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

Shelley, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?

I’ve told this story many times. I feel like it speaks to the support women give each other and the value of community — as well as giving context for my work.

To set the scene, I was in my early 30s. I had a baby and a toddler. I’d quit my Buckhead job in IT, gone back to school for my MFA, taught briefly at a couple of universities, and then moved to the suburbs —where I felt a bit like a fish out of water. To keep myself busy and because I’d gained considerable weight during my first pregnancy, I got involved with and started to teach group fitness classes at a women’s gym. (Stay with me. This comes back to art, I promise.)

Unexpectedly, this gym became my support group. Besides working out together, we all had coffee together, socialized together, gave each other advice and support when being a parent was hard. One day we were having coffee in the lobby and I was telling some of them about how I liked to take a solo trip every year to keep my sanity. It was never anywhere exotic; it was only important to me that I be alone for a while. The extroverts in the group were apoplectic. What did I DO?! How did I survive three days alone??? The introverts were jealous. Anyway, as part of the explanation, I showed them a few pictures of some paintings I’d done while on one of these escapes. They were honestly enthusiastic and began to encourage me to show them more and more. Eventually they talked me into being part of a craft show they gym put on for its members for the holidays.

I worked so hard for that show. I’d never done anything like that. I made small, medium, and large pieces. I designed, sawed, stained, and hammered custom display boards with sculptural elements. I created hand-made business cards. I bought table cloths and planned my outfit. When the day came, I had calculated how much I might make if I sold every single piece. I’m pretty sure if I had, I would have still been in the red. As it was, I did not sell out, but I did sell.

That little show was mostly birds. I was, and am, a bird watcher and gardener. I sold some pieces. I got a few requests. I had some wonderful conversations. I found out a few folks were designers. I found out another friend was also a bird watcher. It was a great day. Exhausting, but great.

From that one little show, I realized how much I loved the process. Yes, I loved painting (whether people ever saw it or now) but I also loved the connections that art can make. I’ll always be forever grateful to that group of women in the gym lobby who took a few minutes to see the value in my perspective. I’d always made things for myself and friends, but I don’t think I would have had the courage to jump if I hadn’t had a little push.

Shelley, 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?

I’m what you’d call a self-taught artist, although that’s far from what really happened. What it really means is I didn’t got to art school. I was taught by artists all around me. I grew up in walking distance to a good museum. Summer was longer then (only 8 lousy weeks for my kids now) and I spent quite a bit of it in art class. I took art in high school. My awesome neighbor down the street was a professional artist and gave me lessons. I volunteered teaching art at a half-way house when I was in college. I painted in my dorm room, in my first apartment, when I rented a room in a stranger’s house. I created things: a lamp from a vase my cat broke, a shower curtain from laminated poetry, a bed skirt from triangle fabric remnants. I wrote. I worked. I moved. I read. I got my MFA.

Yes, I have an MFA. It’s a studio art degree, but it is in poetry. Most people don’t even know such a degree exists, but it is a degree that certifies (?) that I have spent several years studying the writing of poetry. We studied structure and history and other famous poets, but we also spent required hours in workshop listening, critiquing, editing, and putting it all out there. It was a wonderful time in the company of people who really think about the world we inhabit. They sit with it. Then in comes out in these beautiful, gut-poking, sneaky ways.

So that’s where I am coming from when I am making work. It’s me, untrained by a system of art. So, sometimes I use mediums win ways I shouldn’t or make shadows the wrong color. However, it also means I have a way of looking at things as a poet. I see the underlying structure and how missing a supportive element makes you go back and look at what is shaky. I think in building ways, putting unrelated things together to make a metaphor that rings. I understand juxtaposition, repetition, and alliteration and I paint with them.

When I am creating work for someone else — and I do quite a few commissions these days — I have to be careful to think about what visual poem I am giving them. I truly love the sort of challenges when a collector brings me themes or memorabilia and then lets me make whatever I want with them. Maybe they give me a little direction like, “Make it match the couch fabric.” I don’t mind that. We all work within constraints and having to use a certain gray green isn’t going to keep me from making work that I’m proud of making. I do find that I really love creating those personal pieces. I think of them as an epigraph to the room — or even the rest of the house. You come in, you see something that is absolutely unique to this person, this family, this home, and it informs everything that comes after.

The pieces I make from torn papers, found items, old lace, etc., those are easier to explain. They are building an image people can understand. It is an amalgamation of pictures, allusions, contrasts, jokes and memories; but those components are recognizable — just displaced. It is not unlike a puzzle, a challenge to reshape the familiar. It is a form.

Abstract work, in contrast, is making something out of “whole cloth.” It is harder in a way. Seems counterintuitive, but the elements of good art still need to be there: composition, contrast, movement, texture, etc., but the easily recognizable elements have been removed. I think the versatility of it is very free verse; the ability to push and pull the idea for as long as you need to until it is resolved — or is obviously unresolvable. (There is some question here as to which is more honest and beautiful.)

I often get dinged for having such a diverse body of work, but when you look at my encaustics next to my mixed media work, a little piece next to a big piece, a commission next to an experimental piece, try to think of them like lines of a poem or a poems in a collection. I wrote them into being. They are how I see things: in pieces, separated, coming back together in a new construction, everything loosely connected by beauty.

So in the same way the placement of an image next to an idea builds a poem, so the layers of color and light build a painting. It is not so different, the method of it, the part of the brain that directs the hand, almost unwittingly. It is the same intuitive dance that as mentioned in an earlier question — between comfort/discomfort or thinking/feeling. I have been surprised by the similarities of painting and poetry, the comparative ease of putting pieces together in a way that other people can identify as part of themselves. Of course, I never considered myself a gift to the world of poetry. Similarly, I will not change the world of painting, but the process of understanding placement and form and editing (and the patience that comes with age) has taught me that I’m capable and I’m determined. And if it took poetry for me to better understand painting or painting for me to better understand poetry, so be it.

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

This sounds so basic, but I really value the time to think. The corporate world emphasizes return on investment, that time is money. Busy-ness, or the appearance of being busy, seems to somehow equate importance. Being in my studio gives me the opportunity to consider. Pieces require thinking, a fresh eye, time. I mean, occasionally a piece comes out in a whirl and is great, but for the most part, they come in waves with some time in between. Neglect that time, that consideration, and the piece suffers; it loses a little bit of its story.

For me at least, there is a disconnect in my “regular” life with a phone and children and housekeeping and my life as an artist. In the usual day to day, there is almost a desperation to be entertained, a constant requirement to be diverted away from just sitting and thinking. Rumination is somehow wasteful, disrespectful to the industrious, lazy. Sometimes I feel guilty if I’m not actively doing something.

However, art — or my art — seems to be at its best when I’m settled enough to listen to whatever half-formed thoughts are circulating in my brain. I don’t always have a plan. I might have an idea, a starting point, but I don’t have each step evaluated and ordered. Art sort of becomes. I love the accidentally wonderful bits where two colors react in an unexpected way or an unplanned drop becomes the perfect mark. Making art requires a sort of room to let feelings and thoughts bump around in the unconscious until they come out the hands. It’s not really accidental; that might be the wrong word. Maybe it is instinctual.

To connect to that thing inside, that instinct, that intuitive voice, I have to be in the right mental space. Being an artist gives me an excuse to take that time. There’s reel/tiktok that was popular for a while with Bob Ross’ voice saying something like “If people think you’re weird, just tell them you’re an artist.” I saw it all over the place for a while. It strikes a chord with so many because it is true. Being an artist gives you a free pass to step outside a few lines. After watching the world suffer through a mental health crisis these past few years, I’m continually rewarded by having a job that demands I take the time to be think, listen, and feel before I make.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I’m still figuring this out. I think we all are. I struggle to find the balance. I feel obligated to make reels and posts, but I’m not really sure the effort I put into making those social media posts actually translates into growing interest. I’ve had to reframe my thinking about social media as a kind of overture to making friends. If people who follow me on social media are looking for glitz and glamour, they aren’t going to get it with me. I try to post what I’m working on, what I’m proud of making, pretty details, or challenges from my day. I post dirty studios and silly cat pictures. I can guarantee you that the people who chose to follow me and remain as followers are not bots or hanging on because they think I’m a rock star. If they follow me, it is because they like my work and they like me. And that’s really what I’m looking for in the long run. I’ve sort of stopped caring so much about numbers and am trying to communicate what I find so fascinating about what I do. Sometimes I might have wet hair and stained clothes when I do it.

The real problem for me is that I resent the time I make things for social media because it is time I’d rather have in the studio. Time is not infinite and I need to take care of other things, too. Also, I’ve seen a real difference in how my individual artist/small business posts are treated by Instagram. It used to be that I could run an ad or two and boost numbers — at least within my own followers. Now, I compete with large corporations who pay the big buck for ads. And I can’t compete, so I lose. I’m honestly not sure how to fix that problem.

The social media world is always changing. I think of it like one those swirly world balls; you think you know what it looks like, then it spins a bit and it’s all brand new. So while I’m doing what I can to just talk to people about what I do, I’m also just waiting to see what is next because I feel like there’s something new just around the corner that will be better for artists, be what Instagram used to be at the onset.

However, ultimately what I do is best seen in person anyway. You can’t really experience the textures of a mixed media piece — no matter how good your photos are — with a photograph. Encaustic work, especially, just cannot be captured by a camera. It changes mood, opacity, luminescence, everything, contingent the light and time of day or the angle of your viewpoint. It just is amazingly dependent on the moment. That’s why I like it, it’s why it could never be an NFT, and it is why I still work in shows and galleries. Sometimes I just want to get close to art, to look at it from the side, to (maybe?) touch it. I want to make art that makes people feel that way. And we can’t do that with social media.

Contact Info:

• Website: SHFstudio.net
• Instagram: @SHF_studio
• Facebook: SHF-studio

Image Credits
Becki Madsen Christina Paz