We recently connected with Laurelin Gilmore and have shared our conversation below.
Laurelin, looking forward to hearing all of your stories 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.
There have been a couple of pivotal moments in my artistic and professional life that proved to me the adage, ‘everything you want is on the other side of fear,” is absolutely true. In 2010, I was working at the Governor’s Office and daydreaming about a life in art. I’ve been making art my entire life, and knew from an early age that I wanted to be an artist and a writer. Books and art, all day every day. I had a minor degree in Fine Art and went back to school for a minor degree in Library Science,hoping that if I couldn’t make it as an artist, I might be able to support myself with a career in books, and sustain an art practice doing something I loved. With this in mind, but no real prospects to speak of, i quit my job and decided to pursue art full time. In 2010 libraries were not hiring, but my family could sustain this attempt if i could make art sales. It was rough going, the build was slow, but I eventually grew a client base, a roster of galleries that believed in me, commissions and special projects including work appearing in a TV show on Showtime. I was living a life in art, and it was sustaining itself. During the pandemic, one of my favorite bookstores, specializing in art books, had sold to an out of state bookseller. Despite having no experience in bookselling, only librarianship, I decided, along with a partner, to try and keep it open. Going into our fourth year now, we have established ourselves as a unique and valuable resource for artist books serving local creatives, students, artists, teachers, collectors, and hosting events for art talks, poetry readings, and a whole host of related programming. I still maintain a working studio, have gallery representation, and am currently making work for a solo show next year. It was terrifying to leap without a parachute, but I am now living a life in art and in books, exactly as I intended. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Laurelin, 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?
Aside form being a bookseller and business owner at Amatoria Fine Art Books, the region’s only brick and mortar book shop specializing in books on the arts, I am also a professional artist. I am primarily an oil painter, but I also enjoy sculpting, drawing, and mixed-media fabrication like soft sculpture and installation. My work generally tends to center around the human-nature experience, the habitation of the body, and the habitation of the earth. What it means to be a living piece of a living world, and exploring our place in the map of natural things. I intend to remind the viewer that we are organic beings, intrinsically tied to and dependent on the natural world. I do this by blending the human figure with elements from the natural world like flora and sometimes fauna, hoping the viewer will see themselves in nature, see nature in themselves, feel at home and in reverence and take better care. I focus on realism, anatomical correctness, so that I can invite the viewer to suspend disbelief long enough to believe these creatures might actually exist somewhere. I recently completed a series of paintings based on the biodiversity of California called, Caliscape, and an exhibition in Sacramento. I am currently working on a series for a solo show based around my fascination with the octopus, showing in June of 2025.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
I think it might be difficult for some people to understand the value of books, or a bookstore that exists as a physical space. We get a lot of people extolling the belief that bookstores are no longer relevant to the need. I mean, you can load a digital reader with hundreds of books, magazines, articles, and keep it in your bag. But that really is beside the point. A bookstore is not an injection mechanism for information. It is an ecosystem. It is alive in a way that has to be experienced to understand. A bookstore, especially one like ours that sits in a tree-lined residential neighborhood with a cafe down the street, a 90-year-old bakery, and an elementary school around the corner, can and does reflect the needs of the community in lots of ways. We teach people about the human experience through art and artists they love or didn’t know existed, including photographers, filmmakers, musicians, painters, architects, fashion designers, we have books on all of it. We give people a comfortable place to sit outside of the chaos of life, and absorb these things in high color, in slow motion if need be. It’s a place to be good to yourself, to feed the parts of you that needs to touch and feel things. You can hold the entire visual archive of Manolo Blahnik in your lap, spend as much time as you need with each detail, and flip back and forth to make sure you got all of it. You can do the same with Frank Lloyd Wright, or Louise Nevelson, and then you can take it home, you can spend years revisiting it. We offer space for poets to read, and people to hear it live. We offer space for musicians to perform, artists to display and speak about their work. People with passion and curiosity but no money for tuition can discover, and interact with other curious people. You can travel the world in our bookshop, travel through time, travel across dimensions and meet your kind maybe a hundred years in the past. We are where inspiration is recycled, bringing new books in, buying and selling used books to new people. Bookstores are, in my humble opinion, the best civilization has to offer.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
Certainly, the most rewarding aspect of engaging with people over my art or my books is the moment when new doors are unlocked and they either learn something new, find new articulation for something they couldn’t explain, or find like minds. That may be self-explanatory for the bookstore, but with the artwork it’s a little less obvious. I make artwork that expresses something personal to me, but that I suspect might resonate to broader audiences. I don’t actually know that it resonates until I get to speak with people about it. So the moment somebody actually expresses newfound excitement that inspires, uplifts, or encourages them, I feel totally fulfilled. People have told me my work helps them get out of bed in the morning, so it hangs where they can see it first. People have commissioned me to make work in memoriam for their family members. People have created whole storied narratives about work of mine that’s completely different than I intended, and I love it. I believe my work is to begin the conversation, and the viewer completes the narrative.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.laurelingilmore.com
- Instagram: @laurelingilmoreartist
- Facebook: @laurelingilmoreartist
- Other: The bookstore links are: www.amatoriafineartbooks.shop @amatoriafineartbooks (IG & FB)
Image Credits
Eddie Walker Andrew Hindman