Meet Emily Wise

We were lucky to catch up with Emily Wise recently and have shared our conversation below.

Emily, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.

Creativity is a living breathing thing. The trick of keeping it alive for me is treating it like any other important relationship in my life. It is somehow both my primary partner and a child I care for and protect at all cost.
Through personifying it in various ways over time, I have deepened my relationship with it.
Through deepening my relationship with it, it has given back to me tenfold, regardless of the reception of me or my work.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I feel like my artist bio does a lot of the heavy lifting as far as explaining (in a broad sense)
who I am and what I’m most interested in. I’ve attached it below 🙂

Apart from that, I suppose I am a person who just deeply loves and appreciates art enough to dedicate my life to it.
My own artistic practice is very important to me, but I also curate a few spaces and try to support and uplift other local artists in my community. Whether I’m providing them with space to show their work or visiting their studios to talk about a project they’re working on, playing an active roll in supporting other artists keeps me creatively fed and engaged.

Emily Wise (b.1988) was born and raised between upstate New York and Baltimore, Maryland. She received a BFA in Painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, where she currently lives and works. Driven by curiosities around femininity, intimacy, and the mysteries of the natural world, Wise paints carefully posed bodies amidst surreal flora, using unexpected fluorescent colors to both surprise and disarm. Beneath their vibrant surfaces, Wise’s paintings craft layered stories of women building relationships with themselves and their follow women in spaces somewhere between the realities of waking life and the limitless possibilities of dreams.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Patience

The things you desire the most in your art career (and life) are a lifelong commitment. You kind of have to be in it for the long haul to be able to ride the highs and lows of successes and failures that come with such a strange career path.

Getting better at anything you want to be good at takes time, and a lot of it.
Maybe the paintings you wish you were capable of making now are 5 years of hard work in the distance. You’re allowed to let that frustration fuel you and enjoy the process at the same time, knowing that you’re going to get there some day.

Grace

Not only are you going to occasionally make some bad paintings for the rest of your life, your work is also going to grow and change with you. Sometimes in surprising ways.
You are an artist to follow your own path. Your own voice. Give yourself the grace of losing your self + your way + the point of any of it, as well as the pleasure of finding your way back to it over and over again.

Focus

Just like any other career I’m sure, there are parts of being an artist that both suck and don’t matter simultaneously. When you find yourself getting distracted or feeling down, comparing others successes to your own etc-
Feel those feelings and then get back to what you want to be making. It’s the only way to stop giving a care and refocus.
Look at others work and get inspired. Go to a museum. Go to a gallery. Get off the internet. Get back to work lol

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

Painting, loving with my whole dang chest, being in nature, and slowly negotiating with the powers that be to let me come back as someone’s well loved dog in my next life.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emily_elizabeth_wise/
• Other: Email-
  [email protected]

Image Credits

Mario Gallucci
Ryan Warner