Meet Mallory Caloca

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mallory Caloca a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mallory, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

Growing up, I personally struggled establishing a deeper understanding of creativity and communicating this with others. In other words, drawing and painting made all the sense to show what I was thinking and feeling and being constantly vulnerable without realizing in the moment. I navigated any joy, sadness, trauma, hope, etc by putting something on a blank canvas (perhaps the most daunting creative task imaginable). All the efforts done prepared me for failures or more like ongoing lessons to learn and grow from.

That’s what keeps me going as an artist.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Creative inspiration comes from something unexpected or unknown. It’s exciting!

My passion is to share the little details, simultaneously bold and delicate, and create an imagined image for others to perceive something beyond conventional understanding. Combined sources that are both organic or natural and geometric shapes and forms create a fantastical blueprint of possibilities. Watercolor is an immediate and mostly unforgiving tool that has kept the art process uniquely grounded.

As an artist, I want to celebrate and show a form of communication that can still easily connect a universal learning experience.

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?

Three important things come to mind: be humble in every environment, collage images together as one image, and venture into a genre of the art world you’re not familiar with. All of these things should hold you accountable to do on some kind of recurring basis. Consistency is everything – if being healthy demands consistency, it absolutely applies as an artist.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

An obstacle to share my work is social media marketing. Personally, it’s too overwhelming with just myself when I am already hyper focused on the process of the craft itself. If marketing my work was much more efficient, I have yet to see who would want more of or what inspiration can happen.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: malmakesmagic