they’re my best, most grounded resource for living a creative life.

As far as media + resources go, I like—

Newsletters/Podcasts/Sites:

The Utter by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Truly Spectacular by Joy Newell
Common Shapes by Cody Cook-Parrott
Between The Covers by David Naimon/Tin House
The Creative Independent

Books:

Body Work by Mellisa Febos
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
Zami by Aurdre Lorde
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
The Word Pretty by Elisa Gabbert
How to Adjust to the Dark by Rebecca van Laer
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Apps:

Ulysses
Squarespace
Substack
Notion

Contact Info:

• Website: https://brittanyvwilder.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brittanyvwilder/
• Other: https://brittanyvwilder.substack.com/

Image Credits

Kirsten Hartzell