Today we’d like to introduce you to Bad Talents.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I started painting when I was three years old, and while I can’t attest to the quality of those paintings, clearly something about it sparked enough joy for me to latch onto it for the rest of my life. Art was always at the core of my identity as a kid and as a student growing up in Pittsburgh, but back then, we were never taught that art could be a profession. For that matter, we weren’t taught about *any* creative careers. So I had a complex for many years, believing that to make artwork meant I would have to suffer, but ironically, I spent a lot of time suffering because I *wasn’t* making artwork. Two years after college, I decided to jump back into making artwork and found what I really loved—textiles—and it reignited that joy for me. I managed to get into my first local group show, and then it just kind of snowballed from there. If you would’ve told me as a kid that I would one day end up on the other side of the country, working as an artist in Los Angeles, I would’ve never believed you. I never had any grandiose goals or dreams of life as an artist; I just knew that if I kept making work and applying to shows, the rest would follow suit.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
My journey has been anything but a smooth one. Five years ago I was living at home and working as a temp, scanning mail for an insurance company, without any clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. I joke that if I’m able to come this far in five years, truly anything is possible. I’m also very open about the fact that I battled severe clinical depression for many years, which was like a dark cloud looming over every facet of my life. It was impossible for me to do anything, let alone create artwork, which certainly impacted my self-esteem. When you’re an artist, your work is such an intrinsic part of your identity; it makes it really hard to progress when you don’t have confidence in yourself. Because of this, I believe it’s especially important for creatives to take care of themselves mentally and physically to better foster self-love (no matter how cheesy it sounds).
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a fine artist that exhibits under the pseudonym Bad Talents®, which is basically just my alter-ego. I work in mixed media, specializing in drawing and textiles. In most of my work, I combine realistic figure drawings with collaged secondhand textiles, by cutting out the drawings and float-mounting them above stretched fabric. It’s a process and technique that I made up as I went along, and I’m constantly evolving it to make it more technically sound. While my work conceptually centers around the impacts of fashion as it relates to environmental pollution, I mostly enjoy making beautiful things to look at: art for art’s sake. Most recently I learned that my artwork will be on a billboard in LA next February, and I’m pretty proud and excited to share some beauty with the world on such a large scale.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
A keen awareness of when to say “yes” and when to say “no,” along with a healthy disregard for the rules.
Contact Info:
- Website: badtalents.com
- Instagram: @bad_talents
Image Credits
Photos by @LorealMade (all 3 photos that are not scanned artwork).
