We recently connected with Alyssa Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Alyssa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I think every new project becomes the most meaningful for one reason or another. Each painting or collection is the most important or meaningful to build to the next one. There is no perfect piece, just pieces of art that bring you to the next and then to the next. The latest project was a collection entitled “Fire Flowers” – a grouping of 100 ceramic pieces along with 38 watercolors. Fire flowers for me represents duality. We are never only one thing. The idea originally came during morning meditations before heading to work. While I had my eyes closed and was following the prompts, a bright flaming flower came into my mind’s eye. The rest of the day, I could see it there whenever I closed my eyes. I started painting what I could make out of it. Every time afterwards, when I would meditate, the same thing would happen though a different flower would appear. I started painting these watercolors every day.
That same week, I was talking with a couple friends while paddle boarding on the last few days of our Michigan Indian summer. A friend called them “fire flowers” and it made a lot of sense to me. Life is full of opposing and yet coexisting ideas and feelings. I am happy and sad, frail and strong. I am entirely a part of the collective of humanity and yet entirely separate. You can feel small or unseen but on an energetic level are also immeasurably more powerful than you can ever understand. Even the small flowers, trampled over and barely noticed most of the time – even they have powers that we aren’t often aware of. I started moving the imagery over to ceramics and painted the fire flowers on the clay tiles I’ve been making. Some of the ceramics took on the shape of water. I love to think about how the elements are all represented…the fire (including the temperatures that the ceramics have to endure…), the air without which there is no fire, the water and all of the ceramics made out of earth. Ether ties them all together with the energy of creative practice and how all things relate and influence each other. Perhaps this is what I seek internally – to be balanced, to allow all emotions and facets of myself to arise without judgement and then watch them pass through without destruction. One of my favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke says

“You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Beauty and terror. Perhaps the summation of life in two words it seems.

Alyssa, 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?

I grew up in both France and the United States. It was in some ways a really expansive childhood but also destabilizing. We had moved around so much that by the time I got to my Junior year of high school, I decided to go to boarding school so I could finish my schooling in the american system before going to college. It ended up being where I first started oil painting and I was hooked from then on. I knew I wanted to be an artist but took a long route there. I got a degree in art education and then taught for five years in Germany before getting an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. Looking back, I would have loved to have done things differently but so it is! Life then took a rather unexpected detour. In 2015, because of a chemical sensitivity to paint, painting was put to the side while I pursued other interests. I ended up working on organic farms in South Carolina, New York and then Northern Michigan, traveling back and forth between France and Michigan during the off season. Farming changed my life in a lot of ways. I learned a good deal more about discipline which I was never super undisciplined but it took my work ethic to the next level for sure. Experiencing the seasons and weather in such a close way also shifted how I see the natural world. Along with working with the earth, I was also learning how to heal my body. I started working with a lot of different energy healing modalities. It changed how I saw my body, how I saw my interactions with the world and ultimately has changed how I see my own work. It’s still a process I’m moving through but getting closer to a place of authenticity is really the best thing you can do as an artist. It’s a long journey but I’m really grateful for what I’ve been learning. I started up my creative practice again in 2018 and then took a plunge to be a “part-time” artist in 2020. It was a crazy time to do that and there were a lot of ups and downs. I was still moving around a lot at that point and finally in 2022, I moved to Traverse City. Things really stabilized and I was able to progressively bring my part time job hours down while art started selling more. It’s still a shaky process and I’m not 100% there but I think in general, things are on the way up.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think it’s really important to remember once you are “on top” in whatever field, what it feels like to be on the other side of things and to support in the ways that feel aligned. On two separate occasions, when I was really at rock bottom in all categories, feeling like I would have to put art to the side again for a while (which I’ve done and is also an perfectly ok thing to do…no shame), people provided financial gifts. They didn’t even know my whole situation but they are both huge champions for artists and randomly, I was provided for in pretty miraculous ways. Money is NOT everything BUT those gifts made it possible for me to progress and get to the next step. They gave momentum and permission to feel like I could make it to the next phase. I wouldn’t have been able to make the leaps that I did without that support. Since then, I’ve by no means “arrived”. I don’t have stable, consistent income but I’m making it ok. I’ve made it a point to be a support on the level that I can handle right now. This last year that meant sponsoring a friend’s framing costs for a show they got into but couldn’t afford the framing. It was a small thing but it felt within my reach to do. I’m hoping that I’ll get to the point where I can give the kinds of gifts that I’ve been given but for now, I’m doing my best to do what I can.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’ve had to unlearn the urge to follow the pack. It doesn’t work as an artist. The urge to conform or do what other people want you to do, think you should do or just what seems “in vogue” can be strong but it’s a sure way to get burnt out and uninspired. Growing up between cultures, I had learned how to be chameleon and fit in wherever I needed to but that was so unhelpful in the art world. I’ve had to do a lot of unlearning to not care what people think and to keep making work that feels authentic to me. I’m still unlearning this and even the work I’m doing this month feels more and more mine. I think the closer you can get your art to who you are, the more successful it will be.

Contact Info:

• Website: alyssaannsmith.com
• Instagram: @smithalyssaann

Image Credits
Portrait Photographer: Ro Birkey All other photographs: Alyssa Smith Interior designer: Kelsey Duda