Meet Sean Ward

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sean Ward a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sean, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
This is a great question! The answer is multi-faceted. It begins with my intense desire to spark my creativity and continually grow and evolve with the times. With that said, and knowing how future evolution works, this is quite the time intensive task, so I never run out of things to do, just time in the day! With my acrylic paintings, now having painted over 1,200 individual works of art.. I started to think it was time to break out of the norm and introduce my painted works into the digital and immersive media of projection mapping and led screens, specifically for my side passion of music. That led to years of learning to animate and then perform live as a vj and installation artist. Again, staying busy and staying ahead of the curve!

Now, the second part to this answer is a little darker, but something I do for my mental health. Whenever I have nothing to work on, I tend to face depression. However, while I continue to work hard, the depression is not existant! So, one could say working and creating art, no matter the medium, is my way of fending off depression and staying positive, which shows in my very colorful and bright artworks.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
Born and raised in Kansas, outside of the major arts and culture meccas of the world, I have taken it upon himself to start creating oddities of shapes and designs to pass the time and to enliven my mind with far out designs since I was five years old and only equipped with colors pencils and rulers with all kinds of shapes cut into them, with which I won my very first “art contest” at a local grocery store and it throttled the concept that maybe this wackiness could some day become an every day ordeal to enjoy life in the way I see it!! Fostering designs from memories, cultures, corporate identities and then modulating and expanding these to artistic works has become a challenge that I continue to trick the mind in seeing kinetic movement from flat surfaces and has become a force to deal with in the op art movement, envoking the memories of the 60s and 70s even further in our modern day! Forward 22 years later, with a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Wichita State University in my pocket, my art has traveled the world and got into major collections on every continent, with over 930 of my works in happy homes and businesses and each month the number continues to grow. This voyage in the arts has allowed connections to some major notable collectors including Universal Japan, Elton John, Bob Dylan, The Pixies, Planetary Holdings, Karen Sijbrandij, Milan Kordestani, Aaron Lux and the Center for Women’s Wellness. I continue to fine tune my craft and will continuously create new artworks for the rest of my life, as this is my true calling in hopes to bring excitement and happiness to those around me!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The most important quality of any artist is the desire and will to never give up. The starting years are the toughest. You might go years without a sale, but as long as you continue to grow and evolve as an artist and NETWORK, you will find sales come naturally over time. So, spend these early years investing in yourself and don’t count sales as victories, but blessings that allow you to continue to afford what supplies you need for your art to thrive. I, still to this day, use one third of my income to buy supplies and try out new mediums or styles of art, as it allows my mind to thrive. If I’m having a bad year of sales, it might mean I make less art, but even if I have zero sales, I would still continue to make art by getting a part time job to afford the supplies I need. All and all, it really is about never giving up. It’s the artists with the longest careers that typically have the most success, at least in my eyes.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I am ALWAYS looking for folks to collaborate with! This is an amazing way to expand your network and my own, by working together to create something beautiful!! I am selective on the artists I work with, but you never know what might spark my interest, as the possibilities are endless when you are a multi-media artist!

Lately, one of my collectives, No More Sleeps Collective, out of Wichita, Kansas, has been working on building 7’x7’x7′ immersive cubes for people to walk into, and we’re always looking for more interesting artists to have full creative freedom with our team of visual, tech and sound artists to create an experience that is beyond the norm of the every day. Though, a project this size is likely best for locals, there’s still the possibility we can host you for a residency if the match is right!

Then, the number one thing I’m looking for collaboratively, is duo exhibitions around the country, where our individual styles mesh together to create unique experiences for brand new audiences. This is something I am very passionate about, sharing the stage with others to succeed, and would be very open to hearing proposals, simply by e-mailing me!

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