We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Saki -. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Saki below.

Alright, Saki thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I wouldn’t change a thing. Even though I have always been interested in art since I could remember, I think my life journey before officially becoming a professional artist has filled me with more experiences, inspirations, and skills to draw from. It’s as if the pent-up creativity and the struggle to express it while being trapped in a non-creative career served as an incubation chamber for my art, like whiskey aging in a barrel.

To sum up my career path, my artistic adventures began when I was a toddler. I loved crafting all sorts of things—painting, clay sculptures, papercraft, you name it. My mom generally discouraged it because those skills weren’t the “money-making type,” but the irony is that the forbidden fruit is the tastiest, so I would secretly do my art projects in my room anyway. When it was time for college, I was pressured into majoring in Biology, and I ended up getting a Masters degree in it, but I had major burnout after grad school, so I worked in restaurants for a while, with the goal of opening up my own vegan bakery. Then my friend offered me a job at his biotech startup and the salary was too good to turn down, so I took it. Over the next several years, I saved up a lot of money and quit one day because I could.

I’m really thankful that fate led me down the path that I took. Even though biotech was a boring grind, it gave me financial freedom to explore different hobbies and figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

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?

What sets me apart from many artists is my diverse skill set. I’m not just a painter, or a fashion designer, or musician; I am a whole team. People come to me with odd jobs that require multi-disciplinary talents—these are projects that other artists turn down, either because they’re too specialized in a single trade, or the opposite—they only dabble in several hobbies but don’t have the expertise required to produce a professional result.

As an example, I was commissioned to create an outdoor canvas cover for a composting control unit. It was for a startup company who had just put together their second prototype. They went to several canvas companies to get quotes, but none of them would take on a project less than $10,000, which was far over budget for the small startup. Local tailors wouldn’t take on the project either, because their expertise was in garment design. Finally, through word of mouth, the company found me, and I worked with them to engineer a custom cover that allowed them to showcase their prototype and secure funding from investors to commercialize the product.

As for my more creative work—stuff I do for myself or as a collaboration with local artists, I like to make art that can be appreciated from multiple perspectives. For example, when I write a song, it’s not just music: a song often inspires a music video and/or stage performance, which may inspire a new costume, which may end up manifesting an entire art installation. Using different modes of communication has helped me express myself better and also connect with my audience and clients.

I think that my artistic diversity also makes me more human. As artificial intelligence threatens to replace many artists, the most vulnerable of which have a highly developed style and/or specific product—something formulaic—and so I believe that it is important for an artist to produce a varied body of work that draws from multiple disciplines: not only painting but also music, not only fashion but also poetry, not only photography but also dance. When art forms are so integrated, the pieces come to life. Such comprehensive works may eventually be mimicked by AI, but they will not express a complete human experience or tell a story like we do.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

A common disjunct between creatives and non-creatives is how to assess the monetary value of art. For example, a potential client may ask me to quote them for a pair of custom cosplay wings, and I’ll give them an estimate based on the cost of materials plus my time to design the wings, procure supplies, and then craft them. The most common response I get is something like, “That’s ridiculously expensive. I can buy similar wings on Amazon for [X amount of dollars].” What these people fail to understand is that they are asking me to create an original work—from scratch—a design without a blueprint. Turning an idea into a reality is wizardry, not grunt work.

Commercially available products are usually inspired by the work of an uncredited artist, but the mass-produced version rarely holds a candle to its original inspiration. Again, going back to the palpable threat of AI replacing human artists, I think that many non-creatives struggle to place value on art because their metrics for assessing value are based on comparison with similar works of the same genre whether made by man or machine. As AI creates art that approaches indistinguishability from human-made art, I believe that the value of human-art will actually go up, since they are the seeds that feed the plagiarizing machine.

All art is derivative, and the true value of art is in its originality, not in how reproducible it is. I hope that more non-creatives will come to realize how important artists are for the future of art, and show their support by paying artists what they’re truly worth.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

My goal as an artist is to catalyze change. It can be a change of heart, a change of mind, maybe even a political change. Change is what drives progress. When people say that my work inspires them to take their life in a new direction, that is a major success to me. I pour my heart and soul into my art, without any promise that I’ll get anything in return…and sometimes what I’ve put into the world resonates with another soul, and that makes it all worthwhile.

Every piece of art created is a message in a bottle, written in a strange new language invented by the artist. The magic happens when someone finds the bottle and is intrigued enough to decipher the message and maybe even write back. Music and dance are great examples of this: melodies and movement can convey emotion without using lyrics. It is this connection, this communication, that motivates me to keep doing what I do.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sakitheartist.com/
• Instagram: @saki.the.artist
• Facebook: @saki.the.artist
• Youtube: @SakiDoingThings
• Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2f9beQ9TKaoqyv0HuK5N55

Image Credits
Becky Campbell, Chris Barbour, John Lundgren, Oceanside Museum of Art, Bradley Hunt