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

Alexandria, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Creating Paranormal Artist took so many days, weeks, months of planning. It was a lot of trying to figure out what the focus would be, like what I would be discussing; of course it was always going to be over the paranormal. It was always going to be over anything paranormal, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to focus solely on hauntings and spirits or if I wanted to talk about everything including the supernatural and cryptids. I’ve said it many, many times on the show that I love the paranormal, I’ve lived for this for as long as I could remember. I was always interested in learning about hauntings and UFO sightings. So I knew from the get go what was going to be main topics. I also love art, art makes me so happy. I love to go to art museums and learn about the different art eras that have helped create art as we know it today. I love to talk about the local artists in my show, and I am an artist, perhaps not full time but art has done many things for me over the years. So calling the show Paranormal Artist was a way for me to combine my two great loves and each episode I am learning more ways to help combine the paranormal and the artist.

Alexandria, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Believe it or not, how I got into this was by sitting in a painting class trying to find the right thing to listen to while I was working on that particular piece. I started to listen to other podcasts, or listen to the true creepy encounters on youtube while painting. I found it to be relaxing honestly, I would get into the show and I’d be in the zone while painting. And of course, as the years passed, I continued to look for more podcasts to listen to that talked about the paranormal or true crime. That’s when I came across my top three favourites: Paranormal Putas, And That’s Why We Drink, and Be.Busta. It was really when I started listening to Paranormal Putas that I got inspired to really start all of this. So, I started to plan everything out, I have sketchbooks packed with all the ideas and names I thought of before I settled on Paranormal Artist. I mean these sketch books are full of all these different ideas I had, all kinds of thoughts and scratched out failed ideas. Until one day, I sat at my desk for what felt like the 1,000,000th time to brainstorm and restart the process of ideas once again, when I had the thought of “why am I over thinking this? I should just keep it simple and see how it goes for now.” Then I focused on the content of course, I already knew what it was going to be. I knew that from the start.

I’d like to think that something that sets apart my podcast from others is the how I’ve learned to tie in art history about a particular piece of art in certain locations, I talk about the artist, where they came from, the back story of them and how they came to be known as who they are today. I also add drawings on social media that I do based on certain episodes, I don’t have time to do one for every single episode yet, but in time I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do that also. Sometimes, I will go out to the location I’m discussing and investigate it, I haven’t posted any videos on those investigations yet. I think the other reason my podcast is unique is because of how I have managed to tie paranormal and art together in my own way.

I take pride in knowing that I’m building this show from the ground up by myself, while working full-time, I know I’m not the only one on this planet who does this, there’s so many people out there doing the same. I take pride in knowing that I have planned nearly every single detail of this show, and that it’s growing. I love it when I see a new follower on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, I love seeing that people from all over the world are listening to this show that I have spent countless hours and weeks on building. The one thing I take the most pride in, however, is that with each and every episode I have made it my duty to out a suicide awareness message at the end. I always put that message at the end of my episodes, I put it in Spanish, and I am not fluent in Spanish at all. It makes me feel as if I am helping somebody in need, or maybe teaching people what numbers to use if they know somebody in need.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, I love reading books about the paranormal, I love listening to shows, watching the shows about people who have lived in some of the most haunted houses in the world. One day, I hope to become a full-time podcaster so that I can write books on the paranormal like my favourite one “The Big Book of Texas Ghost Stories” and so that I can create a show similar to “A Haunting”, “These Woods Are Haunted”, or “My Ghost Story”. That would be a dream come true.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

To stop comparing myself to other people. That is one of the hardest lessons for me to unlearn and truthfully, I’m still unlearning it. It’s a bad habit for me to have always compared myself to others, like I would see their art and think “mine will never be that great” or “I cant compare to that.” I felt completely out of place in art school and even after I graduated. It had gotten so bad that I eventually just stopped having anything to do with art or photography because I just felt like I wasn’t good enough or that my work was crap compared to others out there. I had spent so much time being lost without art because I just wasn’t good enough at it, at least in my head. I was a wreck, I felt alone, like washed up.

That same year that I was starting to hit rock bottom, I started to go to counseling to help myself get better because I was so distraught with my life feeling as if it was crumbling around me and seeing my peers land their dream jobs and achieve goals that I felt I could never reach. With the help of this counselor, we learned that comparing myself to others was without a doubt eating me alive. So after a few sessions, lots of tears, I started to unravel the ball of “i’m not good enough” and slowly got back into drawing. I was still afraid that nobody would ever like what I did, until I was sitting at work, yes at work it was at the very start of the pandemic, and was working on my very first anatomy piece. I had already spent well over 12 hours on it, when a doctor in the Emergency Department I was working in happened to pass by and do a double take. He stopped and admired my drawing, he even pulled a couple of nurses over to where I was sitting to come see the drawing. They loved it and I had to fight back some tears. That moment helped me learn that even if I’m not as successful as others; I should never compare my talents with somebody else’s. From that moment, I began to reach into a more unique style of drawing and many people enjoyed it seeing these drawings. Four years later, while I still struggle from time to time with comparing myself to others, I’ve learned that I am not like the others.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paranormalartist.podcast/?igsh=bnBlbTNybmxlczR3&utm_source=qr
• Twitter: https://x.com/pizzalyfezombie/status/1836501169125957691?s=12&t=6talwrkegKHg05l0OR7DPw
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@paranormalartistpodcast
• Other: [email protected]://open.spotify.com/show/4xpIZsMdS7XncKVQeSimuk

  https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alexandria-valdez