Meet Sarah Mills-Bailey

We were lucky to catch up with Sarah Mills-Bailey recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
Well, I’m from New Orleans, so you know there’s a creative aspect involved! It all started when I was three years old and the go-to family outing destination was the French Quarter, eating beignets, feeding pigeons, viewing the artists’ work produced at sidewalk easels and exhibited on the cast iron fence around Jackson Square. The street musicians inspired me, performing with a hat, brim up at their feet to collect the cash tokens of appreciation. I announced to my doting parents that I wanted to play the violin, leaving out the motivation of visions of money in my hat! Their response was then, and continued to be, supporting my endeavors, led by my interests. That’s a mode of life that builds an inner structure providing a deep foundation for whatever comes.

That approach was encountered as a formal educational philosophy in my high school years at McGehee, officially known as the Louise S. McGehee School. From the schools’ website:

A beacon of our program is to encourage the development of student agency. Agency is the ability to make decisions about one’s life and take actions to achieve a desired outcome and is critical in the development of global citizenship. As an all-girls school, we are uniquely positioned to show our students that it is acceptable to make a mistake—to sometimes fail when boldly attempting something new. At McGehee, out of the gaze of boys, our students can confidently develop a voice to express informed opinions, the ability to make decisions, the development of self-confidence, a capacity to organize, and the vision or ability to motivate others.

Through our intentional focus on student voice and student choice, our classrooms provide students with the opportunity to develop agency, to research extensively, and to excel in ways that are rarely seen in a high school curriculum. We believe in intellectual depth over intellectual breadth.

There’s a thread running through these formative years of my life, encouraging my individual engagement and expression. In young adulthood, I established academic discipline through my graduate work at Tulane University studies in microbiology and immunology. The rigor of laboratory experiments is a transferable skill! Life itself is a petri dish of relationships, health issues, milestones, endless variables to take into account, leading to unanticipated challenges and adjustments.

The initial hurdle was autoimmune illness that led to wrapping up graduate studies with a master’s degree and getting to work in laboratory research in pharmaceutical development. Moving on with life, and the necessity of earning a livelihood, is another way of honing your work ethic. Add to that the role of guiding a child through her own illness and it turns out there are aspects of determination and persistence in family life which is a hallowed ground for refining that work ethic, burnishing it with love.

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?
Those who have been following my development as an artist know that I started out as a textile artist, working with fabric, specializing in combining colors, patterns and textures in unexpected ways, probably the result of my older daughter’s fascination with pink and orange in her bedroom décor. We painted and stenciled found objects together and I designed custom clothing for her, all in a concerted effort to give her autonomy where it could be wrested from the constraints of childhood illness. The vestiges of this beginning are evident in my broad application of creative expression in decorative arts including decoupaging, creating fabric accents in table skirts and throw pillows and reupholstering random unique chairs, pulling together a design display that cultivates a new focus in a well-known space.

Five years ago I picked up my first canvas simply as a needed design in preparing the nursery for the addition of my younger daughter to our reconfigured family. Little did I know what would unfold from that! It has been a joyous experience of developing as a visual artist. The culmination of these endeavors is my current association with Marie Turner’s company Maison Miral exhibiting furnishings at the Round Top Antiques Show. The furniture is antique French sourced by Marie in the Haute-Saône region of France, the stagings are Marie’s creation and the paintings in many of the displays are mine.

The antiques show in Round Top, Texas (population 90) is the largest of its kind in the country, eleven miles along a rural Texas highway scattered with barns, tents, hayfields, every possible venue for antiques, fine art, home décor and more, visited by over a hundred thousand shoppers during the show.

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?
In my case I developed the skills and knowledge as I went along, doing what I felt called to do, so I would have to single out qualities as impacting my journey. The first is life affirming, looking for ways to provide a fuller experience of possibility and just a happy home life. The second is self-affirming, not letting an inner critic stop you from participating in whatever skill you are claiming for yourself. And the third is flexibility as the opportunities for creatively living in your chosen new aspect of life have to be carved out of time easily spent on anything else demanding your attention.

What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?
That’s simple, which is not the same as easy, trusting myself as an artist, allowing my artist voice to mature and not be limited to any particular style or medium in painting. It’s a very satisfying and adventurous life.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sarahmillsbailey.com
• Instagram:smbaileyart
• Facebook: Art of Sarah Mills Bailey