We were lucky to catch up with Sean Mills recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sean, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I always loved to draw. Drawing on the edges of my math homework and trying to twist every project, in every subject into an art project. My painting epiphany came in college while I was studying to be a lawyer. I would try to read as fast as I could, or finish my essays so that I could have time to paint.

As I was enjoying copying an illustration from Dante’s INFERNO, one day, after class, I realized that I should be doing what I love the whole day. That following day I went to the Lamar Dodd School of Art to see about transferring into their art program. This program was luckily within the same University and it just so happened to be one of the best in the South.

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?

After I graduated, I was still hungry to learn and to prove myself. I beat the bushes to apply at any art related job in town, (Athens, GA). The Classic City, at that time, had a gallery called Mercury Artworks. As as student they would sometimes ask me to help document artists’ works with my background as a Digital Media major. That experience connected me with a local graphic design company called, “BASELINE SPORTS MEDIA”.

BASELINE made award winning posters for nationally known brand in the MLB, NCAA, NBA, and many local businesses. From this first job, I learned so many technical skills as well as business acumen. Learning how to talk to clients, how to approach creating on deadlines, and how to work with others was hugely impactful for me.

Getting to create artwork that would be instantly seen by thousands of people was something I couldn’t have done on my own. The hardest part was learning to take incomplete information or conflicting opinions and synthesize things that looked appealing and made people happy. I think that whatever creative field you go into, learning to deal with difficult people, hard deadlines, and competition will serve you well.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

A driving passion in my work is to share a perspective with a community. That community can be local or universal and that perspective could be sad, bitter, or sarcastic, but I’m driven to capture images and ideas that we can share. Sharing things with others is both practically easy and almost impossibly hard, because we have so many tools yet we have so many experiences and opinions every moment of every day.

On the most mundane level, we can easily share a moment in time and view and in this way a simple portrait can say, “I see this beauty or pain or stupidity” and the audience can know at least one other person did, too. Of course, there is also the goal to capture ephemeral things, hard to express things, or subtle feelings.

The challenge and fun of it all, is solving this puzzle that is how to capture something: what media, what form, what style, and what presentation will help people feel seen or understood or inspired.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

The easiest starting point is always thinking of what you wish you had. This can be access to materials, or exposure to ideas, or opportunities to share your work. For beginning artists these are the soil, sun, and water they need to grow.

The next thing is helping them survive. A kind society would outright subsidize the pursuit of arts, but we can all help by choosing to support artists. Support can mean directly paying them to make things as well as giving them opportunity to make things with an affordable place to live, and a career that allows them to afford making art.

It is not a mystery what will make an art scene thrive: provide space for artists to interact, provide access to an audience, and give them time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.seanmillsartist.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/seanmillsartist
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seanmillsartist
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/sean-mills-artist
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SeanMillsMedia
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/expansionsquad