We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Melinda R. Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Melinda R. below.
Melinda R. , so happy to have you with us today. You are such a creative person, but have you ever had any sort of creativity block along the way? If so, can you talk to us about how you overcame or beat it?
I don’t think blocks in creativity can be beat or overcome. Which isn’t to say they’re going to come out the victor in the end, completely defeating you. I just mean that they’re part of the natural process of creation, and, rather than fighting them (trust me, I’ve been to that war many times!), it’s best to just wait them out, even honor them. I’ve been consistently creating my entire life, first writing, and now in the visual medium. And if I’ve learned one thing in all that time (I’m 58), it’s that creative blocks are integral to the process, and, rather than calling them blocks, perhaps it would be more useful to view them as transitions, for that’s usually what they end up being, a transition between one body of work to another or one project to the next. It would be crazy to think you could leap from one to the next without rest, without reflection or regeneration. No intense period of creation ends on the doorstep of another intense period of creation (if it does, it’s a rare and beautiful event). Sure, sometimes it takes longer to find your way into the next project or to feel inspired again. I know sometimes it can even take years. I experienced an agonizing period of writer’s block in my early 40s. I thought I’d never write again. But the thing is, I was writing, just aimlessly and without purpose…and it turned into a book that was the pinnacle of my personal writing achievements. It was the book I had always wanted to write, I just didn’t know I’d been writing it; after all, I had writer’s block! At any rate, although it feels like a block, I wonder how much of that is simply the story we tell ourselves about that feeling? Can it also feel like a transition? A dormancy? A hibernation? Blocks are difficult, if not impossible, to get around. Dormancies and hibernations are necessary phases that result in blossoming events.
I’ve found that the best thing to do, if possible, is just to relax and trust the process, trust that something you cannot yet detect is germinating underground, as it were, and one day you’ll see the shoots of it come up, and then you’ll know instinctively where to go from there. If you cultivate and honor your instincts, I believe they’ll reward you for it. As a self-taught painter, I take the opportunity, in these down times, to continue my process of learning, doing things I don’t have time to do whilst in the midst of something inspired. For instance, in my work I’m doing now, I’m interested in representing trees, but I have zero patience for painting leaves, so I began to work on creating my own way of representing trees without painting individual leaves. This wasn’t fun; it was pretty tedious, actually. But it saw me through a period between projects, when I had nothing left within me, when I had spent my creative flame, and I had no new ideas. I’m not terribly interested in time off, so when I’m not in the throes of the best of my job, I turn to the more mundane aspects of it. Creativity can often feel like magic, like a magical, muse-driven process. But that’s only part of it. The larger portion of it is discipline, is work—sheer nose-to-the-grindstone work. Maybe it sounds as if I’m contradicting myself, offering the advice to both relax and work at the same time. I guess what I’m trying to say is to simply not push the need to overcome the “block,” but to work within its seemingly inflexible and narrow parameters.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I was about seven years old when I asked my mother, “If I write a novel, could I get it published?” Her answer: “If it’s good enough.” From then on I worked assiduously to become the kind of writer who was good enough to be published. Which is not to say that I did this as a child, although I did keep diaries and wrote little stories, and, in the third grade, I wrote and performed short plays for my class almost every day, conscripting two friends to act in them. (Shout-out to Mrs. Dill, who nurtured my creativity!) But I never wavered from my drive—one might say compulsion—to create.
After graduating college, I struggled for a time, trying to figure out what I was going to do professionally. This was in the late-1980s, when everybody seemed to be going into finance, investment banking, money-making careers. I knew with certainty this was not my path. So I asked myself, “If you could do anything, what would it be?” The answer was easy: “I’d write.” So I took a job in publishing and, in my spare time, I wrote and wrote and wrote. If I had to be at work at 9, I’d wake up at 4 a.m. to get enough time with the writing. Often I took jobs, always in publishing, where I would be able to carve out a little time on the job to work on my own writing. I spent my lunchtimes writing.
I had no mentors, but literature was my guide. I taught myself to write by two methods only: reading and writing. It took me many years of serious dedication and hard work to become the writer I wanted to be. But publishing did not come easy, and I took rejection hard (read: personally). Although I had many poems published in literary journals, a wider success never came to me. Quite frankly I didn’t cultivate the networks I would have needed for such a success. My father once said to me that he was concerned that if I never achieved the success I had dreamed of, I’d be devastated. My answer to him was this: “Even if I never achieve wider recognition, I will still have spent my life doing what I love.” And I believed it, and I believe it to this day. Worldly success is secondary. It’s the doing that matters.
In my mid-40s, I had a chapbook of poetry published (“Tiny Island”), and I told the publisher I’d like to design the cover myself. So I downloaded a trial version of Photoshop, and I quickly became obsessed with it. At the same time, I was losing my ability to sustain narratives in my writing. I won’t go into the reasons why I think this happened, but suffice to say, it was life-changing. Every morning I’d force myself to the computer to struggle to write (at the time I was writing plays), biding my time until I could quit for the day and play with Photoshop. Then the day came I’ll never forget: I was living in a little house in Mt. Washington in Los Angeles, and I made the decision, sitting one morning at my kitchen table, to quit writing for good (it really had become a struggle!) and to work entirely in a visual medium. And from that day on, it’s exactly what I did.
I began as a digital artist and had a degree of success almost immediately. There was a gallery in downtown Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, which accepted some early submissions, and I was suddenly in my first show. This was so exciting. This led to a solo show maybe a year later. Around this time, I bought a large printer so I could print out my pieces, and, once I did this, I immediately began painting on them. Not long after that, I jettisoned the digital part and began my new life as a painter. All of this happened fairly quickly—I was in a hurry! I was coming to painting late, and it was proving to be one of the great loves of my life. I was certain that no matter how long I lived, I’d never have enough time with it. I still feel that way.
At first, of course, I wasn’t very good. As with writing, I taught myself to paint by two methods only: Studying great art (as well as not-so-great art—there’s instruction in that as well) and painting. I painted and I painted and I painted. The odd thing is, even though, in my early years of painting, I lacked the skills I would later develop, and although the paintings were pretty rough, I knew that one day I’d be good. I just knew it. Perhaps it came from my lifetime of dedication to writing, I don’t know. I only know it was there, this belief, this mysterious faith. It took a lot of hard work. I had to teach myself everything: the tools of painting, the materials and, ultimately, the techniques. There was a lot of trial and error. I can’t say whether talent is inborn or not. How could I know this when I worked so hard to teach myself to do the things I became good at? What I can say is that, with me, the drive, the compulsion to create has always been there. For as long as I’ve been self-aware, I’ve needed to express myself artistically. Had I not had that need, I’m sure I would not have worked as hard as I have, and I would not, therefore, have ever attained this level of skill. It takes a great deal of determination to be thoroughly self-taught, so it’s hard to know exactly where a priori talent enters the picture.
After ten years of being a painter, I’ve been represented in galleries in three cities (Los Angeles, Dallas and Greenwich, Connecticut), and I’ve shown in many galleries around the country. I’ve had several solo and two-person shows. I found the art world to have a wider embrace, to be more open-armed and open-hearted than the literary world. Whereas the literary world seems always to be contracting, the art world feels expansive (even though covid did a lot of damage to the gallery paradigm). I no longer fear rejection. Not because I don’t get rejected anymore—I do—but because for whatever reason, I don’t take it personally with my visual work. Perhaps that’s my age. But also, I believe my eyes, and my eyes are what tells me whether my work is good or not. With writing, it was harder to be sure—I think writing has to go through a lot more filters before you can judge its worth.
Lately, I’ve begun slowly writing again. I jokingly call it gentle writing: no pressure. Even if just for a few minutes a day. I have a story to tell, and it’s not one I can tell through a painting or even a series of paintings (although I’m doing that as well). Last year, following the upheavals of covid, I left Los Angeles after 30 years to return to my hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, which I’ve been gone from for 40 years. It’s the story of return. I’m constantly searching for a way to marry my visual art with my writing, and perhaps this will be the place where I do it. One of my favorite things about what I do is experimentation, searching for new ways to express myself, doggedly experimenting with how to expand my artistic boundaries. For years I’ve sought ways to combine my writing with my visual work, but so far, I’ve not arrived at a satisfactory way of doing this. But that’s okay, because I absolutely love trying. I hope never to cease renewing myself artistically.
Recently I published a book of illustrations called “Lockdown!” It tells the dark and humorous story of being locked down, by myself, in an industrial loft in downtown Los Angeles during covid. The book is available by contacting me through my website, or DMing me on Instagram.
One final thing I’d like to add: Hard work and dedication notwithstanding, I also take care to propitiate the muse. That’s very important!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Dedication, determination and tolerance of discomfort seem to be three indispensable qualities for achieving one’s goals. I’d like to add a fourth: Discipline. It takes enormous amounts of hard work, and often the work seems thankless and the outcomes are frustrating, even painful, but you have to push through all of that and be led by your passion for what you’re doing and the small still voice within of self-belief. It’s a step-by-step process, no matter what you’re doing or aiming for, and the early painful steps can’t be avoided, unless you’re some kind of prodigy, but how many of us are that? You have to live through the discomfort of being bad at what you’re doing in order to get to the payoff of being good. Hold fast to your determination to get there. Hold fast to your vision. Dedicate yourself to the practice of becoming first proficient and ultimately masterful. I honestly don’t know if these things can be taught, but I do believe they naturally attend the desire and passion for any chosen pursuit.
I’ve often thought I’d like to teach, but because I’m self-taught I feel that the only thing I’m qualified to teach is how to be self-taught, how to believe in oneself and develop one’s own voice to such a degree that it becomes the foundation of a lifetime of creativity. The only thing I think I could possibly teach would be how to find one’s way to that. But anyone who could be shown that could also find one’s own way to it, so there would therefore be no need of me as a teacher. But this would be my lesson!
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I think it’s both. I can only speak for myself, but in my life, I’ve been entirely monomaniacal. For the first half of my life, I single-mindedly pursued my goal of becoming a great writer. In the second half of my life, I’m doing the same with visual art. When people ask me what else I do, as someone did just the other night, the answer is, “Nothing.” It’s all I do. I don’t even know how to do anything else. I personally believe that’s what it takes to become great. And even if I’m wrong about that, I don’t care, because I don’t want to do anything else. I want to spend practically every minute of every day engaged with my work. So on that level, of course I’m an advocate for going all in on our strengths. That said, however, I’d say that intradiscipline, it’s important to stretch out, to explore areas of weakness and to find ways to strengthen them. As an example, I’ll give you a brief history of my learning process vis-a-vis painting:
I began by wanting to be an abstract painter, but I quickly realized that I was naturally a figurative painter, even though I couldn’t draw. So I had to learn the rudiments of drawing—not an easy task when it doesn’t come naturally. I began by working in acrylics and painting on paper. This was how I initially learned to paint. After a time, it became evident that I needed to learn how to paint on canvas (every surface is its own learning curve). I didn’t especially want to, but I knew I had to. Also, for the longest time, I couldn’t paint hands, and I was happy to continue to paint figures where the hands were obscured. But at some point, this became untenable, especially since I’m an autobiographical storyteller, so I had to begin the arduous process of learning to paint hands.
Ultimately I became so proficient in acrylics that I grew a little bored. I had gone through many processes of experimenting with different styles and different approaches to the paintings, but it became obvious to me over time that I needed a greater challenge. So I switched to oils, and that was any entirely new learning curve. New materials, new ways of using the tools…it was almost like starting painting all over again. As I had with acrylics, I worked on large canvases. Very few people have room in their homes for the size of paintings I was doing, so at some point I decided I needed to start making smaller paintings. But scale is its own learning curve, and I really didn’t want to. (I am not without a laziness strain!) However, when you’re aiming for something, it really doesn’t matter what you want. So I started to learn how to scale down the size of the paintings, and now I have a portion of my studio dedicated to very small paintings, and one dedicated to large ones. I have paper paintings and canvas paintings going at once. Within my single-mindedness, I’ve stretched the boundaries of my limitations in such a way that keeps me growing. I hope to always be growing in this manner.
Incidentally, my partner, who was there from the beginning of my painting journey, and who’s been nothing but supportive, always used to jump ahead of me, telling me I needed to learn how to do something I hadn’t arrived at yet (see above!). And although I was just self-aware enough to know that if his suggestions especially irritated me, it probably meant that he was right, I refused to let him direct my pace. I just kept doing what I was doing. I knew that I would get to where I needed to go in my own time. Certainly, I had earned that right. I realize that’s not part of the question, but it’s an important thing for people starting out to absorb, that they have a right to their own pace.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.melindarsmith.com/
- Instagram: @melindarsmithi
Image Credits
