The Quick Q & A editorial in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine is a much loved regular feature, in which we ask 6 artists the same 4 questions. In the June 2018 Issue 21, these were the Quick Q & A questions:
- What do you hope to leave behind in the world through your art?
- What 3 main materials do you use and why?
- Please share one of your secret artistic practices and/or rituals
- What is the most challenging part of creating art for you?
We feel that the artists’ responses provide such a valuable insight for our community of artists that we wanted to share one Quick Q & A response from each issue with you, going forward. The June 2018 Issue 21 print issue is sold out, but you can download the digital magazine via our webstore to read more. To ensure you never miss an issue again, you can also subscribe to Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, and have each issue sent straight to your door each quarter.
Excerpt from Issue 21 // June 2018 Quick Q & A editorial: Artists Andi Soto, Laura Colors, Caitlin Hackett, Scott Radke, Adipocere and Daniel Dust respond to the below Quick Q & A:
What is the most challenging part of creating art for you?
“The most challenging part of this process is also the most enjoyable. I have way too many ideas at the same time, and I find myself trying to develop all of them in a very small amount of time. It’s overwhelming and exciting but you can’t exhaust all your energy in just one day. I’ve learned how to work with this high tide of ideas and work on them over long periods of time, so my body is able to handle it.”
“I think the most difficult part of creating art is putting your work out in public. It’s like putting pieces of your soul on view and that’s not easy for me because I’m a very quiet person who strives for perfection. I try to create pieces that convey stories about how I’m feeling or how I wish things really were. I like my surroundings serene and happy. My favourite place to be is in my studio at my desk, creating magical, peaceful places, or out walking in the woods examining tiny pieces of nature, like the veins on a leaf or the texture of an acorn. This habit of study and looking closely at the world around me helps in capturing and creating a tiny moment in time, which is then transformed into a work of art.”
“I think that I, like many creatives, suffer from a great deal of self-doubt. I often have the gnawing sensation that I am not creating good enough work, or enough work, or important or meaningful work. These are feelings that ultimately can be helpful, I can often harness those feelings of inadequacy into working on larger and more powerful pieces, paintings that are more personally meaningful, but it can definitely be a challenge to overcome them. I have to balance my ability to make a living from my art with making work that is personally meaningful, all the while managing a career that spans everything from gallery work, to tattoo designs, to children’s books. I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to create art for a living, but I don’t think I’m alone in the world of artists battling these feelings and striving to create more and better art!”
“To be honest I am very happy with all of it at the moment. Yes there are struggles but I really can’t complain. Doing this for your livelihood, what more could you ask for! Managing time is always a challenge. It’s like spilling a bunch of marbles on the floor and they find their way to a drain, you’re then trying to find the drain, and when you do, nothing stops you from falling in. That’s what it’s like in between projects.”
“Lossless translation from mind to fabric is definitely the largest challenge. I always have a very vivid feeling visualised, only some of which is ever materialised. It’s all about closing that gap. Embroidery has so many constraints within the medium itself, it feels like the gap will never close completely. However this makes for a good source of natural drive. On top of the medium constraints, I have created a short list of my own fiction-based constraints which can sometimes get in the way of certain imagery. I create in constant avoidance of fiction-breaking anachronisms, mostly clothing and other synthetic or unnatural objects.”
“When I began, the challenge was painting realistically. I started in monochrome because I couldn’t figure out colour. This was the right course of action because when I did dive into colour a few years later I began to understand it. But the challenge has shifted. Now the challenge is visually conveying ideas as purely as possible, which I find immensely fun and rewarding. Regardless of
the current challenge, I habitually remind myself that I can always do better, in every aspect of creating. There is no such thing as arriving, or mastery – there is only the journey. I believe that when you have climbed a skill set all the way to the peak, there is always another peak above it, hidden in the clouds.”
