We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Becky Jewell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Becky below.

Becky, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When it was time to pick a college major, I switched from Astronomy to Fine Art at the last minute. I realized that as much as I loved science and was doing some pretty serious work in the field, art was what made me and all of my friends happy. Art can apply to careers in more ways than I realized at the time, so in 20/20 hindsight, it was a good choice. I think if a person can communicate an idea through art or writing, that person is probably doing something of professional value to the world. There certainly will be failures along the way. Not every painting or drawing will connect with everyone. Let’s say too if something hardly connects with anyone at all, there may be a way for it to resonate with someone who is living in the future. It’s almost impossible to put a dollar value on art, this way. My only path is to just keep making, and things will find a home with people in this time or another.

Becky, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Like most little kids who are lucky enough to have art supplies lying around, I had some paint one day and made some paintings. My mom has a photo of me as a baby where I’m standing in front of an easel. What might be different about me is that I simply kept going. I have kind of a hardheaded way about me where I simply never give up. If I make a drawing that seems ugly or bad, I do another one. I’m also very okay with admitting if something is good or bad on my own terms. I’m very optimistic, so I am always sure I can do better.

I do my best to touch every star of art. I make paintings, drawings, watercolors, comics, paper craft, and I do digital art as well on my iPad. I think for many artists like me, there is no limit to the medium or message. All of us are limited by space and time in some way, but many other things are not really limits at all, so I work to transcend categories as much as possible. I make realistic oil paintings and watercolors, and my papercraft is more lighthearted. Since my papercraft focuses on animals and fantastic creatures, usually they’re the first things that children pick up when they go to stores that carry my art, or when a child visits my booth at an art fair.

I’m most proud of my work that finds a happy home. I think if someone brings art into their space, there’s a kind of holy responsibility of the artist to do their best. The person who buys an artist’s painting will probably see it every day, maybe they will walk by it as they go out the door to work. In the blink of an eye, years will pass, and that painting will have been there the whole time, through all of life’s changes and consistencies.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I really liked “Art and Fear” as a book, there’s the famous anecdote in this book where half the students in a class make many paintings in a semester, and the other half of students make one painting in a semester. The students who make more paintings do considerably better than the students who make one single painting. It was an interesting foil to the idea of “Quality over quantity”, where you’d think the lesson of the chapter is “quantity beats quality”. I think ultimately the lesson is that iteration and failing and re-doing and scrapping it all and starting again ultimately builds quality. Making 20 paintings and getting 1 or 2 good ones so that the next 20 has 2-4 good ones is a powerful, powerful way of progressing. Anyone who does this does have to be willing to fail, and to throw their paintings out or throw turpentine on them and try again. It can be physically wrenching. But again, imagine if the next 20 paintings after that have 6-8 good paintings in them, and how far this can be taken. People who are out of the school environment and who are fully happy with their work are making 20 out of 20 good paintings. And there’s no reason that others can’t get there.

Optimism combined with the ability to iterate on failures and successes are very important qualities to have in any entrepreneurial setting, or any setting where a person is making something for others to enjoy and cherish. A person may be a pessimist about some things, like the news, but if they’re optimistic about their own work – enough to throw out the bad and double down on the good – then that person is probably going to win at some things. They’re probably going to make something that people will love, that they will find beautiful or true.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There’s so many things. One of my favorite things to do lately is to paint plein air. I pack up an easel and a backpack, and I go outside, hike to a place, and set up the easel and paint. It’s one of the most rewarding mental states I’ve ever experienced. There are challenges – sometimes bugs will fly into my paint, or the wind can shake my easel pretty badly. Sometimes I will have a spot that I want to go to, and other people are enjoying the spot, so I have to find another one. Sometimes I forget to pack white paint so I have to use another color that’s closest to white.

I think the reward of plein air builds on my love of improvisation, or being tasked with something right in front of me to focus on. It feels like a singular form of thinking. In a way, it’s lots of little problems to solve, and something in me really attaches to that.

Too, hiking with an easel is a good workout. If something is good for the body and mind, the reward of it can’t be put into a dollar amount, or even words.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.beckyjewellart.com
• Instagram: @beckyjewell
• Twitter: @beckyjewell