We recently connected with Lindsay Heider Diamond and have shared our conversation below.

Lindsay, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My work all has meaning to me, from the book cover designs I create for incarcerated authors through AuthorsInside.org and/or independent authors, to the designs such as the one I created for the Charlottesville City Bus Art competition (it won), to my fine art with its explorations of emotion and presence in this human life. I am also working on a series of children’s books, which are probably more accurately for “the inner child” in all of us.

Like most artists, there is an aspect of relativity in my work, directly related to myself and my experiences and my aim is that there is a universal message or communication that comes through.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I was born on the East Coast of the US but have lived in the middle, on the West and even lived overseas for a bit as a child. Currently I live in Charlottesville, VA and work as a professional artist, graphic designer and illustrator. I live with my husband, a software engineer and author, as well as my three kids and two dogs.

I created art from a young age as a means to deal with a stressful and not very healthy family environment. When I was a teen, working on watercolors or drawings, I noticed that the rest of the world slipped away as I focused on creating. Often that experience felt preferable to the world around me. I took my high school portfolio with me to college visits and was accepted to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio based on the work, before there was a portfolio admission program. My childhood hope was to be an artist or a therapist. I think I do both with my work, on some levels.

Working hard in college and focusing on both fine art and graphic design led me to my first job as a professional greeting card artist, right after college graduation. I was so fortunate to be given this opportunity and in looking back, perhaps something about creating images for cards, which ultimately all had a purpose or message in them influences me even today. Learning to master numerous mediums and styles were also part of the job, and still to this day, I feel the freedom to explore many mediums.

A long held exploration in contemplative practices, self-inquiry and a non-stop brain that seems to thrive on problem solving influence much of what I do. Inquiry is vital to a beneficial contemplative practice, in my opinion. Inquiry is also vital to an art practice. It is also how we start to understand each other and the world around us, opening our hearts and our minds to discover more about ourselves and this odd world.

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

My main hope through all of my work – design, illustration and fine art – is that people see a relatable message coming through and this starts a contemplation, through the visual imagery with the viewer.

Much of my work involves coming up with a visual solution to a question or an inquiry. The question can be guided by a client, in the case of graphic design for book covers, or related to or from an experience or contemplation that I would like to explore visually.

For the incarcerated authors and other book cover design I ask the question “how can this voice and story be expressed visually?” I hope, for the incarcerated authors, to have readers and anyone who comes in contact with the organization Authors Inside remember that the people inside of correctional facilities are humans, with thoughts and feelings, were once children, often with major unresolved trauma and they too have voices that are worth hearing. It is an honor to work on those projects.

An example of inquiry in my illustration work is when I asked the question “how can I get better at Adobe Illustrator?” using my skills and also focusing on something I am passionate about. I created a poster image that I called “Things to teach our children” and a friend who is an ESL teacher asked if she could have one for her classroom. That led me to I wonder how this message could have a larger impact. Around the same time I saw the local Charlottesville City Bus competition and decided to further my Illustrator learning and apply, using the poster design as the base. I had never designed for something so large but I figured it out. And I won! What started as a simple inquiry led to something that has a lasting impression on all who see it.

Some of the questions in my fine art practice, such as how can we honor nature and the interdependence we have with it, are explored with a series of locally inspired landscape paintings that represent land threatened by development and linked to the poetry of Mary Oliver, whose sincere wonderment of the natural world over the social world is a big influence in my life. During the pandemic, the switch over to landscapes felt right because nature was what I started to connect to daily. I started to see nature as a much more divine place and I wanted to capture that joy I felt in its presence.

Other questions, such as how do we (I) come to terms with our reactive emotions in order to understand our suffering, I explored through needle felting large portraits in moments of anguish, joy, sadness, etc. What becomes interesting to me is that the angle of the line of the eyes can change one expression into something very different and I am amazed at the language of facial emotion and the myriad ways we express ourselves without saying a word. Some say there are 27 base emotions but could range to 34,000. I have more work to do on this project!

When I asked the question of “Why are there so few strong and independent aging female subjects in art, mythology and religion?”, those often represented seem to be hags, crones, or evil. I explored the questino by painting women over the age of 80 and sharing the strength and beauty I saw.

And to understand myself and my place in this world, I explored how I exist within the walls of my home and created a body of work that led to a series called Friends in which I am represented 6-7 times, in each painting wearing the same outfit, in each room of my home.. The photos taken for the paintings are pieces of art themselves as they delve into being present, the human condition and our existence. So many people seem to relate to these.

This question, of what does it mean to be a strong and independent woman, led to further creating painting studies of individual women, shown together as The Female Collective, a collection of 30 small gouache paintings of women. As I painted these, I started to see myself among them, more than I had before. This also influenced self portraits such as Crone Queen and You Are Never More Yourself Than When You Are Still.

These are just a handful of examples from my fine art. One can see both that I have a very busy and creative mind and that my work varies in medium because each question or contemplation seems to require or ask for a different process of exploration.

To be able to work with a non-verbal language that is unique and my own that I put out to the world. To be able to share an experience in a non-verbal way that involves people using their senses to view, understand, communicate and to think. Nothing artists are creating is “real” but only a representation of an idea or an object. To have learned how to do this feels like such an honor and gift, to share with people these ideas and contemplations in the hopes that they expand their own minds and hearts. Sounds corny, but I believe that art can make the world a better place.

I have a studio at McGuffey Art Center, in Charlottesville, VA. We are one of the oldest artist-run cooperatives in the United States. Filled with 54 resident artists and 100 Associate artists, artists must have open to the public studio doors 17.5 hours a week. The benefit and reward of this is that I get to interact with the community weekly in my studio, around these questions I have and more, with both artists and people from the public in real time. I think of it like an active gallery, where one can see the artist work and have conversations that just don’t exist when one goes into a gallery or a museum because the artist is rarely present.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Coming from the world of fine art into greeting cards was a big shift for me and equally a big shift coming out of that world and back into fine art. As a young creative, 21 years old and fresh out of college working as a professional illustrator at Gibson Greetings, Inc, I was told, after a couple of months of training, that if I wanted to keep my job, I needed to shift my palette from “fine art” to “greeting card” colors. The very next day, I abandoned the prussian blue, alizarin crimson, viridian and went to pinks, purples and the colors of “joy” as I was told to do. To this day, painting flowers and/or using pink or purple feels like a trigger for me losing my job but slowly slowly I am getting back to allowing myself to have more freedom and range in my work. I actually have pink flowers in my current show. There was a period of time when I leaned in more to creating images involving the darkness of life but now I am also painting more of the light and am opening to using color in whatever way arises. I am having much more fun and think that the balance of both, painting/creating with some of the shadow of our lives and some of the joy balances me.

Another lesson I have had to unlearn is the lesson of telling myself that I can’t do something or if I can’t do it well, I should not even try, which I am sure is often a universal voice people hear. Over time, those layers have shed and I am free to experiment and play more. The lesson here too is that we don’t have to be perfect in what we do, we have to learn how to accept who we are and where we are at. And have much humor and compassion for that person. In the big scheme of life, maybe we can all learn to not hold on so tightly to our belief structures and expand ourselves. My art helps me do that and I hope that it helps others to as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lindsayheider.com
• Instagram: @lindsayhdiamond.art, @lindsayhdiamond.illustration, @lindsayhdiamond.design
• Other: Related links: Authors inside – https://www.authorsinside.org/ McGuffey Art Center – https://www.mcguffeyartcenter.com/