ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: CHELSEA BLAKELY

We recently sat down with artist Chelsea Blakely to talk about her work and current exhibit, which on display in the Studio IX Virtual Gallery this month. All proceeds of sales from Chelsea’s show will go to support the C’ville Restaurant Fund. More information can be found HERE.

Studio IX:

Good morning, Chelsea. Thanks for taking the time.

Chelsea:

Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Studio IX:

So how are you doing this morning?

Chelsea:

Well, yeah, it’s an hour-to-hour thing. I think that sometimes it's easy for me to be optimistic and focus on the good things that are happening. Then, some hour will hit where I start ruminating and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is going to ruin us. We're all going to get sick, and then there's going to be a World War III, and then an environmental catastrophe and then..."

Studio IX:

I hear you.

Chelsea:

I don't actually think that's going to happen, but that's just where my neurotic mind tends to go when faced with uncertainty, which is essentially what we're dealing with right now.

It's a huge, huge lesson. I feel like a lesson of being a human.

Studio IX:

Yes.                                                                      

Chelsea:

Gazing down the abyss.

Studio IX:

Yes, the mortality piece is there. The existential. I think it's cracked something open internally too, that this is good.

Chelsea:

Yeah.

Studio IX:

That it’s getting at the essence of things.

Chelsea:

Well, your values become clearer and you get closer to yourself and to what actually matters when faced with what it means to be in a body and be vulnerable.

I think that's what's happening. We're trimming the fat.

Studio IX:

Well said.

Chelsea:

Yeah.

Studio IX:

Well, you want to talk about art?

Chelsea:

Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. I feel like people want to hear about things that gives us agency, stuff that reminds us that we are creative beings and we do have some potency.

Studio IX:

Yes! Potency and purpose are good. So tell us who you are.

Chelsea:

My name is Chelsea, and I am a person in a body who likes to connect and make things and tap into the universal between all of us. I feel like that's who I am, but there are a lot of things that I do and I've lived in a lot of places and travelled to a lot places and learned a lot of things.

Studio IX:

And what kind of artist are you? What mediums do you use?

Chelsea:

I work primarily with collage, printmaking, watercolor and ink. I do a lot of drawing and painting too, but I think it’s all just the product of something deeper that I'm trying to get at. It's just the byproduct of my process.

Studio IX:

Are you formally trained? or has it always just been there? Something that evolved on your own.

Chelsea:

That question has always been difficult for me to answer. I feel like that alludes to the indeterminateness that I've referenced in my description of the show and the ideas that I've tried to approach because I could never really pinpoint when it started. My mother was an art teacher and she was technically my first instructor. Growing up in the three locations where we lived, there was always a studio, there were always supplies, and she just had a generosity of spirit. I think she really believed in the power of putting a blank piece of paper and some colored pencils or paint in front of a person and something happens. You get to work, but it works on you a little bit too.

It was always there. But I guess the formal training per se started when I went to college. I studied art history, so I developed the eye, and when that happened, I was able to turn that eye intentionally to what I was doing and what I had been doing. I took drawing classes while I was there too because I had toyed with the idea of doing a studio art major, but I eventually decided on art history and Classics. In addition to art, I had a preoccupation with ancient cultures that was pervasive throughout my childhood, so I decided to put that into action and studied to be an archeologist.

I feel like it influenced me aesthetically and also tapped into this basic fundamental aspect of being human that I was always really interested in. And after I graduated, to be honest, my creative practice had fallen by the wayside. And I noticed that gap, that there was something that needed to be fulfilled in me. I think I was also a little lost after I graduated because my plan didn't work out, which is what tends to happen.  So, I just started with the basics and really started to look around me and figure out what mattered to me, to pinpoint what was in my immediate environment. I was working at the C&O Restaurant at that time, and I started noticing all of the beautiful patterns in that building. I had my sketchbook with me, and on my breaks, I would draw the things that I saw, not necessarily the things as objects, but patterns. Wood patterns and brick patterns and gravel and patterns on sidewalks and in the walls and stuff like that. And I became really preoccupied with the repetition of those patterns in other places.

I felt like it provided a link between disparate parts, and I gained a sense of structure and unity and solidity that I think at that time I was looking for. And then I started to experiment a little more intentionally with watercolor and printmaking. The watercolors were gifted to me by my family and then, Thomas Dean, sweet man that he is, gave me access to his studio, and we experimented with screen printing. And I really enjoyed that process and decided to investigate printmaking more closely. And then it just spiraled and snowballed over the years. I've done workshops in Charlottesville and Richmond, and then the pinnacle was the workshop I did at Penland School of Craft last summer. I think the things that I was doing during those years up until then were really focused on technique, refining my process, figuring out what it was I was wrestling with, and what are the aesthetics that I'm creating. It was really maturing all of that.

Studio IX:

I’m always curious.

To my experience it seems that most of us are born artists and then we are told we are not, so we stop or we unlearn it in some way. It sounds as if it was supported and nurtured — something that was always present in your world.

Chelsea:

Yeah. And to be honest, a lot of the growth process was a process of unlearning, like you said.

Studio IX:

What is your process like? Maybe you can talk about it through that lens.

Chelsea:

Well, it was a lot of unlearning what we're told art is supposed to be or what we're told you're supposed to do in order to be called an artist. And of course, there are different levels of technical skill and that should be respected. But I think an artist is just someone who can tune out all the noise to be able to speak life to whatever experience it is that they are observing. And if their vision is clear and resounding, I think that that is really the practice of art, what it really means. I think that maybe people's reception gets more of a premium than it should. It is an engagement with the public and there is something to say for that. But one of my favorite books actually, called “Art and Fear,” talks a lot about unlearning that emphasis on how your work is going to be received. If you try to pander to your viewers, your work might come off as watered-down or condescending or arrogant or worse, like a culmination of all three, and you're sacrificing your vision and what you see.

But as far as my process goes, typically what I'm doing is trying to approach this place of indeterminateness, a kind of a liminal space where I’m disengaged with the prospecting, over-analytical, hyper-articulate part of the brain in order to get to something more essential and fundamental. And the way that I do that is by tapping into my senses, what I’m experiencing. A lot of times I tend to bombard my senses a little bit. I will engage with sound, with music, with texture, with writing. I’ll submerge myself in smells. I'm really just trying to have an intentional conversation with what it means to be and to recreate that experience, to communicate that visually rather than trap it in words, like I'm doing now. And maybe it's why it sounds a little clumsy. I try to communicate what I experienced from that space visually, and it comes out as indefinite in the aesthetic. When I have talked to people who have looked at some of the pieces in this collection, they say that in their experience of looking at it, they're trying to figure out what it is or why it is that they like it. There's something there, something vague, ineffable, that just communicates to you, and you know what it is but you might not be able to put words to it. That means I'm doing it right.

Studio IX:

What questions guide your work?

Chelsea:

Why this color? Why this combination? Why this composition? That’s more the analytical part that comes after, but when I'm in the process of making something, the question might be, what are my instincts telling me? Can my experience of a state of mind or an emotion or a texture or a sound be communicated in another medium? I'm really preoccupied with synesthesia, so I try to engage that metaphoric thinking whenever I'm creating something.

Studio IX:

What inspires you?

Chelsea:

Textures. Music. Writers who stir something in me. Movies that speak to the human condition. Disjointed phrases. Agitated voices. Those things that tickle your nerves a little bit. That's what I'm inspired by.