Meet Quinn Marston

We were lucky to catch up with Quinn Marston recently and have shared our conversation below.

Quinn, thank you so much for joining us. You are such a positive person and it’s something we really admire and so we wanted to start by asking you where you think your optimism comes from?

My optimism comes from my spirituality and belief that there is a greater divine force. I feel like whatever this force is connects us all. I feel like I also get my optimism from a belief that we are all doing our best to search for love and give love and to create balance in our lives and to move through this world without hurting each other.

I can really relate to George Michaels’ song “In Your Eyes,” which perfectly sums up where I get my optimism in this world from. I have experienced his song’s idea that he can see and feel everything there is to know about the world by looking into his lover’s eyes, like how he says he sees “a thousand churches” in her eyes.

I felt like the moments that I spent cuddling with my last lover and looking into their eyes were so beautiful that I knew after those moments that if I were to die at any time soon (which I hope doesn’t happen soon because I really enjoy being alive) I would die completely fulfilled and content and with zero regrets because I realized that I learned everything that I needed to know about the world just from looking into their eyes. I could see the immense love in their eyes and pain and longing to connect and I just felt like I could see all of us and all of the love in the world and desire to understand each other and all of the earthly human technologies and works of art in their eyes as George Michaels describes.

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 like to draw and I like to paint. I am a big believer in the idea that everyone is an artist and I think that the idea of artists and non-artists is a myth. I studied art history in school and I think there is a lot of pressure in the art world to have a definitive explanation and a unifying theme or meaning behind every work of art. I think there is also a lot of pressure in the art world to have a singular, unifying narrative behind yourself and what your entire body of art is about and what you represent.

Someone told me that they think it is arrogant that I don’t want to define the things that I create, but it just feels phony to me when I try because I start a new drawing or painting with absolutely no idea of what I am gonna create, put on headphones and let a combination of the music that I am listening to and the emotions and things that I was thinking about in that day or even that moment come out however they come out.

However, I do have artists and artistic styles that I look up to the most like Basquiat, Keith Haring, graffiti art, and skateboard art, and people say they can see those influences in my art because I draw and paint in a style that isn’t realistic, but a combination of imaginary characters.

If you want to check out my art my website is www.qmarston.com

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?

1) The most important thing for me is that I like and am happy with the art that I create, and feel that it meets my own personal standards for how I want it to look or what I want it to express, and not how other people evaluate it and whether other people approve of it. That is not to say that criticism doesn’t hurt me and praise doesn’t feel good, but I try my hardest to judge my art by whether I am meeting my own standards for what I want to create versus others’ standards.

2) I work in the gift shop at the Guggenheim Museum and they sell a cool t-shirt there that says “Art is Life,” and I agree with that and that is a cool lesson that I learned that “becoming an artist” doesn’t have to be a destination point, but rather we all can just live in this world as continuous creators expressing whatever we feel as we have new life experiences moving through the world.

3) There doesn’t have to be this constant battle and dichotomy between being someone who likes making art versus working what many might call a more “conventional job” or a “day job,” even though those terms bother me. I love being at work in retail and the other side jobs that I work the same amount that I love being at home painting. I feel really blessed and it is really exciting to me have a job in retail where I can interact with people from all over the world and people from NYC one of the biggest cities in the world, and those daily moments where I can help people find what they need, or just be part of a team at work where I can do my best to help out and do what’s asked of me.

Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges or build and develop the essential skills, qualities or knowledge you needed to be successful?

Many people in my life don’t know this about me, but I am a transgender man. I have been on hormones for twelve years now and have had gender-affirming surgery.

It is really mind-bending to me that, at this time, being transgender is such a constant topic of conversation, political argument, or media headlines because, when I was on the verge of coming out as transgender at the end of college in 2010, my biggest obstacle to coming out and taking steps to medically transition was that no one around me seemed to know that transgender men existed, and I had never met a single transgender man in my life or seen them anywhere in the media.

The first hero in my life was the photographer Catherine Opie, who I wrote my art history thesis paper on in college. Her photographs changed my life because she photographed her friends who dressed in drag from the California scene, and seeing those images was my first exposure to the idea that people could defy the gender norms imposed upon them by society in terms of how they dressed and presented.

Then in the years following that, my other heroes were the first transgender men who started to become YouTube celebrities in the years where Youtube celebrities were first becoming a thing who would document their whole process of starting hormone replacement therapy treatment and what that involved in terms of what changes were happening for them at what times and document and report on their experiences with transgender related surgeries and gave information on what to expect and what the healing process was like for them.

Seeing these videos was invaluable to me because I had never met a transgender man before at this point or seen them in the media, so I actually didn’t know until seeing transgender men on YouTube that taking hormones for gender transition was a possibility, and many of the doctors that I talked to in NYC at this time trying to pick their brains about hormone replacement therapy and what it involved and the medical risks seemed to know nothing about it.

What I am trying to say overall is that internet community and communication changed my life for the better, because at a time when I had no transgender community or resources or guidance in my daily life, I could watch videos of transgender men who were courageous enough to document their whole medical and surgical transition process online step by step, and seeing this and getting a sense of what to expect gave me the courage to take the leap into coming out as trans and starting my medical transition.

I do have to say though that I am really really nervous to mention that I am a transgender man within the context of an art-related article even though being transgender is a really important part of my journey through this Earth so far, just because I don’t want to get put into the box or label of being “a transgender artist,” I would rather just be thought of as someone who likes making art, who happens to be trans. I like it when people see my drawings or paintings without knowing that I am trans and can just see the images and patterns on the page in whatever way it speaks to them, versus jumping to “he’s an artist who is transgender so there must automatically be some, for example, trans rights related theme or subject matter going on in a painting.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.qmarston.com
• Instagram: @quinnmarston1

Image Credits

Michael Marston