Meet Steven Frankel

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Steven Frankel. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Steven, 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?

Creativity, like most skills, needs to be nurtured. To keep your creativity alive and allow it to flourish you need to be constantly working on your creativity, pushing yourself to explore the bounds of what you can conceive and what you can accomplish. Creativity breeds more creativity.

Throughout my youth I was constantly creating, my games as a child involved creating made-up cities out of everything I could find. I took art classes and filled sketchbooks, doodling all the time. But I allowed the world to tell me that my creativity couldn’t be my passion, that I needed to go to school and try and get a real job. When I took stock of what I wanted and who I was, I turned my neglected hobby back into my full-time job as an artist. My creativity is my greatest asset and keeping it alive and growing is the key to continued success as an artist. To look for inspiration everywhere and never become fully content with where you are, allowing yourself to keep driving forward.

I see my ADHD reflected in my work and in the way I approach the creative process. I’ve worked with resin, paper, recycled paper products, and, most recently, paperclips. I don’t limit myself to a single medium. Future project ideas include using TVs, other old electronics, and mousetraps. By working with a variety of media I push my creativity further, challenging myself to create beautiful and inspiring works out of different objects. Through all these changes, and a scroll through the various artworks I’ve created over the past four years highlights this extreme diversity, my art always plays on the same themes that are important to me. They draw on my personal experiences and on my unique perspective on nature and what matters.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am an artist, working with unique materials to create inspiring and beautiful pieces of art.

A lot of my early work is inspired by nature, not by its beauty alone but more so by how destructive humans can be to it. We manufacture countless objects, taking from nature for most of it to end up in landfills as waste. Through this obsession, I find my mediums. I turned toilet paper rolls into flowers and cover them with the remainder of a hole punch. I take everyday objects that are hard to recycle, turning paperclips into butterflies. I use candy wrappers and empty beer cans to create a garden. Not limiting myself to one medium helps me narrate to the viewer a deeper meaning to my work. Not only does the final result tell a story, but so too does the medium I choose to portray it with.

I want the viewer to look at these everyday objects from a different point of view. To open a discussion about the things we use on a daily basis and the long-term effects they have not only on our lives but on all life. My work is a reflection on what most take for granted, the beauty of nature and the hidden cost of accessibility and availability of the objects that clutter our lives.

The objects I use have to coexist with the picture of the art. I use man-made materials that I manipulate exclusively with my hands. My work is completely handmade, conceptualized and executed entirely without the use of computers in this world of increasing reliance on technology and AI. When I interviewed for the industrial design program I attended, the interviewers asked me why I had chosen to submit a portfolio with my application that was entirely hand-drawn. In all honesty, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of using a computer, and apparently my application stood out for being the only non-computer generated portfolio.

A lot of my early work embeds these man-made objects, primarily recycled paper, in epoxy resin, a toxic man-made plastic. Once catalyzed, the resin is no longer toxic but it is permanent, forever holding the beauty of nature firmly in place. Other work is displayed in shadow boxes, reminiscent of entomological boxes used to preserve and display biological specimens. These pieces highlight what we currently possess and what needs to be preserved before it too goes extinct.

Most recently, I diversified and started a new and deeply personal series. Titled “Outside The Lines”, it features an analog being stuck in a digital world. It is a reflection on how I see the world and my place in it, a statement on societal pressures towards conformity and fitting neatly into a box. It tells the story of my personal hardships and triumphs, a play on the digital world we can’t escape and the analog beings we are. A story about the relationships and experiences that shape ourselves and our perspectives on who we are and who we want to be.

Using only paperclips, I abused, manipulated, and shaped them to portray this idea even further – using not only the content of the piece but the media I used to convey this message even further. A man-made and easily identified object, easily formed and somewhat easily broken.

Blu, the name of the main character in the first works of this series, is the epitome of an analog being stuck in a digital world. He doesn’t fit into the boxes in which he’s been placed, he doesn’t fit in his own robotic skin, and breaks out on a journey to find himself.

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?

The three qualities that were, and continue to be, most impactful in my creative journey are the way I see the world differently, my ability to hyperfocus and work hard, and not being afraid to try new things.

I see the world differently. Life, questions, meaning – nothing is black and white. The world is a beautiful place filled with colours and light. I get my ideas from everywhere. I am constantly thinking and looking for inspiration, from the way we take an empty toilet paper roll and toss it (ideally, for recycling at least), to the little hole that is created when you hole punch a paper, to a simple paper clip that was lying on the ground. These small things, overlooked and destined for the landfill, inspire my art.

I have the ability to hyperfocus and am an extremely hard worker. I can sit at my desk in my home studio for hours without moving, unfolding paper clips and delicately reshaping them into butterflies and bees and hole punching hundreds of sheets of paper to create flowers from the holes (while maximizing efficiency to use as much of each sheet of paper as possible). When she isn’t working from home, my wife likes to check in during the day and see if I’ve eaten anything or if I am running on caffeine and motivation alone.

Not being afraid to try new things has been extremely critical throughout my creative journey. I often don’t know how to do something and I try doing it anyway. Without a guide, without knowing how I am going to use the material, or what the piece will end up looking like. I just take a chance, and I try something new. I immerse myself in the new medium, the new method, the new idea that I’ve had and through trial and error, through adapting when I make a mistake, through dedication and perseverance, I experiment. I find a way to make a mark and do something truly different and unique. When I was just starting out as an artist, even within this creative pursuit I tried fitting into the mold. I tried painting, sticking to common and overdone art motifs. Losing the fear of failure, the fear of mistakes, has been liberating in both allowing my creativity to flourish and allowing me to start realizing my full potential as an artist and as a person.

My advice to folks who are early in their journey is to follow your passion and to try. I was never advised to follow my passion, the advice I received always had to do with fitting into the mold and redefining yourself to suit other people’s standards. Allow the nay-sayers to inspire you, rather than letting them get under your skin.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?

Being self-employed in a creative field is challenging. It is hard to hold yourself accountable, hard to stay motivated and on task, hard to make progress some days without the standard work deadlines and progress reports to keep the work going. Realizing that to succeed as an artist I needed art to become more than a typical full-time job and dedicated myself to it appropriately. My creative process doesn’t run from 9-5, with a lunch break. It took a while for me to embrace the title, to confidently call myself an artist and introduce myself as such.

One particular skill I’ve been working on over the past few months is my documentation and process sharing. My work from afar often looks like a pretty picture, and only through closer inspection do you start noticing the details and what the work is actually made out of. I am not particularly tech-savy or comfortable in front of the camera, but I have challenged myself to document more of my process in short videos and share these on social media. This allows me to share more about what makes my work unique and allow the audience to fully appreciate the materials that I use. My choice of materials are a critical part of the meaning behind my art and sharing my process immerses the viewer in the art in a meaningful way.

The past 12 months have been the most successful I have had as an artist, both financially in terms of original works sold and commissions made and creatively in terms of the quantity of works I’ve created and the different media I’ve explored. Looking forward to the next 12 months and seeing how this wonderful journey continues in 2025.

Contact Info:

• Website: www,stevenfrankelart.com
• Instagram: stevenfrankel.art

Image Credits

Steven Frankel Art