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

Yehlie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

Growing up my parents have always encouraged my sister and I to be creative, we started with music and then it was dance classes. I learned so many different instruments because they wanted to make sure i found what was the best fit for us. I always liked to draw and at a very young age my school was ending a lot of my drawing to youth drawing contests whether they were national or international. My parents always encouraged me to participate and helped me come up with ideas. They were always so invested and asa child that made me feel safe enough to share with them what I did. They keep every single drawings I’ve made and chose to keep.

On that same line they encouraged me to express my emotions. My art and my emotions work hand to hand , I never knew how to process my emotions on my own before I started painting, both of my parents were always there to listen to me talk about it and I grew up understanding that feeling the way I felt was alright and necessary. the tricky part came to finding out how to transform them into something that can be helpful to me. OnceI decided that I really wanted to get into painting, my father got all of the tools I asked him to get me from acrylic paint, to my first decent paint brushes.

I started expressing my emotions into art and it became my favorite thing to do in this world. Once My parents saw the fruit of my emotions , they always made me feel like it was the most beautiful art work tehy had ever seen. They encouraged me, helped me, payed for my supplies, displayed my work and more. To me it felt like them showing me how beautiful they believed my emotions were. My father, is and absolute art lover, he collects a lot of Haitian art from the most popular names to the newer arising artists. He has been and will always be one of the people who has always encouraged me to do better, to keep feeling and to keep creating. When my mother was my listener, my dad was my watcher. I would’ve never seen the importance of feeding into my creative side if it was not for my parents connecting the dots for me between the real world, and the beauty the mind can create, they made me feel like we could connect them and create beauty and peace in one.

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?

I am a Haitian/American artist. I was born in the united states in Brooklynn New York and I was raised in Haiti my whole life after that. I moved to the united States for college where I choose to learn psychology and deep my knowledge for visual arts. I started drawing at a very young age but I was more of the kid who made great color combos and made sure the crayolas stayed inside the lines. I naturally knew how to make my shapes get together in order to create shapes and make it look like a human being, I was always shocked when kids my age could not do the same. My art class teacher of first grade very rapidly started putting myself and some of my other art inclined friends into national drawing contests for kids.

We took part of it every year with no break until I started middle school. Middle school being a different in Haiti, those contest were almost non-existant. Though I loved getting with my friends in order to create, I hated the idea that my work was going to be compared and judged. Once I made it out of that cycle, I stopped drawing all together. My first year of High school I started again after I hit 16 years old and my teenage emotions were all crazy, I felt a little discouraged because I felt that my skills were stuck in a middle school level and I aspired to be a portrait artist. I very quickly realized I haded doing realistic portraits and preferred playing around with pigments preferable in liquid form. I the started posting my work on instagram and then I found my niche. I became a semi realistic painter who loves to experiment with her skills.

I think that my art is very colorful while lifting up black women and melanin in general. I often paint what I dream of, that’s where I get most of my inspiration from, and I express it better when I feel strong emotions. I am proud of the fact that chose to put myself out there, I am very sensitive for my work and my biggest pride is that I actually started doing it professionally.

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

The lesson I had to unlearn and still struggle with is the idea that artist are afraid to copy. Very often as artist we want to make something new never seen before and never done before which is very hard in 2023 knowing that many artists have done many things. I had to learn that in oder to do more we need to find role models and figures that we can get inspired from without seeing is as copying. When I first started, my thing was to always do something I thought of on my own out my own brain. I refused to even use references, it and my work was very poorly done because I had to accept that in order to create bette art I had to learn from someone and somewhere. I am still unlearning it with creating content, everything is a lesson that can be taken step my step and this is mine.

How did you build your audience on social media?

There was a point in my career where I created more than I seeked professionalism in my craft. Everytime I created something that I considered good, I wanted to post it and show it to the world. I had a very low audience at the time and I wanted to bring more people towards my page. I chose to post a painting that i made of my friends and their aura. It ws very successful and brought some people towards my page that shared my work and their audience shared my work and it created this this fast growing community. To this day I am forever grateful of anyone sharing my work and anyone that has faith in me.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @yehlowbyyehlie

Image Credits
@prswrkvisuals