Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kelsey Phillips. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Kelsey, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career.
As someone who went through the public school system and a child of a public school teacher I can easily say: our education system has a lot of problems. There’s definitely a lot to say about paying teachers more and giving them the resources they need to help their students succeed
I grew up feeling like the arts were undervalued in my schools. Not in any drastic way like “the football team got new uniforms every year while theater is performing with 20-year-old costumes”, but in the sense that the morning announcements always talked about how the soccer team had a loss against another school and not how one or two students won a district art competition or how the marching band is in the state’s top ten. I’d personally like to see more investment in arts in schools not just in a monetary sense, but an emotional investment where school administration actually cares about art and the students who want to pursue it. It means a lot to artistic students when their work is recognized, and it gives them the confidence to proceed in the world knowing what they do provides value to people.
Kelsey, 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’m a fifth-generation Arizonan artist fascinated with monsters, people, animals, and everything in-between. As a kid, my notebooks and scrap pieces of paper were where I could scribble dragons or create all sorts of amalgams of animals on my own, so it’s no surprise I latched onto subjects like mythology or games like Pokémon. I became serious about wanting to pursue art around the age of twelve, but with a public-school education and a family of non-artistic athletes, I was self-taught until college. I was given my first drawing tablet at the age of twelve, and being able to integrate that medium into my practice early in my career (if you’d even call it a career at that point) was incredibly informative to my artistic growth. Digital is a really unique medium that allows you to experiment with processes and styles without having to use expensive materials. In that sense, I learned to paint digitally before I learned to paint with acrylic or oil paint.
I’m freshly-graduated from ASU with my BFA in Art (Painting and Drawing) with Honors, so I have a lot ahead of me. Despite being the child of a teacher, I never fancied myself being one, but I teach two classes—an “how to draw anime” one for teenagers and a fantasy one for elementary schoolers— at the Edna Vihel Arts Center in Tempe. I’m currently pursuing a career for professional illustration, comic/graphic novel work, or visual development for entertainment, but I understand a lot can change along the way, so I’m really just seeing where life takes me.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
There are plenty of resources I wish I knew about earlier—I could go on for an incredibly long time but I’ll try to keep it concise. I’m a young adult and I’m careful with my money, which is unfortunate because art is not a cheap hobby once you begin to take things seriously. I actually discovered it this past year thanks to my roommate, but the Art Resource Center in Tempe is a great way to grab used-but-functional some art supplies. I like to think of it as a Goodwill for arts and crafts stuff; the stock is unpredictable, but the prices are never bad.
When it comes to education, I was fortunate enough to go to university. I was not, however, aware of how extensive the library was until my Junior year. ASU’s library has a massive amount of resources about everything art-related, but it’s far from the only library. In fact, I was able to find quite a few books and topics I’ve been meaning to get into at the local Tempe library in the past few months since I got my library card. The really neat thing about Tempe’s library is that all library cards come free with a subscription to Hoopla- an online streaming service with tons of comics, movies, audiobooks, cookbooks, ebooks, and the like. It’s definitely not art-centric, but it provides me a lot of interesting content to consume while I work. I also work at the Edna Vihel arts center next door and I was surprised to learn we have a lot of stuff going on there! I teach children and teenagers, but there are adult classes there too for all sorts of disciplines from ceramics to working with glass.
In terms of opportunities, I’m always on the lookout for creative directories and postings. Some of my instructors told me about the Arizona Commission of the Arts’s “Arts Opportunities” page and Phoenix Artlink, which have been really good resources for finding galleries to apply to if you’re looking into getting your work out there. There are also galleries like Art One Gallery in Scottsdale who love to work with student and emerging artists, and in my experience, it made the whole “showing in a gallery” thing feel less intimidating.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice.
TLDR: They suck. People more eloquent than I have explained it better but there’s too much that doesn’t sit right with me about the entire industry (project? scene? community?) for me to want to participate in anything that involves NFTs or crypto in general.
I think at this point a lot of people know that any cryptocurrency uses massive amounts of energy and computing power to function— I frankly don’t see how it’s worth it when that energy can be used instead to improve people’s day-to-day lives (or not used at all). I’m not going to pretend that mediums like oil painting are great for the environment either, but the scale in which the crypto mines needed to sustain NFTs operate is insane and wasteful.
However, most of my reservations come with the many, many flaws in the system. Flaws that exist by design in the unregulated world of crypto. People tout how a token is authentic and “nonfungible” which, it is in a coding sense it of course is, but there are little measures in place to protect the literal thousands of artists who have their work stolen and minted as NFTs on platforms like Opensea. In fact, a close friend of mine had 70 pieces of her artwork stolen from her DeviantArt account and minted into NFTs; she then had to enlist the help of her brother in cybersecurity and take hours out of her day to write individual takedown reports. This happens to countless artists and content-makers on a daily basis. It’s theft, it sucks, and it’s not benefiting these artists. Even the artists who do participate have no clue how well their work is going to do because the market is flooded with lookalikes, AI-generated art, and copy-pasted images with enough little tweaks to make them “unique”.
From an artistic standpoint, I can see how the NFT market is so attractive in theory: you’re selling “one-of-a-kind” artwork, or you’re given currency more directly and not through galleries, but it’s just too rife with scams and nonsense to be worthwhile. And this is all for money you can’t even directly use to buy your groceries with.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://artofkeymintt.weebly.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/keymintt/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelsey-phillips-keymintt/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/keymintt
Image Credits
A. Torres (studio photo)