Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kyra Coates. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Kyra, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I’m very fortunate to earn my living full-time as an artist. It is by no means an easy way to provide for my family. Any entrepreneurial venture is a roller coaster ride, but the field of fine arts seems to bump that ride up to feeling often like a rowboat in a tsunami.

I first started pursuing my art career full-time 21 years ago. It was a very different landscape back then. E-commerce was just beginning to take off and social media didn’t even exist outside of benign MySpace pages. I threw myself head-first into the art fair circuit. Though I was young, my talent was embraced and I was lucky enough to be accepted into many high-end shows. In my first year, I sold $36,000 of art, which felt amazing considering I had never sold a piece before jumping in with everything! Looking back, I see really how outrageous it was the way I priced my art. Most professionals would have laughed in my face if I told them what my starting prices were. But I learned early to trust my talent and see what would happen.

I will never forget the very first painting I sold. It was a figurative diptych of a nude female I had painted all in gold. A doctor from Sarasota bought it and talked me down by almost $500 from my original asking price. He had no idea it was my very first sale, and walked away with a satisfactory smirk on his face that he got such a great deal. Meanwhile, I was just thrilled that my very first painting sold for $1,600! That first sale taught me something very important and set the standard from which I would build the rest of my art career on: never to undersell myself.

I did the art show circuit for the next three years. It was exhausting! I was always on the road chasing the best shows. Some would be amazing, and at some I would sell nothing. In those years I often found myself crying myself to sleep at night wondering what I was doing with my life, to then only wake up the next day to a string of amazing sales and be celebrating the great blessing my career was. I had many people give me advice. But I remember one set of advice that changed my trajectory forever. A very wonderful woman who organizes the largest art show circuit in the country was talking to me at a show I was at in Naples, Florida. I had done four shows back-to-back with almost no sales and was panicking. She watched from afar as I finally sold a small painting, my first in over a month. She marched over to my booth and congratulated me on the sale.

“Nice job!” she said. “Now go out and paint ten more exactly like the one you just sold! That’s how you make it in this industry. You find your niche and stick to it!”

I was horrified and deeply disappointed. That wasn’t how I created my work at all. For me, my work had to be born from inspiration, from a need to express a deep part of my soul. Creating was and always has been a spiritual experience for me. What she was telling me to do felt closer to being an assembly-line worker, not creating art! But I was so young, and she knew so much more about the art world than I did. Who was I to question her wisdom?

But it was only one and a half years later after a string of terrible shows that I decided the industry wasn’t worth it. I didn’t want to make assembly-line art. I was frustrated and felt that what I was doing held little meaning anymore. I might as well have been selling vacuum cleaners. It all felt the same to me at that point. I walked away not only from the art world, but the rest of my life as well. At this time I had been having intense spiritual experiences I had no explanation for. I had met a guru from an eastern lineage who was beginning to offer me answers, to bring deeper meaning back into my life I had lost in the art world. I dropped everything and moved to her ashram where I became a nun in a Hindu tradition. I lived that way for three years.

It would take me 13 more years to find my way back to the art world. After my years as a nun, I went back to school to earn a degree in Religious Studies and Psychology, a further continuation of my search for meaning and truth. I moved to South America, got married, and had a baby. I worked in hospice for many years helping people die. I began studying marketing and got involved in nonprofit organizations, searching for fulfillment there as well. I learned to run businesses. Yet through all that, I was unsatisfied. I knew in the deepest corner of my heart that true fulfillment would be found in doing what I do best, which is my art.

In 2015, now much wiser and learned in the ways of running a business, I leaped back into being a creative professional. It was a new world this time around with so many more opportunities to reach an audience. I didn’t have to be on the road most of the year. I could not only be creative in my art, but creative in the business side as well, exploring exciting opportunities, and ways to tell stories, and fell in love with being a businesswoman. I ran my business part-time for the first few years while doing nonprofit marketing on the side until I was ready to go full-time once more four years ago.

It is still the rowboat in the tsunami I remember, but I have many more tools at my disposal to make the sailing a bit smoother. And I think back often to the well-intentioned advice I was given to keep creating the same thing over and over to find my niche. The truth is, it’s not about creating the same art on repeat. It’s about creating authentic art that tells a real story people can connect with. That is where the niche is found; connecting through authenticity. I am very grateful I can make my living doing just that.

Kyra, 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 a visual artist, fashion designer, and author. In my paintings, I depict psychologically emotional experiences of spiritual awakening and explorations of states of consciousness. I paint states of mind as abstract imagery and use figurative work to tell a story and connect to inspirational moments from my own life narrative. I have several different series of works that address themes such as Feminine Power, our connection to trees and the human effects of climate change, identity and death, and abstract works that are pure stream of consciousness. Through energetic and vividly colorful works, I hope to inspire that sense of empowerment and freedom in the viewer as an experience of emotional resonance. I sell all my original paintings as well as high-quality giclee reproductions.

In 2020 I launched my clothing line created from my artwork. As a creative person, I never understood following fashion trends. Why would I want to look like everyone else when there is so much potential for something new and inventive? So I never found my “style” in the stores. Realizing the most vibrant and interesting patterns were the ones I was creating on my canvases, I decided to blend art and fashion and create a line of wearable art for men, women, and children. My designs have been featured in New York Fashion Work, the Biennial Artwear at The Lincoln Center, and in several retail shops in Colorado.

I also had my first novel published in March of 2022. This was a two-year project and includes an accompanying painting series in the book. “The Journey of the In-Between” explores death, identity, and what it means to face your own mortality. It is women’s literary fiction work and pulls together my decades of spiritual and psychological study.

All of my art, fashion, and books can be found on my website at https://kyracoatesart.com.

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

Absolutely! I was blessed to receive amazing art training at both the Corcoran School of Art and the Maryland Institue, College of Art. Art school was incredibly challenging and pushed me in amazing ways to develop my skills. But the one thing it did not give me was any sort of business understanding of how to become a professional artist. That of course was 25 years ago. Things are very different now. And perhaps so is the training they offer in art school. But the resource I wish I had back then was actual business training. Learning things such as setting up an LLC, how to track tax write-offs, how to market my work, and how to find opportunities to show and sell my work. Nowadays you can find many many people selling courses on how to become a professional artist. Many of these don’t offer much, but some have been helpful to me. But one of the most helpful was a mentoring program offered by SCORE, which is a nationwide organization that offers services to small business owners. The program was free and matched me with someone who volunteered to give mentoring. I was matched with a man who was retired, but had owned multiple businesses over the course of his career and had made millions doing so. Though he was not in the fine arts field, his view on how to approach my career as a business was invaluable. I highly recommend any small business owner to use this free and amazing service!

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

In general, I feel like creatives are the culture-creators of society. Our job is to highlight the experiences and values that can change world views, can resonate on a grander collective scale. How many of us can say there was a particular book/painting/song/movie in our lives that changed us, that touched some part of us we didn’t know was there before? Almost everyone! There is a responsibility that comes with that. I feel my mission as a creative is to highlight the grandest, most inspiring parts of ourselves. To educate people to see the world as an extension of themselves, and therefore, inspire deeper connection and compassion to this world and others within it. This is why I create art that is based on joy, personal empowerment, and interconnection. I want to inspire this world to be more loving and beautiful, and for people to find that within themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kyracoatesart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kyra_coates_art_infusegallery/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kyradeviart/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyra-coates-b65aa1b/