Meet Erin Rehil

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

Hi Erin, so excited to talk about all sorts of important topics with you today. The first one we want to jump into is about being the only one in the room – for some that’s being the only person of color or the only non-native English speaker or the only non-MBA, etc Can you talk to us about how you have managed to be successful even when you were the only one in the room that looked like you?

I think the best way to overcome this kind of insecurity is to give ourselves lots of opportunities to practice. As a visual artist from Flint, Michigan, I grew up in an underappreciated community with a lot of hardships and now work in an industry where there is a lot of wealth.

Back in 2012, right after I had gotten my teaching certificate, I signed a contract teaching art at a bilingual private school in Shanghai. Once I arrived, I discovered that I hadn’t been placed in the international division, but within the local stream as one of only two foreigners in a large art department of six. I dove into Mandarin lessons while my colleagues worked to improve their English, and ended up learning a lot about diplomacy and cross-cultural communication over the two-year period. This experience led to an entire decade making and teaching art abroad. I lived in Hong Kong, married a Hongkonger, and was the only foreigner in an indigenous Hakka village in a remote part of the New Territories. I have plenty of experience being the only American in the room. Later, I moved to the Middle East and lived as a nonbinary, counter-culture person in a socially conservative country where I did not observe the majority religion.

Now that I am based in New York, I do sometimes struggle with being perceived as an outsider artist from the Midwest. But I am many other things besides, and I have learned to appreciate that it is our differences that make our stories vibrant. The more time we spend getting to know people from different backgrounds, the more fluent we become at adapting to different kinds of environments and social circles. And when we fight to create a feeling of belonging in an unfamiliar new community, I believe we eventually reach a point where we start to feel like we do belong.

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 have been drawing, painting, and writing for as long as I’ve been able to hold a pencil. After getting my undergraduate degree in illustration, I fell into teaching as an art instructor at the Flint Institute of Arts in my hometown. This led to pursuing a second degree in art education, along with my K-12 teaching certificate. For a time, I enjoyed a really incredible balance between teaching art and making it, demonstrating techniques and picking up new ones along the way. I learned how to run a ceramics program in Oman by ordering a kiln, wheels, and tabletop slab roller, then teaching myself how to use them, always staying one step ahead of my lesson plans for students. Eventually I began to feel that it was time to refocus on my own artmaking practice, and so I moved to Manhattan to join the MFA Fine Arts program at SVA.

This has been an exhilarating phase of life, getting a crash course on the New York art scene and building relationships with local galleries while trying to spend as much time as humanly possible in my studio. I have appreciated having this time to reflect on how my work fits into the greater context and what I care most about as a painter. I have even begun to see myself as interdisciplinary, making video works and experimenting with how to take those previously gained ceramics skills and use them to make something that truly feels like “mine” in the same way that my paintings do.

Regarding my practice itself, I do a lot of acrylic glazing on wood panel and make work about nature-based spirituality, dreams, and the subconscious. My thesis work consists of a deep-dive into my dream journaling practice, looking for recurring symbols and motifs and then making them visible here in the real world. I love working with both figures and landscape, and try to merge physical reality with my inner perceptions, feelings, and memories. This leads to paintings that contain expressive colors, many layers, and a mix of both realistic rendering and graphic patterning.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I think it’s fair to say that I can give my anxiety some credit for my success! Always being nervous about meeting requirements and deadlines has made me a very careful person; sometimes the character traits that we might view as flaws can actually be shifted and seen in a positive light. Apart from this, I think my most important qualities are kindness, an openness to trying new things, and a willingness to work hard.

Teachers are always telling us to develop a growth mindset, and I think that’s really good advice. Having an internal locus of control means that we believe our actions and attitudes can make an important difference. Sure, I think it’s possible to do everything “right” and still fail to achieve a goal due to some factor that’s beyond our control. But I also believe that our best chance at success is to be decent to others, to be dedicated and persistent in our work, to exercise the power of our will and never give up on our dreams.

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?

I think it’s impossible to predict what kinds of collaborations are right around the corner. That’s one of the things I find so exciting about life in New York, that I could attend an opening or a talk tomorrow and meet someone who could become a business partner, or a best friend. Not long ago, some of my nature footage from overseas ended up in the music video of an electronic artist and friend from my hometown; he also gave me permission to use one of his newly released singles as the background for a video performance that I was creating. The track just happened to fit perfectly. I think it’s amazing what can happen when we have the vision to see and the courage to ask!

The most amazing collaborations can happen at the intersection of visual art and other disciplines. I mean, what might happen if I did a project with an engineer, or a biologist? Thankfully, if anyone has any great suggestions for a project that could benefit from my skillset, I’m very easy to find via my website or on Instagram–there aren’t a lot of Erin Rehils in the world.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.erinrehil.com
• Instagram: @erinrehil
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ErinRehil

Image Credits

Artist portrait by Guy Nechmad Stern (IG @guynechmadstern). Photo of the artist’s studio by Benjamin Gemmill.