We were lucky to catch up with Mary Jhun recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Mary thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us 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 am so thankful I am able to work as an artist full-time the past 3 years, but it definitely came with an abundance of time learning and building my path. I had been in love with painting since I was so little, but my clearest memory was at 8 years old and so on. I lived in the Philippines during my childhood, so when i cam to the states, I was self-conscious of my accent. I found that it was easier to make friends by giving them a little drawing to tell them i see them, and i care about our interaction. As i got older, art became my prominent daily practice of expressing myself, like breathing, it didnt feel like work, so it was a no-brainer that it would become a bigger part of my life outside of my own obsession of it. I tried going to school to be an art teacher but i became impatient and just wanted to paint. I ultimately realized i didnt want to teach about other artists, i wanted to be the artist teachers talked about. I knew i wanted to be a full time painter of The Girls, a theme in my work that is a prominent symbol for our human experience, and I knew i needed people to believe in me as a true artist, not their idea of a “starving artist”. For 10 years working as a barista and coffee lab trainer, I was able to learn how a small business functions their shop. From inventory, to showing up on the dot for your customers daily, to packaging and managing orders, a consistent media presence, and creating a warm ambience, all of my experience working at a coffee shop attributed to running a public art studio gallery for myself. I spent 2014 – 2020 working as a barista and full time painter in my studio, so i barely slept for those years. When the pandemic took its toll and forced everyone to stay home, my sales increased. I was curious and shocked but realized where the success came from. The need for art during the hardest times of our lives will never diminish, and i realized that The Girls in my work had created this safe place for people to escape to, to feel comforted, feel understood, or feel charged enough to continue on with their life. In 2018, I began setting up a plan of full working the studio as a full stocked art merch shop of my own goods, full of originals, and I began cementing a order of operations for myself, which eventually kicked into high gear in 2020. Throughout the pandemic, i was able to see these operations strengthen and align with my public space: Open Hours, Online Sales, Website building, Merch Creation, Social Media presence, Art Commission, Ship outs and Pick up schedules. I still had a barista job during this time. 2020 allowed me to see that my art can make as much as i do as a full time barista, but in 2021, i expanded the studio larger and wanted to see if my income through art would beat my barista income. It did. I then announced I would be leaving my coffee job and secure my future in art. I gave myself 6 months before i quit coffee to learn about business insurance, health insurance, and some of the extra logistics that involve my personal life. There wouldn’t have been a faster process to learn what i learned, because it involved the jobs i needed to experience. Being a full time artist isnt really about how well you do your art, its mostly how you present yourself in relationship to you loving your art so much, and that involves learning how to engage with people, respect buyers, respect your own craft, being affordable to a wide range of clients, understanding the logistics of getting a painting from point a to b, and truly accepting and loving that process as much as you love art. It takes the appreciation of both your talent and how you spend your time outside of that talent to create a well rounded business that doesn’t drag you down. That was the realization for me, and I’m so thankful i was able to experience it in the way i did.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Mary Jhun, surrealist painter of The Girls. I am solely a fine art painter and own a public art shop for my work and merch. I have been a painter for 20+ years but have been dedicated to my theme of understanding the human experience through my signature subject called The Girls, a series of paintings carried by an human figure, and tells deep and rich stories about our daily lives through blending botanical, biological, industrial, mechanical, and architectural pieces. Ive often related my paintings as observation of memories from a day remembered, whether it involved another person or just myself. It brings different people from different walks of life into the same space of feeling and understanding life through art, and a sense of openness as well.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Go to them, seek them out, and if you can’t hire them or buy from them, share their work to others.

We are approaching every year with faster everything, food, service, art and with fast art. With fast comes affordable, but most of the time, lack luster. Im not speaking for every piece of work and im not against it, but of course, fast print and fast reproductions found in department stores is what im talking about. You’re also buying something that most people encounter at places such as target, Walmart, ikea. Fast things tend to not have the same weight as when you see a persons paint strokes, or hand made print, and with especially, you dont get to make an interaction with fast art as you would when speaking with the artist themselves.

A thriving creative ecosystem is often what makes places in our cities truly special, and when people realize that a place is special, they monopolize on it for better or worst. We have been in our own detriment in the US where creatives have made the “old runned down” parts of town be the most interesting, the most hip, and where people seek to feel that type of creative need. The detriment is that it becomes the newest place people want to build apartments in which gets rid of those abandoned buildings we’ve been working in, but that is often our world, and we will always be creating art there. We are mostly found in those places, and securing us through your interactions and active participation allows us to keep making a part of our cities cool, beautiful, and inspirational.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

For me personally, its easier to paint than to feel my depression, anxiety, and my bipolar swings on a daily basis. My mission had always been to paint and travel. Painting aids the emotional needs and also keeps me aligned with being an observer, and allows me to understand and process my observations of how humans are and what they need. Traveling is just allowing me to observe different people in different places.

Contact Info:

• Website: Maryjhun.com
• Instagram: @maryjhunart
• Other: https://vimeo.com/333356263/763cd5bb67 A 2019 Short Documentary of my art life.

Image Credits
Self