We were lucky to catch up with Lupe Galvan recently and have shared our conversation below.
Lupe, 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?
For over a decade, I worked as a professional artist creating illustrations and fine art. I did everything from book covers, to spot illustrations to landscape and portrait commissions. There were many times when things were very consistent and earning a living solely from creative work was possible and other times when I had to supplement my income from teaching part time or working for the forest service. When things go well and you are receiving commissions, you work every single day. You have to say yes and figure out how to adapt to people’s visions even if it’s not what you have in mind. This process keeps you on your toes and stretches you creatively. You learn to meet deadlines, negotiate business minded things and learn how to work within your discipline and what that requires of you. There are many great benefits to all of this, one is that you learn whether you can do it and sustain it, if you can not then you have to figure out what isn’t working, it could be that you need to market yourself better or make yourself more well known. There are always many variables involved and you have to be prepared for things to change.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I was born and raised in rural Idaho, the land itself had a large impact on me since I think a lot about us as products of our environment. You can see how an environment shapes our face whether it is harder on some than others. I became interested in art at an early age. When I was in the 6th grade I fell in love with Art History and this was by accident. I had an older sibling who had a college level art history book that she could not sell back so she gave it to me. I spent six years pouring over each page, studying the images of the Old Masters and I knew at that point I wanted to do something like what I saw. Later, as an adult, I attended Art School and some workshops that’s when I started taking commissions. I spent a lot of time painting landscapes and portraits from life. A large part of my commissions were primarily landscape paintings; that was my first love and the thing I had the most access to. In art school I learned about the human figure and really decided that I wanted to learn how to do both figures and landscape. Problem solving is a large part of working creatively, it can be working with people’s photographs, altering ideas, using what you know about perspective, combining different ideas but sometimes my clients really just want me to interpret an idea for them that they have – they trust my own creativity, this is the best since I feel I can really explore and invest into the piece. It can take longer for this process but it’s almost always a better result. I am most proud of my exploration of portraiture with elements of landscapes, some of these are assembled in a modernist symbolic manner, this allows me to not have to adhere to things bound to realism per se and can explore more possibilities and different arrangements. My works revolve around celebrating my cultural roots, investigating my indigeneity and interpreting compositional ideas from Old Masters and re-contextualizing them into my own work.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I lesson I had to unlearn? Unlearn to treat your work too preciously. I think in the process of making work we can do things that impress ourselves or feel that we don’t want to “screw the thing up” but this is limiting. You may be hindering something greater simply because we think “i don’t want to mess up the eye or the ear” but maybe it’s in the wrong place or it doesnt fit well with what the rest of it needs, so you need to scrape it down or move it over. The same goes for drawing, it’s too easy to lock down into details too soon. This has been a rather long and difficult thing for myself and I think I arrived at my understanding a little later than most do. When I can stay in the abstract stages longer, I can dream bigger and It has more possibility, it’s not tied down yet to anything. As things start to take clarity those things are more easily identified in particular ways it it can affect the outcome. You have to continue to be willing to take things out and change it if that’s what the piece needs, but you may not know that in the moment, some time needs to pass in order to see where it can go.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)
I’m generally not interested in NFTs. I like having things of material nature, something that my eyes can fall on and gaze over the labor and see the searching and involvement that only a human hand provide. I want actual light to illuminate the thing and I want to use my own eyes and think about it for some time. I think with NFTs, it’s no longer “art” to me, but rather a commodity and I’d rather be involved in making something that changes over time and allows you to view it differently as you walk into a room a different times of the day or year and it impresses something on you that only things in the material world can do.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lupegalvan.com/
- Instagram: lupeglvn
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is40KUhIAis