We recently connected with Camille Selhorst and have shared our conversation below.

Camille, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s jump back to the first dollar you earned as a creative? What can you share with us about how it happened?

Sitting on a cement bench outside one of the downtown restaurants, I could feel myself almost shaking with nervousness. I tried to quell the nausea building inside me, but my heartbeat was too fast. I looked up at my boyfriend sitting beside me. “What if no one shows up?” I asked him with a slight tinge of terror in my voice. He smiled sweetly, although I knew he had no guarantees for me. “Well, you know your mom will be there,” he replied. My stomach dropped a little more.

I had just hung my first art show in the new little coffee shop in town. After years of painting and studying, I’d finally worked up the courage to ask the shop if I could hang my work and invite all my friends and family to see it. Today was the opening event, and now sitting on a bench downtown I was having cold feet. What if no one came? What if I had to sit there for two hours totally embarrassed and pretend that I was happy with the turnout? What if my art was not even important enough that anyone would make the drive?

The questions tore through the insufficient façade I had created inside myself, the story I’d woven in my head that I was totally okay no matter what happened. No, I was terrified of being let down, terrified that this would be the bleak and unimportant end of my creative journey.

“It’s time to go,” my boyfriend let me know. “They’ll be waiting for you.” So despite the nausea and with a few encouraging looks from him, I forced myself to walk the few blocks over to where the show was hung.

To my surprise, when I arrived, there were already people waiting, mostly family and a few friends I hadn’t expected to show. Then, as I began saying hello and laying out prints, a few more people trickled in. Someone asked me a question about one of the paintings, and by the time I could look up from our conversation, the room was full.

It was heaven in earth. I was plucked from one conversation to the next. Everyone wanted to know what I was thinking when I created the work, what it meant and how it made me feel. I felt like I was floating, gliding in my chiffon dress through the crowd of onlookers who were all there to see my me and my paintings.

Then, the unimaginable happened. “I’d like to buy this one,” said a friend’s mom from behind my left shoulder. “Do you take checks?” I was speechless. “Yes she does,” my boyfriend answered proudly. From then on, it was like fireworks, people buying left and right until 6 paintings were sold and all the prints I had uncertainly made “in case no one wanted an original” were cleaned out. I couldn’t believe it. This was more than I could have imagined. My heart was lit from the inside. I was bathing in the magic of it all, as I danced from conversation to conversation, trying to take payments in between.

After that night, something changed. I could feel that something in my nervous system was shocked into motion. The world I inhabited was now bigger, as if a new part of myself had suddenly been birthed. I now knew it was possible to make as much in a night as I made in a month at my job. And although it would not always be that effortless and that seamlessly magical, I could never un-live that knowledge.

It only takes a few of those moments to keep a dream alive for years because once that door of possibility is opened, it’s impossible to ever fully shut it again.

Fast forward a few years, and I’d had countless more shows, some successes and some utter failures. Some nights I cried myself to sleep thinking I’ll never sell another painting and on other days I sold my “most expensive piece ever.” This happened time and time again, me always feeling like I wasn’t getting there fast enough but the world always delivering some new success just when I felt like giving up.

And despite all the ups and downs, that overwhelming delight I’d felt at that first coffee shop art show was still the fuel that propelled me forward. A few years later and I’d sold as much in a day as I made in half a year, and after that, amounts that, only a few years prior, would have made my jaw drop started feeling like just another Wednesday afternoon’s work.

Looking back, I can see the progress as plain as day, but I will be totally honest that while I was going through it all, I felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all. Every collection released without instantly selling out felt like complete failure. I watched as others had successes in a few short months that I had worked years to accomplish. I asked myself, “why is it so hard for me?” Am I just not good enough, not talented enough?” “Should I just quit now?”

But those pivotal moments of success always drew me back in. Because, after all, I had done it once!

Now, with commissions lined up and a huge network of artist and art consultant friends, I can take a step back and reflect on it all. What I’ve learned is one thing that comes up time and time again. It is the power of taking that first step. All of life is a series of first steps – the first show at a little coffee shop, the first time you approach a major gallery, the first piece you price higher than you ever could have dreamed of.

Building a life as an artist is just a series of first steps, bravely taken until you look back and realize that the person you were five years ago couldn’t even have imagined having the life you think is totally normal today. It’s a wild thing to step back and acknowledge how these tiny steps led to your big, big dreams.

But looking back, I feel most grateful for the moments when I just kept going. It’s always the version of us that succeeds who gets the praise, but I honor the girl who put hours into her show and didn’t sell anything, the girl who felt unimportant and defeated and yet still went to the studio to make another painting. It’s that version of me who I respect more than any other because she is the one who got me here. When I sell a big painting I think of her. She didn’t know it, but she was the one of enough strength and courage to just keep going.

Even when progress feels slow, when it feels like no one cares, if you just keep going, making that one more painting or putting up that one more show, you will wake up one day and realize you’re living a life your past self didn’t dare to even dream of.

That is why in our house, we try to always celebrate “the reach.” My boyfriend (now my husband) and I always celebrate each other when either of us reaches for something good in our lives. We don’t wait to see if it pans out. We don’t wait for the payout. We celebrate taking the step, that first in a series of many first steps, towards our dreams. Because it’s choosing to move forward in the face of uncertainty that is so powerfully potent and what invariably leads to those big, life changing moments.

Anyway, it’s pretty hard to regret giving your heart to something you really care about. Better to have loved and lost… because the chance of it all paying off is so heart-wrenchingly sweet.

Now, after several years, I have new bigger dreams, and I’ll keep taking steps each day to reach them. Some days I will cry tears of disappointment and feel the weight of failure, and some days I will experience huge wins and feel like I’m on top of the world. But ultimately I know that I’ll look back in 5 more years and be amazed by the new life I am living that is full of my present day self’s big dreams.

It’s all just waiting for me as long as I take that first step.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My work is about allowing inner beauty to blossom. My signature paintings are expressions of women and flowers that fall somewhere between realism and abstraction. I work to capture the feeling of unfurling, opening and stepping into the metaphorical beauty and grandness of life.

Inspired by the play between bright, vibrant colors and dreamy pastels, I use a variety of mixed media materials, finishing every painting in oils and gilding my work in 24 karat gold leaf.

I paint to inspire inner beauty to blossom. An open flower or beautiful woman, shining and radiant in the sun, reminds us that we too can allow ourselves to unfurl.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Being an artist doesn’t just start and end in the studio. It’s a way of being and living, a way of existing in full alignment. I can’t paint anything good or anything that feels like me until I am totally aligned with my true nature. When you begin to create like that, you begin to live all of life in this way. Even the business side of being an artist can feel like a creative act. For
me, poetry is part of my copywriting and branding. A beautiful studio with all my favorite flowers in it is now part of my brand identity. With the right perspective, all of business can be the same vulnerable creative act that making art is. That is what I love about living a creative life. It’s a full body, full life experience. At a certain point, we become the artwork.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I was practically born painting. Both my parents were hobby artists who took me to museums and nurtured my love of art. But I was also raised in a culture where I heard a lot of judgments about business and money and art, and especially about how they couldn’t go together. I remember after my first successful show, my dad looked over at me and said, “Wow, we are not the same.” I think he was more in awe than anything, but it broke my heart to feel that my dream was the thing making him feel far away and separate from me. It took a lot of inner work and awareness to shift my beliefs around making profit from art, but when I did, I started encountering amazing people making beautiful things and getting paid well, and it opened my eyes to dreams I never thought were possible. I saw how a creative life could be created beautifully and honorably and with so much abundance. It was a way of existing that felt genuinely true to my heart, and the more I reached for this way of being, the more examples I found of others living this beautiful path. And my parents eventually came around. At some point this new version of me became normalized for them and it didn’t feel like I was so different anymore. It takes a lot of courage, though, the choose a different path, especially when it isolates you from all the people you love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://camilleselhorst.com
• Instagram: @camilleselhorst