We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Melinda Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Melinda, appreciate you joining us today. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?
Yes. I love what I do. I often compare it to being a child at play, and I feel so fortunate to be able spend my life doing what I love. That said, being an artist isn’t easy, and I can imagine how intolerable a life it would be for some. It can be very lonely, especially if you have a noncollaborative practice. I’m a painter, so my life is lived in the studio, coming up with ideas and executing them. It takes many long hours of solitude to do this. I’m especially cognizant of the magical properties of creativity, and this makes me vaguely superstitious. I view my studio as a kind of cauldron where ideas brew, and I am therefore very protective of the space, meaning, I don’t invite people in very often. In fact, at the threshold of my studio I have a painting of a lion head and, above that, a Gorgon, as a kind of warning to those who would enter uninvited. My entire life, I’ve been creating, first as a writer, now as a visual artist, and I’ve always had the very strong sense that what the muse requires of me is solitude and even the loneliness that is sometimes solitude’s companion. I believe she required that I sacrifice a normal life, that I live a kind of monkish life in order to do the work I’m meant to do. Luckily, I’m a loner, so it really wasn’t all that much of a sacrifice (ssh!).
However, there are times of tremendous struggle, when the solitude does turn briefly to unbearable loneliness, where the unending doubts that arise in the process of creating work, the unending battle with one’s own mind, which sometimes takes up arms against the painter, undermines her confidence, when all these things bear down so heavily that I wonder, is it really worth it? But then the next minute comes, or the next day, and the brush is once again excitedly reaching for the canvas, or a story insists on being told, or an idea for a new direction has me suddenly and wholeheartedly in its thrall, and the question seems absurd. Of course it’s worth it!
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?
For my entire life, I was a writer—a poet and playwright, mainly. Writing was my life, I lived for it. In 2010, I had a book of poetry published by Finishing Line Press called “Tiny Island,” and I wanted to design the cover myself. In doing so, I became obsessed with visual imagery. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly unable to sustain narratives in my writing, and since I had finally reached my end of tolerance for difficult relationships, I had lost my muse for poetry. At that time, I would sit in the mornings attempting to write, basically biding my time until I could quit for the day and play with Photoshop. On January 10, 2011, when I was 46, I made the—to me—momentous decision to walk away from writing altogether in order to focus exclusively on visual art.
I began with digital art. My idea at that time was to sort of trick people into reading my writing by putting it into the art. My first pieces I exhibited, at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, were images in which I placed stanzas from one of my longer poems I didn’t think deserved to languish in obscurity. I don’t think my trick worked. People looked at the pieces without really reading the words. Most people find poetry a chore. Although I loved the digital medium, I eventually left it for painting because I needed more immediacy in the work itself—I craved the vitality and vibrancy and physicality of paint. It’s such an incredibly sensual medium. The shift from writing to painting was the greatest surprise of my life, and unless I sprout another head or win the Nobel Prize in economics, it probably will always remain so.
As a writer, I had always secretly wished that I was a painter instead, but I was unaware that it was something I could potentially be good at, I suppose for the simple reason that I couldn’t draw. And so when it came to me, I gave myself to it completely. There’s no other way. As an entirely self-taught artist, I had to dedicate myself fully to the learning process. This wasn’t easy! But I was determined. I had to teach myself not only the techniques of painting, but the tools and materials as well. Everything. There was a lot of trial and error. I can’t say whether talent is inborn or not. How could I know this when I worked so hard to teach myself to do the things at which I became good? What I can say is that, with me, the drive, the compulsion to create has always been there. For as long as I’ve been self-aware, I’ve needed to express myself artistically. Had I not had that need, I’m sure I would not have worked as hard as I have. It takes an enormous amount of determination and discipline to be thoroughly self-taught.
After ten years of being a painter, I’ve been represented in galleries in three cities (Los Angeles, Dallas and Greenwich, Connecticut), and I’ve shown in many galleries around the country. I’ve had several solo and two-person shows, and I recently published a book of my lockdown illustrations titled, cleverly, “Lockdown!” Recently, due to the upheavals of covid, I relocated from Los Angeles, after 30 years there, to my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Although I’m enjoying a more bucolic and peaceful life, and although I’m loving the time with my family, I do miss the competitive spirit of the L.A. art scene. I miss the many and varied opportunities there, and, of course, I miss my friends, wonderful artists who provided me with so much inspiration.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I had some pieces in the L.A. Art Show in 2019. There was a family, a mother and father and a daughter, maybe she was four or five years old, they were in the booth looking at one of my paintings. The painting is very large, larger than life, it’s of a woman who has reached into her chest and pulled out her heart. She’s holding the heart in such a manner as to say, Here, have it. The expression on her face reinforces that. The little girl studied the painting for some time, then said to her mother, “I don’t like it, Mommy.” Standing nearby, I went up to her and said, gently, “Why don’t you like it?” and she replied, “Because she’s hurt.” I then said to her, “No, she isn’t hurt. She loves you. She’s giving you her heart.” Then I stepped away, and the little girl studied the painting some more. After a bit, she turned to look at me, then ran over with her arms open wide and threw them around me, hugging me. That is the reward; that is the full reward. When my work resonates emotionally with others enough to move them, I know I’ve done my job, and it is truly satisfying. Of course, it’s always nice too when people value the work enough to buy it and put in in their homes. I love the idea of people living with my work. I view art as a kind of collaboration between the artist and the audience. A piece is never truly finished until the viewer completes it with her or his gaze and interpretations and emotional responses. When they choose to live with it, that’s something very special. It means my work carries on, day after day, doing its job without me.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
As I’ve said before, I’ve been creating art for my entire life, starting at about 7, when I already knew I wanted to be/was a writer. It’s as though I was born with this need to express myself creatively. Of course, as a child, I didn’t pursue this with the idea of a profession in mind, but when I reached adulthood, I did. I wrote obsessively, with the goal of becoming a great writer. I wrote every day. If I had to be at work at 9, I’d wake up at 4:00 to get enough time with the writing. Year after year after year I did this. Because I wrote poetry, there wasn’t exactly a world that bayed for the work. I wrote in obscurity. I had poems published in literary journals, but it never really went further than that, and literary journals aren’t exactly read by the masses. I wasn’t an academic and was absolutely terrible at networking and self-promotion. So the path to success was very limited, if not altogether absent. But I continued to write. I had many rejections along the way, and, unfortunately, with writing, I tended to take them pretty personally. But I still wrote. I still dedicated myself to writing, to the goal of every day becoming better, and to the sheer love of putting words together. Along with poetry, I wrote plays, and these too were difficult to get into the wider world. Small theaters have next to nothing when it comes to funding, so they were pretty hesitant to take chances on unknown playwrights and experimental plays. Pretty hesitant? They couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Again, I was not a networker. I simply loved to write, and I continued to write plays, knowing it would be impossible to get them produced. The point I’m trying to make is that my resilience lay in my dedication to being the best artist—at that time writer—I could be, despite rejection, despite any detectable career path. It’s a head-down, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of thing, despite how the world’s receiving you, and that, to me, is the very definition of resilience.
The same holds true for what I do now, for painting and visual art, although the art world is far more expansive and open to new voices than the literary world was. But despite some success, I still don’t have as wide an audience as I would like to have, I still struggle with how to attain that, and I still go every day to my studio, with the understanding that no matter what, it’s the doing that matters most. Artists who labor in obscurity, as most of us do, who labor in spite of not attaining much encouragement or feedback or reinforcement that what we’re doing matters, these artists are the embodiment, in my opinion, of resilience.
Contact Info:
- Website: melindarsmith.com
- Instagram: @melindarsmith