We recently connected with Carolyn Wong and have shared our conversation below.

Carolyn, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

If I could go back in time, I wish that I had started my creative career as soon as possible. I wish I could tell my younger self that I would never regret pursuing my passion, and that I would regret it if I didn’t try to see how far I could go.

My journey with art started in my childhood and carried on until high school. After that, I decided to pursue a less risky direction and spent my university education studying the sciences, very quickly realized I had no interest in that, and then became a caregiver to young children. I enjoyed teaching at the time and became an elementary teacher for several years, and it wasn’t until I was 27 that I realized teaching wasn’t it for me. I always had a small voice inside telling me to revisit the arts, specifically drawing and painting. So, after a 10+ hiatus from any art, I started drawing again and soon it became a source of comfort, therapy, and healing for my life circumstances at the time. For 5 years, I practiced drawing and making art almost every day and found myself exploring new mediums, learned digital art, and refined my painting skills. I was sharing my art on social media and I noticed that I was getting good feedback from fellow artists I had met.

At different points in those initial 5 years, I set goals and achieved them as I grew and learned more about art. I wanted to try exhibiting at local markets, designing a comic book cover, designing packaging, painting a mural, etc. basically my interests were so varied that I often felt lost and just had to give everything a try to find out what I really want to do with my art.

I wish I had started my creative career as early as possible because giving myself time to learn and explore is what led me to be the artist I am today. There’s no shortcut to being good at something, only hard work and dedication. Over the past 5 years, I’ve learned that the creative journey is about embracing curiosity, constant learning, and faith that things will eventually come together, even if it doesn’t appear obvious what that goal is at the time.

Carolyn, 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’m an illustrator and mural artist based in Vancouver, Canada and I’ve been fortunate to have painted murals with national institutions, local municipalities, and small businesses. I have recently been pursuing exhibition opportunities with local galleries, but most of my work is in commercial illustration. Murals make up a lot of what I do and my clients usually inquire about bespoke artwork installations for interior and exterior spaces. Last year I was most stoked to paint an exterior mural at a prominent intersection of Vancouver’s historic Chinatown. As a first generation Chinese Canadian, I was honored to create artwork that represents my cultural values, to uplift a public space facing challenges in the surrounding area.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I started sharing my work on Instagram in 2017, when it was still somewhat possible to grow organically. Instagram has changed a lot since then and nowadays, one should not expect growth to be easy or to happen without some investment. Each social platform has a different style of engagement and personally I’ve settled with only using Instagram because it serves the purpose that I want to achieve. Without a strategy for how you want to use social media, it can be frustrating when you don’t see growth – but that’s not necessarily a reflection on the quality of your work, but rather a mysterious algorithm that functions beyond our control.

My greatest piece of advice for aspiring artists using social media is actually not to post for the sake of growth, but to focus on being a better artist and share the work you’re proud of. Over the past 5 years, the way I used IG has changed drastically. At the beginning of my journey, I shared artwork as a way to show my progress and improvement. My art styles also changed drastically each year, but I continued to share my best work at each stage of my art journey, and I’ve never regretted the fact that my content shifted because at the end of the day, that was the truest version of who I was and what I was interested in. Followers come and go, and losing followers who don’t want to see your content is actually better overall because those are not the people who would engage with your work anyways.

Now, 

I use Instagram as an informal portfolio to share my illustrations and murals so that I can reach prospective clients for the purpose of future collaborations. I hope that a prospective client lands on my profile to find what they’re looking for, and that my content demonstrates my professionalism, mastery of my craft, a variety of artwork styles, and an overall visual aesthetic that I can bring to a potential project. I don’t share personal content or anything that would be unrelated to my professional practice, but I do share behind the scenes, work in progress, and visual teasers of what I’m up to.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My current goal is to build a sustainable career as an independent freelance artist and to be known for having a unique artistic style which can be applied across various design contexts. 

Art is life, but making art work as a career is probably one of the most challenging things one can do.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the most valuable thing I can do as an artist is to keep on learning and pursue the natural curiosity that drives me. Every rabbit hole I get lost in always ends up adding more value to my overall work and craft. The more tools I explore, the more possibilities exist for me to create something unique. Growth always happens when we challenge ourselves to leave our comfort zones. I know that this creative journey is going to be a marathon and I have faith that through continued hard work and dedication I’ll hopefully be able to achieve my goal!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.seeroro.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seeroro_/

Image Credits
Johan Kim Jeremy Au Yeung