Meet Gwenn Seemel

We recently connected with Gwenn Seemel and have shared our conversation below.

Gwenn, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?

It’s a matter of remembering that art is a necessity for life–just like air, water, food, shelter, and health care.

What I mean is that art is the love of other humans made tangible across space and time. When a person can’t get a hug from a friend, art is there to make them feel seen and understood. It opens them up to new worlds, helping them to get outside of their own narrow experience, allowing them to become better and more loving.

When I think about it like that, I can tune out all the chatter about art being a hobby or waste of time. I focus on the fundamental value of art, and that allows my creativity to really flow.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I make brightly colored paintings in a polka dot Cubist style that’s both playful and intense, and I release all my work directly into the public domain, free for use by anybody for any reason without asking for permission first. My refusal to claim the copyright on my art makes me a bit of a freak, but it hasn’t stopped me from making my living with my work. I’ve been a full-time painter for 21 years now.

I know that relinquishing copyright isn’t for everyone, and I’d never try to persuade anyone that my way is the right way. But I love how it’s allowed me to live with a fuller kind of integrity, in the sense that all art is based on the work of creatives who came before. I’m inspired by all the creativity around me, and I like the idea that my art can, in turn, inspire others, because I don’t claim that I own every aspect of it and that no one should be permitted to imitate it without asking first.

My current project is firmly rooted in this kind of sharing. It’s called Everything’s Fine and it’s all about mental health. It started as a series of nineteen seriously whimsical and whimsically serious paintings about my own struggles, but I quickly realized that these images could act starting place for others. “I feel like this,” you might say, pointing to one in particular. You could use a digital image as a smartphone background–a private reminder that at least one other person has felt like you. Or maybe the images can help you find the words to describe what’s going on in your head.

I recently turned the paintings of Everything’s Fine into a free high school art lesson plan that teaches students how to make their own whimsically serious paintings and a mental health workbook that contains nineteen seriously whimsical coloring pages.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Artists need courage, passion, and persistence.

For some, the courage is the difficult part. They struggle with the vulnerability of sharing of themselves through their art, or they have a hard time overcoming a lifetime of messaging about how being an artist is selfish or financially irresponsible.

For others, the passion wanes when success doesn’t happen quickly enough or in the way they were expecting. They lose that loving feeling when they see mediocre art getting accolades.

For the majority, persistence is where it all falls apart, and that’s a real shame, because the only difference between the people we think of as artists and the multitudes used-to-be creatives is that the artists are the ones who succeeded at keeping on making.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?

Make art for yourself. In today’s hustle culture, there’s way too much focus placed on sharing all aspects of your creativity on any number of apps, and that pressure can steal your joy.

A few years ago, I quit Instagram, Twitter, and the rest even though I had thousands of followers on those apps. Since deleting my profiles, I’ve felt myself blossoming in a new kind of privacy. I still promote my work through my site and my email lists, but I’ve rediscovered the beauty of truly one-on-one conversations.

When you’re on social media, you get used to commenting publicly on friends’ posts, to the point where, on some level, you might start thinking of it as the same as a private interaction, but it’s not. Public conversations are always a little stilted. People speak differently to an audience of one than they do to a crowd. That’s true when you’re sharing your art; it’s true when you’re sharing anything. It’s good for us to communicate with jut one person and for us to be that audience of one for others. For me, there’s nothing quite like it for calming the overwhelm.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://gwennseemel.com/

Image Credits

Gwenn Seemel