We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Xinyue Chen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Xinyue below.
Xinyue, so happy to have you with us today. You are such a creative person, but have you ever head any sort of creativity block along the way? If so, can you talk to us about how you overcame or beat it?
My way to deal with creativity block is simply to keep creating. In my opinion, “creativity block” actually comes from how you feel about your works. It means that for a certain period of time you feel lower about your works, and lack of motivations to create, but it doesn’t mean that anything happened to your ability to create.
So, my way to overcome the “blocks” is to give myself assignments, find anything to draw, just to keep my habit of drawing alive in general. Another important thing is to always finish the works I started. All these are practices to keep my creativity active. We are not gonna always feel the best about our works or our process, but it is important to keep working even during a lower period, then the better times will follow.
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 book artist and illustrator based in New York. I love to work with traditional media and I want my works to capture unique emotions and atmospheres. Environments play a big part in my art, as well as lights and shadows. I like to use these elements to express specific feelings as I am greatly influenced by cinematography.
Although coming from a fine art background, I found narrative-driven art allows them to communicate with their audience better. I have been involved in book-making since 2020 and created several books with original writing and illustrations, and I am looking forward to create more.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
My skills in traditional art offers the base of my career. Although sometimes I feel restrained by my past trainings, they do offer me enough confidence that I can paint pretty much anything I want to. And that allows me to find out what I like and what I dislike the most in painting. Besides, I believe my sensitivity plays a big part in my creative process. As well as my habit to always observe the environment around me.
My advice to anyone who are starting to paint would be: watch the world around you. There are so many things you could learn from observations, and by sorting what observations are exciting to you and what are irrelevant, you would find your purpose and style.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
A Cat That Lived a Million Times by Yoko Sano was the first book to make me realize that a children’s book could have such strong and deep impact on people’s life. And you don’t need anything complicated, the simplest drawings and the simplest art are enough to explain everything.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.maiyashu.art/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maiyashu/
