We recently connected with Jennifer Love Gironda and have shared our conversation below.

Jennifer, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I feel like many folks know me as the ‘gal who makes art everyday’ and first off, I LOVE that- and second, I want to make sure people know my WHY.

I am a trained artist and teacher. I have a BFA and MAEd from East Carolina University in Greenville, NC where I studied art education and textiles. When I first lived in south Florida back in 2009 I felt like I was focusing more on my teaching and less on my artistic practice- which honestly is the whole reason I became and art teacher. I knew I wanted to make more art, but I wasn’t sure how to get myself motivated. I would go through a few spurts making more work but I still didn’t feel like I was being an artist.

I was selected to attend the Surface Design Association Confluence in the summer of 2011 and I know that is what kickstarted my commitment to creating more art. I was fortunate enough to be in a workshop with Anna Carlson, a textile artist. The workshop focused on finding inspiration to create a body of work and I found myself drawn to fashion. I would return from that conference and complete a series of 18×24 inch Art Nouveau-inspired figurative tree drawings…but that wasn’t the beginning of the daily art. That would come later in January of 2012 when I was still searching for some way to motivate myself to create more- and that is when I found the web site, http://creativeeveryday.com, a site maintained by artist Leah Piken Kolidas. It was there that I found monthly prompts that would get me started- creating a piece of art every day within the suggested prompts. I only used these for a short time before my own ideas and interests started taking over, which eventually led back to fashion. Now I am in year eleven of making art every single day and I haven’t looked back!

Jennifer, 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?

I am an artist, and a high school art teacher. My high school art teacher, Robin Calcutt at Union Pines High School is who inspired me to be a teacher, and I am in my twentieth year of teaching. I have been able renew my love for teaching by bringing back my own studio practice and also by infusing my own art and my art curriculums with fashion. I offer workshops on fashion illustration, both traditional and mixed media approaches (my favorite!) as well as recycled fashion and accessories. I also offer workshops and public speaking engagements on making a commitment to creating more art- something I definitely can speak to after making almost 4,000 pieces of consecutive daily art!

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

One resource that I wish I had known about earlier is the book the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron- it has strengthened my creative practice by giving me a way to clear my head from the clutter of everyday life that gets in the way of actually making the work. I read the book as a part of a professional development for my school district in 2021 just to earn a literacy credit for teaching and it ended up changing my life- I love this book and I tell everyone that is creative to read it! The biggest take away for me has been the daily journaling practice, she calls those ‘morning pages. Every day since January 2021 I have gotten up at least an hour early (even before school!) to hand write three pages. The idea is that by getting everything out of your head and onto those pages you can clear space to make way for your creativity to flow…and it really does work!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I think any educator will say teaching in the pandemic is something illustrates our resilience. For me, during the start of everything I was teaching high school art and had Advanced Placement students that still needed to get their work done to submit for college credit- lockdown or not. I felt like something was off that last Friday, and I just remember taking ALL of my AP students work home- to my house! I am glad I did because we weren’t able to get back to school- I was shuttling art projects and art materials all over the town- but it was worth it. Having to switch to teaching in a virtual format was new to me, and really tough as you can image in with art…and also just the idea that you were really working around the clock to accommodate students. In addition to teaching in a different manner- I even had to rethink materials. Not all of my students, especially the Art 1 students, had access to art materials at home- especially under the circumstances. I started to think about using everyday materials like coffee to paint with for my students…and this informed MY artwork as well, leading me to create a body fashion illustrations painted with coffee!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jenniferlovegironda.com
• Instagram: @artbyjlg
• Facebook: Jennifer Love Gironda-Art

Image Credits
These images all belong to me.