We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jackie Leishman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jackie below.
Jackie, 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.
I do the usual suspects; look at other art, read great books and poetry, spend time in nature, talk to interesting people. But I think the most unspoken thing is that I just keep showing up to the studio. Even when I don’t quite know what I want to make, I still make something, even if it doesn’t turn out. I know that eventually the good with come.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am a collage/mixed-media artist. I have bins and bins of paper and scraps in my studio. It is important to my process that I not use virgin working materials but rather fragments of older work and found materials. Nothing is ever lost. The “mistakes” almost always being what makes another piece great. I enjoy layering pieces of paper, drawings, monotypes over one another. I love the space where one peeks out from under the other, a new relationship is formed. Time is stacked. Because the process takes so much time, the person I am at the start of the pieces is different from the one who finishes it.
I make art about all kinds of subject matter; landscape, still life, figures, but those are just surface narratives, the deeper meaning that runs through all that work is what happens at the edges and among the layers, where two different materials or ideas meet. Both/and, that’s where I’m drawn. The recognizable subject is the entry point for me to explore ideas of tension and in between.
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 learning how to see the visual language of form and continuing to do so had had the greatest impact on my work. A close second is being curious. The third would have to be resilience.
The best advice I have is to surround yourself with people who believe in you but who are also honest. Don’t become narrower in your interests, read broadly, ask a lot of questions, pay attention to what makes you excited or gives you energy- devote more of your time to those things.
And just know that sometimes you will feel down, the work will be going poorly, and you can’t see a way out. Everyone experiences that. Just keep going because the only way out of that space is through.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
My mom told me to go out and make the life I wanted. That I would need to do that for myself, no one could do that for me. It changed my life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jackieleishman.com
- Instagram: @jleishmanart
Image Credits
Portrait of me: Nathaniel de Gala All images of art: Me (Jackie Leishman)
