We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Morgan Auten-Smith a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Morgan , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I have wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember. When I was a child I told people that I was going to be an artist when I grew up. I was always drawing, coloring, building or creating things. After years of people telling me that I would never make any money being an artist, I entered college with the intention of being an english teacher. One night I was helping my friend write a paper and I remember thinking to myself “oh my gosh I hate this” and I knew that I couldn’t do that for the next 30 years. So I decided that I would become an art teacher.

I will admit that at the time I decided to continue down the education path because I was still afraid that I would never be able to earn a living as a visual artist. However, after taking the classes, graduating and now having an 11 year career as an art educator I fell in love with it. It can be hard trying to balance having a career as a visual artist and a career as an educator and I do often feel pulled in two directions. While it is difficult, my careers inform each other so much that I can’t imagine doing one without the other.

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

My name is Morgan Auten Smith. I am an abstract painter and art educator living and working in NE Georgia. I’ve been and art teacher for 11 years and a practicing artist for 7. Over those 7 years I have played around with many styles and medium but I settled into painting in 2018. When I was in college I focused on anatomy as a source of inspiration but I had always wanted to paint abstractly. It wasn’t until after the traumatic birth of my twins in 2017 did I find the courage to begin expressing myself only through color.

Painting became a way to process my mental health struggles [along with therapy] and even after I have healed from the issues that brought me to painting, I cannot stop. When I think about being an artist or a creative or whatever you may call someone who dedicates their life to making, I think of a line from one of my favorite musical artists. In the song “Free” Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine says “But there is nothing else that I know how to do but to open up my arms and give it all to you.” I don’t know how to do anything else.

Currently, my work is all about color. I want to explore all the ways colors interact with each other and how they communicate. Color and composition have such a gentle way of capturing the viewers attention, of asking them to stop and have a conversation. I want my work to quietly demand attention. There is a quote by Georgia O’Keeffe that is often shared but I think it is very fitting. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”

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

One of the biggest lessons I have had to unlearn as an artist is how to take rejection. If you are trying to have a “successful” art career, there is going to be endless amounts of rejection that you have to endure. That rejection can come from jurors of shows you applied to, from galleries you reached out to, even from social media. It takes a long time before you realize that the rejection is not personal. The juror didn’t choose you because your work didn’t align with their vision for the show, the gallery already represents someone with a similar style as your, the post on social media didn’t get shown in peoples feeds; there are a lot of reasons why we as artists face rejection and it is almost never personal.

In my 20’s a rejection notice of any kind would send me into a spiral of uncertainty and self-doubt. Now that I am older and have also gone to therapy, I understand that there are so many outside factors that influence acceptance or rejection that they hardly bother me anymore. I say hardly because there are some rejections that still sting a little more than others. But like all things, unlearning is a process.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I love the feeling of looking at a piece after I have finished it and feeling impressed. To me there is nothing better than looking at a piece and saying to myself “Holy shit, I made that!” My mentor shared something recently that has stuck with me. She said that you should be totally in love with every aspect of your painting. When I get that feeling of “Holy shit, I made that” I know that I have fully fallen in love with a piece. Even if that painting ends up in storage, I can pull it out and still feel in love with it. It is always rewarding having collectors buy my work, galleries show it or people admire it but for me its mostly about how it makes me feel that is most important.

Contact Info:

• Website: morganautensmith.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/morgan_auten_smith