We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joseph Findeiss. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joseph below.
Joseph, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
It’s easy to be resilient when you’re stubborn, ha. I was a stubborn child and a stubborn teenager. Now I’m just a stubborn adult, ha. However, I’ve mostly learned what to be stubborn about and what to let go. I think I’ve always been determined and persistent, and sometimes even to my own detriment. Things aren’t going to always go the way we want them. We roll with the punches. When things go sour, those subsequent feelings of discouragement, disappointment, depression and/or frustration are 100% ok and normal. When I’m ready to be done with these feelings (and sometimes even in spite of these feelings), I get back to work because: a.) call it resilience, call it stubbornness, but I’m hard-wired that way and b.) the process and the product both bring me happiness and will pull me out of that negative emotional spiral.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist with a penchant toward analog practices; my main focuses are collage, assemblage, and photography but I also work in graphic design, layout design, print, and printmaking. I also incorporate woodworking & joinery into some pieces and while I know I’m in over my head when I attempt using LEDs & Arduino, I still give it the old college try. I’m primarily a self-taught artist, having never received any formal higher education in visual art. I do conduct a lot of self-guided research in my free time though and study often on subjects like artists in my medium(s), art & graphic design history, color theory, and others. All of which definitely influence how I think about visual art and how I approach my own practice.
This all may sound cliche, but at this point in my career, I’ve become more interested in the process than the actual end result. Maybe that seems counterintuitive and a little like backtracking after 20 plus years into a career and maybe it’s the consequence of not having a formal education in the arts. And/or maybe I’ve grown out of that impetuous, cocky, sophomoric artist phase and entered a phase in my career where I need to have more humility towards what I know and, especially, what I don’t know. Perhaps this is a turning point in my life/career, where I stay open, listen more than speak, hold space for those who impart insight, have a more authentic and genuine approach and appreciate those who are the same, and ultimately trim the fat (a.k.a.remove negative people and ideas).
I could wax philosophical or rhapsodic about my work but honestly I’m leaning more and more into the idea that currently my work is simply a playground for color and form, either arranged around a subject or not, perhaps playful or more deliberate or even stoic. I’m allowing myself to experiment more and finding avenues to do so. My current output of artwork isn’t meant to be politically or even emotionally charged; there’s no clandestine meaning to be deciphered hidden between the layers of paper or collection of objects or within the noise of a photograph. If a piece of work resonates with a person or an audience, then I think that’s fantastic! If someone can relate to an artwork – if that art evokes an emotional response – then that piece of art has been successful in its purpose, whether the artist intended that specific emotional response or not. But for me, when I’m working (at least in this current phase), it has become more like a riddle I’m trying to solve than an answer I’m attempting to offer.
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?
A thirst for knowledge and an insatiable curiosity is absolutely indispensable in any profession but especially for those in a creative field. Don’t get too comfortable or overly confident with your skills; once you feel like you’ve got a solid grasp on a skill, continue to learn other skills that augment and/or compliment those that you’ve already mastered. We all know how competitive it can be out there in the modern world, and the older you get the more competitive it becomes in any career. Stay up on current trends, watch to see where new ground is being broken, do your best to stay relevant.
Be stubborn; be incorrigible. Keep at whatever it is that you would like to see become your bread and butter. Find the thing you do because you don’t know how not to do it. And then keep doing it. There will always be hard days, disappointment, discouragement, and moments when it seems no one seems to understand you or your passion. And then there will be those days when you want to throw everything onto a busy highway during rush hour and walk away. Despite all those feelings of dismay and daunting moments, stick with it, trudge through because for all the woe and heartbreak it can sometimes bring, your passion will bring you joy more often.
Find positivity/happiness in the thing you love. Let your passion be your safe haven, the place you retreat to when everything else is askew. Find ways to build a solid foundation and create support for your personal sanctuary, whatever that means for you: taking an online or IRL class that expands your knowledge or going to conference/meet-up/event and making connections, upgrading equipment, getting headshots, et cetera. Above all else, make more time for your passion and less excuses.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I would love to collaborate with other people, especially other visual artists! And of various mediums. I’ve collaborated with others in the past and collage specifically can be a very versatile medium and meshes well with other mediums like painting and photography. If anyone would be interested, reach out by messaging me on Instagram @dear_orpheus or send me an email josephfindeissart@gmail.com
Contact Info:
- Website: www.josephfindeiss.com
- Instagram: @dear_orpheus
Image Credits
Joseph Findeiss
