We recently connected with Elaine Weiner-Reed and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Elaine, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.
Thank you for inviting me! I am pleased to talk with you and hope your readers find meaning and inspiration in my art journey.
Risks… Without them, I think we are missing out. Without them, I think we cannot reach our true potential. Testing and pushing boundaries is key to unleashing creativity! Each time we change our style or evolve our artistic voice, we are taking risks. While I am not a thrill-seeker, I do build risks (big and small) into the goals I set for myself. My everyday risk-taking involves changing techniques, color palettes, and exploring new media. Sometimes taking these risks means losing followers and patrons… like when I stopped painting realistically in oils to pursue watercolor painting. I wanted to paint more expressively and was intuitively seeking my own creative voice. The change to watermedia brought new levels of abstracting reality, the layers of watercolor on paper allowing me to convey and release even more emotion than I felt I had done in oils! No worries, though – I gained a new following that also included some of my oil painting patrons. I took another creative risk over fifteen years ago when I moved to painting in acrylics and latex (and mixed media) on canvas, leaving behind much of what I learned painting with watercolors on paper. Each trip into the studio involves exploration and new approaches to decision-making about what I want to create and how I want to convey each new story on canvas.
During one painting session, I began to tear canvases and then wove metal through them, eventually adding cloth and plaster to the wires. Painting over the plaster, textural bumps, lines, and canvas gaps challenged me in new ways. Different substrata and surfaces take paint differently – adding to the creative adventure. These pieces and two stone carving projects at international artist residencies in Poland (2014, 2017) led me back to my sculpture roots. Now, in addition to painting, I am creating painted figurative sculptures in wire, plaster, and other materials. Which brings me to perhaps my biggest risk-taking art venture to date: metalwork!
Wonder of wonders… I am now “painting” in two AND three dimensions! Several years ago I signed up for a metal art fabrication class at my community college and was captivated by the new materials and processes. I grew to LOVE it as I faced and continue to face my fear of power tools head-on, one tool at a time. Welding is pure joy to me and I recently learned to make copper rivets to join metals that are not conducive to MIG welding. My forms are cut-out or fabricated shapes and found objects welded or connected in such a way as to accentuate and leverage negative and positive space, color and line, value and texture. Each piece is created to incorporate the atmosphere around its parts, to include their shadow shapes. Some parts and objects are colored by their alloy combinations plus aging (rusty vs shiny), but all pieces take on new hues through the welding process as fire traces patterns on the different gauges and types of metal.
My welded metal assemblage series “Visual Acoustics” has music as its reason for being. From the moment I touched my first welding table, I began scavenging and shaping metal, forming and connecting found and fabricated bits and bobs into musical instrument pieces of my own design. The driving force behind them is uncontained joy and improvisational energy, conveyed in some pieces through my wild curled ‘strings’ that have broken free to dance in the wind to their own tunes. My non-objective and graffiti paintings are intuitive and visceral responses to everything from music to joy to nature and to life itself. They capture in color and line all the feelings and impressions too vivid to express figuratively.
Can you relate? In your own creative practice, how do you keep yourself and your work energized, fresh, and evolving along with your character and vision?
Elaine, 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?
Joy | Gratitude | Imagination | Intellectual Curiosity | Intuition
I am a painter, sculptor, and writer. Art has always been my center and passion. It has helped shape my identity, giving me purpose and joy throughout my life. I love the physicality of painting and sculpting! Entering my studio, I turn on music and tune into my intuition and emotions. Listening to a lively or moody Jazz (Maynard Ferguson, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Claude Nougaro), a beloved Rock or Blues selection (Vanessa Collier), or a nostalgic song by Chimene Badi, I approach each painting and sculpture with anticipation and joy, knowing that new discoveries and solutions await me. I move around my paintings in a type of improvisational dance whose gestures and energy become the undercarriage of my work. Underpinning my love of life is an analytical mind that strives to understand or make sense of relationships, struggles, and current events.
When not focused on painting my way out of life’s challenges, I let myself go, losing myself in the joy of creating for its own sake inspired by laughter, nature, and life. As a piece is taking shape, I alternate between periods of intuition and critical thinking, engaging alternatively in automatism, construction, and deconstruction. As I splash, pour, draw, and sculpt with paint and plaster, I tune out the world. As consciousness progressively yields to spontaneity, each artwork evolves in an atmosphere of joy and hope – important messages in all my work. My figurative work juxtaposes strength and inner beauty with vulnerability and external imperfections. Focused on identity as impacted by transience and imperfection, some common themes that run through my work are telling the unknown or hidden stories.
People and relationships matter to me. No two identities or relationships are ever the same and I find that fascinating. I see beauty in humans as they are – each one is perfectly imperfect and each one is a unique three-dimensional tableau. My own and other people’s stories are an endless source of ideas and inspiration for me. I explore the mystery and beauty within and beneath the surface. Some of my characters are more defined, while others appear as silhouettes or after-thoughts. My paintings are created to selectively reveal or conceal emotions and storylines, the implied content in a scenario communicated through form, gestural strokes, colors, and other design elements. I leave each piece open to interpretation within a viewer’s personal history and frame of reference, vowing never to limit another’s imagination.
Most people do not know that I am also a writer of prose and poetry. My first children’s book “Mommy Tiger” was published in April 2020. Unbeknownst to many art patrons and even family members, I had drafted Mommy Tiger and several other books, watercolors, and pen illustrations more than 25 years ago while painting, working full-time, and raising my son. To date, I have published four children’s books on Amazon.com. The third dragon book is in progress…
Most people also do not know that I dream in color and my dreams often have plots, themes, musical scores…and some even feature guest appearances by movie stars. I am sometimes plagued by insomnia, and my painting often helps me paint my way out of it, filling me with hope. Recently, I woke up from a dream where I was painting a haunting waterscape featuring a sea cave partially obscured by mist – something I perhaps should paint for real, right?
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
Many people have asked me how I did it… how I kept creating while working full-time in a second career AND while being a single mom trying to keep a roof over our heads. It was not easy, that is for sure. I started my life on a framework of loans – college loans, car loans, and loans to feed and clothe myself. At times I tried second jobs. But ALWAYS through those trials I kept drawing. Drawing kept me centered. It took about 3 years to get my first promotion and that is when I knew I was at a crossroads when I asked myself some hard questions: WAS I A TALKER OR A DOER? What did I want for myself and my life?
I chose Art and I choose it again, each and every day. Art is my joy and always will be, but committing to it means sacrifices – time commitments, financial commitments, etc. My choice involved a commitment to divert some money to begin investing in art and my long-term vision of what I wanted my life to be. As time and money allowed, I took classes and bought one new tube of paint every payday… And so it went for that 36-year co-career time span. Throughout those years, I promised Art (and myself) that I would never make less of art than I was making at each point in time. I kept my eye on the long-term dream…and I hope our artist readers will do the same! I hope they will cherish and nourish their creativity throughout their lifetimes.
So now, after decades of making art, I am now devoting myself to it full-time, all the time. Once again, I am reshaping my vision and goals, asking myself: What do I want to be when I grow up? In other words, where do I wish to take my art now – in which directions literally and figuratively. Specifically, in which direction will I evolve my voice and my work expressively and in terms of making a positive difference in my world? I am still writing this new role and script for myself as we speak, so I hope you will follow me as I explore all that comes next!
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Creatively, my drivers include an insatiable curiosity and questioning mind. I am a continual learner and am always asking: What if…? Why? … Why not? A key goal of mine is to keep evolving as an artist. It takes courage to follow our heart and keep evolving. For me, the worst thing that could happen in my art practice would be for me to become a stereotype of myself – to be afraid to shake things up, change palettes, perspective, and processes for the good of each and every painting. Personally, I would rather risk it all than settle for mediocrity or creating something lacking in spirit and meaning.
Altruistically, I want to make a positive difference in the world through my art and practice, doing no harm along the way. My core values include honesty, respect, integrity, accountability, inclusion, faith, and kindness. I contribute a percentage of all art sales to charities, among them: the Maryland Food Bank and the Salvation Army. All proceeds from sales of an Ekphrastic Book “Portraits of Life” (published in 2022, fallentreepress) in which I am one of two visual artists whose artwork inspired new works by professional poets, goes to fight hunger in our joint Art and Poetry Against Hunger campaign. My one wish as my artwork leaves the studio is for it to touch lives in meaningful ways so that together we can make a beautiful and powerful difference in our world.