Illustrator & Poet Ambivalently Yours On The Importance Of Emotion In Creative Work
"I think that one of the most comforting things is when you try to express a complicated emotion to someone and their response is something along the lines of: 'I know what you mean.'"
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Today we’re talking to author and illustrator Ambivalently Yours about art, expression, and what it means to get real about your feelings for an audience.
1. First, can you give us a quick summary of your creative career? Where did you start and where did you go from there?
I started my creative career 17 years ago. My first professional job was as a textile designer in the fashion industry. A few years later, I worked as a graphic designer on the marketing side. After five years of working in fashion, I decided to go back to school to get a Masters of Fine Art, with a focus on drawing, installation and Feminist Art. That is where I created Ambivalently Yours, which is my semi-anonymous art alter ego. After art school, I did marketing, communications and content design for various art galleries, boutiques and restaurants. Today, I run Ambivalently Yours Studio as my full-time job. I have a small line of art prints, accessories and garments which I sell online and in a few boutiques, and I do freelance illustration, animation and art education. I also have an illustration, animation and writing based art practice. I have shown my work in galleries all over the world, all over the Internet, and, as you know, I just got my first book of drawings, poems and stories Fire and Other Feelings published! Like most creative professionals, I have done and still do a million different things to make a living. It is a career of carefully curated creative chaos.
2. The draw to the creative field is often rooted in emotion—wanting to make people feel something or share your feelings with others. If this is true for you as well, what feelings did you want people to experience through your work and why?
My work is all about feelings. I like to think about them, try to understand them, celebrate them, exorcise them, illustrate them, and animate them. I am particularly interested in mixed feelings or ambivalence, which is the feeling where two or more opposite emotions coexist at once, like love and hate.
My devotion to emotion started when I began my practice as Ambivalently Yours during the “Tumblr Years” in the early 2010s. At the time, people would send me anonymous personal messages online and I would respond to them with drawings. Since then, my work has focused both on my own feelings and those that people share with me. My hope is the feelings I celebrate in my art will make others feel seen and understood.
3. Your illustrations are so stylized and unique. It is very recognizable as your own. Do you think it’s important to have a specific style that is yours as opposed to following trends? Or is it a combination of both?
This is an interesting question that I have always felt a little ambivalent about. When I started my career in fashion we were always following trends and trying to predict what people would buy based on different reports and research. When I went to grad school to study Fine Art we were discouraged from thinking about trends, as they are so linked with consumerism, which is frowned upon in the academic art world. So the part of me with the fashion background understands the power of trends to get a message across and the part of me with the art degree feels the need to resist trends and make art that feels genuine and meaningful. So the end result ends up being a combination of both.
I do think it is important for artists to develop a genuine and recognizable creative language for themselves. It helps people find you and consistency makes art easier to understand. But everything we create is influenced by the culture around us, whether we call that trends or homage or whatever else.
4. Fire (And Other Feelings) and a lot of your other work are dedicated to misunderstood, often hidden emotions—the taboo feelings we don’t usually discuss unless we’re in a therapist’s office trying to figure out how to manage them. Despite this, you’ve managed to find a huge audience on Instagram. Why do you think this is?
I think that one of the most comforting things is when you try to express a complicated emotion to someone and their response is something along the lines of: “I know what you mean.” That small acknowledgement makes you feel seen, understood and less alone. I draw other people’s emotions to try to give them that feeling, and I draw my emotions so I can feel that feeling too.
5. Do you find being so vulnerable and open in sharing your emotions online to be cathartic or draining? Or maybe even both? Explain!
Both, always both! I am unsurprisingly ambivalent about sharing my emotions online. As I mentioned in the last question, sharing my emotions makes me feel seen, helps me connect with like-minded people, and helps me understand my own emotions better. But it can be very overwhelming to put yourself out there. I get a lot of unsolicited opinions about my art and sometimes even about my mental health. In order to protect myself I keep a thin layer of anonymity around my online persona. I share several of my emotions but rarely share details about my personal life. I think it’s important as an artist to find that balance of vulnerability that works for you. It is counterproductive to make yourself so vulnerable that the art starts working against you. And most often the emotions I share are ones that have already run their course. The process of making the art is how I dealt with them so by the time I share my work I am usually onto the next emotion.
6. You’ve worked with a lot of clients, but even when you’re working with a brand, your own style and sentiments really shine through. What’s your advice on staying true to yourself and your work while also giving your clients what they’re looking for?
It took me a long time to get to a point in my career where people wanted to hire me to create my own style of work, and I feel very lucky that I get to do that now. There is no hack to it, it just takes time and practice to develop creative skills and create a recognizable style.
I try to be careful about the clients I choose to work with and try to make sure that we have common goals. Working with a client is all about communication. Some clients and I have had great communication, other partnerships have taken a little more back and forth, and some have not worked out at all. Since I have a lot of work posted online, clients will often show me references of my own work to describe to me what they want, which is helpful. In return, I always try to explain my creative decisions when I send drafts and sketches to help steer the client in a direction that I think will be the most successful. It takes confidence to do that, and it took me a long time to build that confidence. When it comes to creative work, you have to stay away from the misconception that the client is always right and instead remind yourself that the client is coming to you for a certain expertise and that they will benefit from trusting your guidance. At the same time you have to be understanding, flexible and humble enough to listen to the clients feedback and concerns and meet them halfway sometimes.
7. If you were able to go back in time and restart your career, what would you do differently? Or, what wouldn’t you change?
I wish I could go back and tell my younger self to trust herself more. I was very insecure for a long time and had a lot of imposter syndrome, especially when I was in grad school. My insecurity held me back a little and almost caused me to fail out of grad school. I was too afraid to fight for my art, and several of my teachers mistook my fear for a lack of understanding of what I was doing. When I finally started defending my work and believing that I was good enough, my whole career and approach to art changed for the better.
Otherwise, I don’t think I would change anything about my career path. I learned so many things in all of my previous jobs and in school. Working in fashion helped me learn about marketing myself, and also how to use all the Adobe creative software that I still use today. I also learned a lot about product and fashion design which helps me design my own line today. Going to Art school helped me learn how to think about my art and present it to the world. Working with clients helped me learn how to communicate ideas, find compromises and solve problems. All of it was hard, I am grateful for all of it.
Join us on Wednesday, November 2nd at 8 p.m. EST on Thought Catalog's Instagram for an IG Live interview with Ambivalently Yours.
For more from Ambivalently Yours, check out her work on Instagram, Shop Catalog, and on her own website.