We were lucky to catch up with Sunday Avanti recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sunday, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

I’ve been making money from my work in some capacity since I was a child. This started when I was in Kindergarten selling crayon drawings of butterflies for a dollar. I usually spent it on treats from the vending machine after school. That’s one of my favorite stories to tell about my early art career. I also spent a lot of time drawing cartoon characters for friends at lunch and summer camp.

My first big painting commission as an artist was in the eighth grade. I painted a 2′ x 4′ Sesame Street mural for a close family friend’s nursery. I worked on that painting for about seven weeks and to this day it is still one of the pieces I am most proud of.

Sunday, 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?

So, my name is Sunday. My pronouns are they/he. I am an artist, illustrator, librarian, and archivist. I really enjoy figurative illustration work. I focus a lot on portraiture and storytelling. My work often depicts day-to-day activities like working in the garden, having dinner with friends, or relaxing in bed. I place a special emphasis on referencing my experiences as a black queer person from the South. This shows up in me creating work about myself, my friends, and my chosen family.

Gouache is my primary medium. I also work in oils (usually during the summer because my studio can get kind of stuffy), relief printing, and digital art. I also love using pink colored pencils for sketchbook work.

I’ve tried many different forms of creative self-expression through the years. I started in symphonic band in at eight and even went to college on a music scholarship. I started making picture books in second grade. I did open mics all through high school and I was a dancer into my early twenties. Having the privilege to experiment with these creative outlets growing up kept me well-rounded and open-minded as an artist and creative. At the end of the day, I always found myself coming back to art, especially drawing and painting and I would often think about it while doing other things.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

It may sound silly, but I really had to learn how to make work for myself. Throughout high school and college, I spent all of my creative time doing work for a grade and lost most of my creative voice because of that I didn’t know what I wanted to do or what I was interested in after I finished school, and I felt so lost, almost like the shell of an artist. I had strong technical skills, but all of my work felt hollow because it was not me.

I can trace this back to undergrad studies. I went to a small historically women’s college just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. The art department was very intimate and small and lacked a lot of racial diversity among students and staff. It was also very old school. I spent so much time during my program being fed incredibly harmful rhetoric like: “You can only be successful if you are in a gallery.” “You need to pick ONE subject, ONE medium to be good at, and only do that ONE thing.” “You need to be using expensive materials and working large for your work to be taken seriously.”

It took me about three years and a lot of therapy to work through that. To move on, I started by putting away a lot of my work from college– I even burned some. I began experimenting, and I tried lots of media and subjects I had been discouraged from trying in school. I tried printmaking, bookbinding, making my own paper, painting with just my hands, food illustration, and making zines. I found my way to digital art and tried comic books and then video editing.

My work and creative practice are more consistent than they’ve ever been, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I feel like my art is truly for myself. My goals now are to continue to do work that I want to do and take on clients and projects that align with that. My work is for myself before it is for anyone else.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

As an artist, I strive to use my voice to uplift and inspire all Black voices by creating work about all of our experiences in a way that is intentional, truthful, and respectful to the circumstances of our history, and the endless possibilities of our future. I want to see paintings of aunties kikiing on the porch in white plastic chairs on the hottest days of summer, grandparents holding their grandchildren on their first birthdays, and kids racing in the park during the family reunion. I want people to be able to engage with my work and feel like they have a sense of familiarity and warmth.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sundayinbloom.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/sundayinbloom
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/sundayinbloom

Image Credits
All photos were taken by me. <3