We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rosabel Rosalind a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rosabel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Have you been 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? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Thankfully I’ve found ways to translate my creative pursuits into practical ones. I’m a tattoo artist, and manage to work about 3 days a week. I also do a lot of private illustration jobs for young adult or childrens books. Recently I’ve had the opportunity to work on a couple public art projects and that’s also been financially fruitful! As always, I try to sell my work, but it’s so difficult to find and feel stability in a market that’s so unstable and oftentimes stiflingly commercial. Perhaps one day I’ll work with a gallery, but even then I’m not sure I know how to meet the market where it’s at and submit to its whims. For now I enjoy having many small hustles, staying flexible for my own creative practice, and working collaboratively with people to make their visions come to life, on their body, on a page or on a public-facing wall.

Rosabel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Rosabel, I’m an artist currently based in Pittsburgh but I grew up in Los Angeles – and between then and now I’ve lived in Chicago, rural Iowa and Vienna, Austria. I work in painting, drawing and installation but sometimes those boundaries bleed into comics, animation or sculpture. When I’m not making work in my home studio, I’m tattooing out of a shop in town or watching reality TV while working on freelance gigs. But my favorite thing to do is to tell visual stories that are melodramatic, tragicomic and absurd. The subject matter of such stories has tended recently toward the apocalypse, climate disaster, conspiracy theory, interpersonal family drama and soap operas. I see each and every body of work as its own story: while some are short stories, some are memoirs, some make their way into a trilogy eventually. But I get inspired by telling a story and that’s what drives the work I make in my studio.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I want to be an artist who is truly multidisciplinary – in that I can produce a body of work for a midsize gallery, while developing and self-publishing a graphic novel, while selling $25 riso prints to my friends who can afford it, while tattooing a pair of anthropomorphized cherries on my friend’s buttock, while designing a mural with community input. I want to make critical, innovative and funny art that pushes envelopes and appeals to the intellectual, while speaking equally to the layperson. There’s an unfortunate trend I’ve noticed, where non-art folks can’t discuss the kind of art they see in a museum the way they can discuss the music they love or the movies they’ve seen or the books they’ve been enjoying. Capital A: “Art” has an exclusive tendency. I want to combat that through my work- I want to strive to be both/and.

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

Being an artist is such a privilege. It’s not always I feel deeply inspired by the every-day, but when I do – when I get slapped in the face with an idea or when various mental threads in my head tie themselves in a knot all of a sudden I get a burst of energy that makes the pursuit of bring an artist feel worth it. I don’t actually find showing the work I make very rewarding, though it’s always nice to know people are seeing the things I create and labor over. Art making for me is an urge, an impulse I have to burp out of me so I can feel better. The very best part of the process for me, at least these days, has been about dreaming up with the stories I want to tell.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rosabelrosalind.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosabelrosalind/ ( @rosabelrosalind )

Image Credits

Wassaic Project, Pat Stanny and Maria Perez, Tom Little