Meet Stevie Love

Today we’d like to introduce you to Stevie Love.

Stevie, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started out life in a tiny wooden house in LA in what used to be an Italian immigrant neighborhood living with my Mom and my Grandma while my Dad was in the Navy during WW II. My Mom’s family came over from Italy during WW I in the hold of a ship, afraid of being torpedoed! In LA they grew vegetables and grapes and made wine, and my Grandma baked bread in an outdoor brick oven.

I had a happy childhood full of family and good food, and spent most of my growing years in our house in the Burbank hills with 82 steps up to the front door from the driveway! I always loved to draw and spent hours with how-to drawing books, mostly of trees and horses, my favorite subjects. I’ll never forget my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Becklund, who set aside every Thursday afternoon for classical music and drawing.

When she put up my drawing for all the class to see I think my view of myself as an artist was set! In my later years in high school, I considered myself a beatnik. I went off to college as an art major at UC Santa Barbara but flunked out due to spending too much time on the beach and not enough in class.

I still have those nightmares where I’m on campus but it’s been so long since I’ve been to class that I can’t find the classroom! I remained in Isla Vista for a few years, working in a donut shop, and in the marine biology lab, and I was part of the crowd that burned down the Bank of America. It was the Vietnam years, and my friends were dying for no reason. I joined the Peace Corps and went off to Tunisia.

At some point in those years, I spent a few months at a business school where I learned to type and take shorthand, which gave me jobs wherever I lived – Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco. I loved adventure and living in different environments.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I take a philosophical view of life, and fortunately, have never suffered any long-lasting physical problems, and have always been able to find a job whenever I needed one. I married, had two children, and put my husband through undergrad and graduate school, never thinking twice about what that meant to my own development, putting my own advancement on the back burner.

All those years I never quit making art. In fact, I spent a month traveling on my own in Indonesia researching batik techniques and curated shows and gave presentations after returning to the States. When I made the decision to return to school, however, it was a turning point in my life. In the Art Department at Cal State San Bernardino, I found my tribe, then I went on to earn an MFA at Claremont Graduate University, and have never looked back.

I would have to say my biggest obstacle was my view of myself as predominantly a wife and mother for the first twenty years of marriage., But like I said, I’ve never looked back, and my life now is dedicated to making art and developing a career as an artist, and networking with my tribe of LA artists. Dealing with the insecurity of the creative life is always a challenge but growing as an artist is fulfilling.

A separate challenge was ten years ago, my husband and I took on a huge creative project together – building an adobe house by hand, making all the adobes ourselves with a small crew. It took about seven years, and we only had a few yelling fights, where one of us would storm out, jump in the car and roar away in a cloud of dust. But that’s a story for another day.

We’d love to hear more about what you do.
I am addicted to acrylic paint for its ability to form luscious, three-dimensional forms, and that’s what my art production revolves around. The artworks I make are unique in that the paint is not necessarily on a rigid structure, although I’ve done that too, but instead, the paint is on a flexible matrix such as window screen or bird netting or plastic fencing.

I rove the aisles of home improvement centers hunting for suitable materials. The resulting artworks can hang freely in the air, seen from all directions when I put the paint on both sides, or hang freely against the wall, draping by their own weight.

Just last year, I revamped my website into a commercial site where sales can be made and recorded, and I made more sales than I have from any gallery or museum show. This has been a very satisfying turn of events feeling like I’ve taken control of my own destiny, in more ways than one!

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
One of my sweetest memories from childhood was when I was about ten years old. I”d been drawing horses and writing horse stories full of dark, stormy nights. My Dad brought outside a small table and chair and a typewriter and set me up with a view of the canyon. I sat in the sun and conjured tales of drama and beauty and of course horses. My Dad was an amazing guy.

Contact Info:

• Address: 29709 104h St. E.
  Juniper Hills, CA 93543
• Website: www.stevielove.com
• Phone: 661-944-1685
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @stevielovestudio
• Facebook: Stevie Love
• Twitter: @stevielove9

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