Interview with Fine Artist Anna Bayla
We know your artwork from Instagram and through your Women’s History Coloring Pages for Smart Girls, but tell us about yourself. Who is Anna Bayla?
I am a 22-year-old lady living and painting and working in the Bay Area. I am a four-leaf clover hunter and I have a collection of over forty 4, 5, 6 and one 7-leaf clover. I love feeding stray animals. I love ponds and streams because I love toads and frogs and banana slugs and muddy leafy swampy areas. I have a collection of five blue lipsticks.
I am a huge fan of theology and world religions, and as a teenager I harbored a secret ambition to become a Catholic priest. Of course, women aren’t ordained in the Catholic Church, and I was raised Jewish so it felt slightly traitorous of me, so I decided I wanted to be a lay Dominican nun or a theologian. I became an artist instead, but that desire to understand the Divine and connect to other people’s experiences of the Divine informs my artwork majorly. And I still study all religions. Studying religion is where I go to become inspired and to relax my brain. To learn about human values changing and adapting to cultural laws and constantly evolving toward greater peace and justice is so fascinating to me! I see it as the study of the heart through time. I also love listening to PBS and NPR programs, folky female musicians, and my favorite color is yellow. Did I mention that I love frogs? I love them!
Who and what inspires you?
I’m inspired by people who make other people’s welfare their concern. My boyfriend is one of them- he is a nursing student and naturally has the most compassion of anyone I know. His ability to care and be kind to people who are unkind or indifferent to him overflows. I suppose you need it for that work. Compassionate people are the ones I want to hang out with. It’s the type of person I want to be. The amount of strength it takes to set your self-interest aside and care for things that aren’t “your” problem, to care for the treatment and rights of people that are sick, marginalized, poor, is so inspiring to me.
I’m completely inspired by people who are gentle to the planet. I’m inspired by people who take the time to recycle, and refuse excess packaging and aren’t interested in conspicuous shopping or automatic consumption. I’m also eternally inspired by the comedian and activist Margaret Cho, the women behind the charity Days for Girls international, which help girls internationally get access to sustainable women’s health hygiene and health education, as well as jobs setting up those operations.
Specifically, some artists who inspire me are Yoon Ji Seon, an embroidery portrait artist living in Korea. Her work is haunting and intricately beautiful. Jillian Tamaki, an amazing comic artist and illustrator who drew two of my favourite books, Skim and This One Summer, both collaborations with her cousin Mariko Tamaki. I’m inspired by the activists/spoken word poets Sonya Renee and Andrea Gibson. I saw them at one of Andrea Gibson’s poetry shows in 2013 and completely lost my mind, I was so inspired and amazed at their talent and radiant positivity and beauty. I’m a huge fan of the comic artist Craig Thompson, and anyone who is familiar with his works Blankets, Carnet de Voyage, Habibi,and Good-bye, Chunky Rice, will see his influence in every line of my artwork. I’m inspired by most artists I see online or in person. I’ll listen to anyone who tells their story through art. To me, there is nothing more fascinating than hearing someone else’s life story through artwork.
How old were you when you first discovered your love and talent for art?
I was blessed with a family who always took notice and encouraged my artistic impulse. when I was a toddler I was making mandalas with geometric blocks on our floor every night, and my family taught me what symmetry was, seeing that I understood it on a basic level. I once got my hands on a pack of stickers when I was four and stuck all of them- hundreds of them, on the wall my sister and I shared in our bedroom, and made little compositions and scenes with the holographic animals and fairies. I have always been a classical “artistic personality”- I had trouble focusing on school because of the ideas and dreamy thoughts I had in my head. As a child I was told I was artistic, and I had elementary school teachers entering my name into drawing contests. Part of this might have been out of a desire to console me- I’ve always been naturally better at art than at nearly any other academic subject, and finding something onto which I could “hang my hat” felt really important to me as a kid coming from a family with four older academically inclined siblings.
Being called artistic gave me something to feel good about as a kid who was sorely bad at math and science. I wanted to feel smart, but I didn’t. I was lucky, though, to be given the chance to show my strength in art (And not many young artists are!) My siblings gave me so many art books, comic books and graphic novels, and books about artists, and they were always 100% happy to “commission” me to paint something for their walls. My parents had me in art lessons every weekend from the age of eleven to eighteen. I was so motivated to work hard and immerse myself in artwork at home, because the attention and praise my siblings had for their intelligence was something I wanted for myself. Then, as painting became easier and more natural for me, it became a therapeutic outlet for me as a teenager struggling in high school. I began to make money doing small illustrations and small lettering pieces for family and friends. When I was sixteen my grandma gave me a calligraphy kit and it came so easily to me, I fell head-first into the study of hand-done type. I made countless typographical paintings and designed two hand-done “typefaces” in my last year of high school.
You work specifically in the fine arts. What draws you to that over digital?
Traditional media is important to me because it’s how I learned to express myself.
Growing up, I had a very traditional and strict family. I didn’t have a cell phone to text or talk to my friends, I had a 9:30 PM bedtime, I wasn’t permitted to take Driver’s Ed and didn’t have a ton of access to a computer in my home. We had access to the internet, but with strict parents I wasn’t permitted to use the internet without strict limits on what websites I could visit and the amount of time I could be logged on. Even then, because I was a B-average-at-best student, I was only allowed to go on the computer after I had come home from tutoring, completed my homework and chores, and didn’t have any projects for art classes to do. I got in trouble several times as a young teenager being caught having secret myspace and LiveJournal accounts, and because my parents feared for my online safety I wasn’t permitted any sort of social footprint online until I left for college. The chances of me asking for photoshop and getting the chance to become proficient in it (let alone share my digital painting pieces) were fairly slim.
But I still really wanted to have my voice heard, and to express my conflicted feelings. I had many conflicting thoughts as a kid who had undergone a radical religious conversion as a teenager, as a kid who had a mixed-race adopted stepfamily, as a kid who struggled to feel important because I was sort of geeky but still struggled in science and math…Because I was already good at drawing it became the first and most natural expression for my troubles. Drawing took the place of journal-writing for me, it was such a cathartic and empowering practice.
I took a sketchbook with me everywhere I went, and while I was practicing classical oil painting on the weekends, on the weekdays I was making comics featuring my mom, friends, parish priest, my crushes and would-be boyfriends, me as the downtrodden, romantic, clever heroine, and I would share them with my friends at my art classes. I was drawing venue posters for fictitious concerts and cool CD covers for fictitious bands.
Because I did my personal work in the same sketchbooks as my art classes’ assigned homework, my personal artwork flew under the radar of my parents and my teachers. It was the only way I could have privacy. Whereas, any time I had access to a computer it was purely to download music, or email family or scan drawings for printing, and my history was completely visible to anyone who used the computer after me. To my (and my parents’!) credit, I ended up taking two photoshop and digital design classes, especially when I wanted to be a typographer, but in the end I was always making artwork by hand in my spare time, and enjoying it much much more. It was more fulfilling, and it was first and foremost for me. I have never stopped since then. I still occasionally, very occasionally, use photoshop to edit or clean up a hand-done design, especially for a big professional project, but I tend to naturally enjoy the process that comes with traditional media artwork. This is not a slight to digital artists or artwork at all- some of my greatest friends use photoshop to make the most charming and lovable character designs and beautiful illustrations. But to me, digital artwork is what I do for work-work. For everything from my fine artwork to my private journal expression, My first resort is always to paint, to draw, to doodle. There is nothing quite so therapeutic for me as the actual process with paper and paint.
Looking at your work, it’s clear that you love painting powerful women and creating feminist statements through your art. What led you to this path?
I think creating feminist statements with my artwork was a side effect of me making autobiographical art, and using painting as a way of expressing myself. And the older and older I get, the more natural it becomes for me to tell my story, and my experiences, and use them to relate to the experiences of women of the past. I think it was Virginia Woolf who said, “A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her own life.” And art is how I tell my story and the story of women in the past.
To me, acknowledging the contributions of women with portraiture feels like my small way of restoring balance to the representation of women in art today.
Photographs and drawings of predominantly white, young, and sexualized women are arguably some of the most over-saturated images in western media today. But often times, these images fail to portray those women subjectively or as complex people at all. Advertising is rife with particularly objectifying (and at worst, exploitative or violent) images all the time, but fine art and illustration are saturated with these visual tropes as well.
Now, not all art needs to be historically accurate or full of biographical detail…but it seems to me that there are mountains and mountains of images generated daily of women as objects and significantly fewer images with women as subjects. I believe that as more and more women and female-identified people break into the art world and are encouraged to make art about our own experiences.
This continuing theme of illuminating, sacralizing, and celebrating female contributions to the world was never a conscious choice for me though! I paint male portraits all the time with the same level of care, and am always taking on new challenges with my portraiture and fine art work. However, I feel I was led to the path of feminist art after causal research and coming across some niche topics like women’s history in art and reading works from and about feminist ecologists and theologians and famous women in power, I felt more and more inspired to share the suppressed legacy of these women and immortalize them. This seems like my small way of sharing this person’s legacy, because these women deserved to have their portraits painted and shared in their time.
What do you do when a project just isn’t going the way you had anticipated?
I don’t know that I have ever completed a project in exactly the method I had planned, and I am usually pretty comfortable with letting the process take me wherever it goes. However, I am a perfectionist and what helps me from getting frustrated or feeling helpless is to stay interested in the artistic process and not get angry or judgmental of it. That sounds hippie-dippie, but it’s true: for example, when I’m painting a letter and can’t get it right- for example, in calligraphy I always struggle with writing the uppercase B- I have to mentally ask myself, almost like i’m talking to a child, “Why is this working in a way I don’t like?” “How can I retrain my hand to move my brush differently?” And offer myself the chance to become familiar with how I naturally draw. With practice I can almost always learn to develop the look I wanted in the beginning.
The artistic process is a classical problem-solving exercise. I make it sound so serene, but often times I am in tears at my work desk asking myself some ridiculous rhetorical question like, “Why can’t I draw a Volkswagen beetle?!”
I call this using my “artistic” or “work mindset”- seeing artwork as a problem to solve! This process of 1. Examining my subject/theme, 2. Exploring where that goes, visually, and then 3. Editing, helps me keep cool and appreciate the struggle of art making!
What do you feel when you’re looking at a blank page?
I tend to be an unconscious doodler, and I have very few blank sheets in my workspace at all! However, I feel excited and full of purpose when I see a blank canvas or paper. I can almost always visualize what I want to draw or paint before I get to work. I suppose my mind is the projector and my hand is the beam that pulls the image out of the paper. This confidence comes with lots of practice.
However, if anyone reading this struggles with feeling intimidated at a blank page, my advice is to just make a mark. Whether you start by splattering a drip of blue paint or getting a paper a bit wet first before painting, giving yourself something to react to will be the first step. Our minds are limitless in our creative power, and sometimes a single mark acting as a little “flaw” can be the jumping off point to creativity. This works in all sorts of arts, too. Can you imagine making a song out of the lyrics in your class notes? Can you try choreographing a dance routine starting with a simple stretch?
What’s next for you?
I’m going to be in an upcoming art show with two artist friends here in San Francisco called Seasons of Existence, opening on April 12. I’m also working on possibly creating more portraits for other, new Women’s History Coloring pages, and hopefully getting them translated into other languages. But that’s something I can wait for! Otherwise, I am hoping to keep painting, keep writing beautiful letters that make up beautiful words, and get into more group and possibly, solo art shows. And if I can’t, I can always start my own.
What advice do you have for our Smart Girl artists out there?
First of all, I firmly, deeply believe that anyone can be an artist. Art is for everybody and with practice anyone can learn at least basic drawing and painting skills, learn how to improve their singing voice or dance moves, learn how to sew or write poetry.
My advice to any artist friend, whether my age or younger is this: Do it yourself.
There aren’t that many opportunities for a clear career path as an artist in our society. And those opportunities are even fewer if you aren’t a white, straight, cisgender man. But making your voice be heard as a young artist is not impossible. The best thing I can recommend to a person starting out in the arts is to *not* wait for recognition. Grab it for yourself. If there is a way you can safely perform your poetry at a subway station to passing strangers instead of hoping to get published just posting videos on a blog, I encourage you to do it! If there is a way you can (safely and legally, of course,) paste your artwork to public walls or start a public art show or spread your fashion designs to people on the street, I encourage you to get to work. If there’s a way you can start singing on the sidewalk with your band, or if you can cold-call or email one of your influences to ask for their suggestions or to signal-boost your work, you will lose nothing by putting yourself out there (as long as you do it legally and most importantly, safely!) Today, people are doing that more and more with the help of instagram, and tumblr, and youtube, but to me, the best way to break into the art world might be just spreading your art around in the Real World, whatever that means to you. And remember, if anyone’s advice, even mine, doesn’t ring true to you, make art Doing It Yourself however you feel is best!
Secondly, my last bit of advice is more of a call for help, because: If you’re a young woman, your perspective is absolutely needed in our culture.
With the advent of the internet, there has never been a better platform to be an outspoken woman, and yet there is so much progress needed to continue advancing our opportunities and equal rights and treatment.
The best way to ensure women are represented fairly in our media is to teach girls to take their artwork seriously, and to make artwork, literature, poetry, choreography, (and every other medium) about our *own* lives and our *own* experiences. If you are a female artist, your perspective is needed out here! If you are Indigenous, Black, Latina, Asian-American, mixed-race, or any other ethnic minority, your voice and your recounting of your experiences is so precious to our cultural discourse. If you are a young LGBTQIA artist, if you are differently-abled, or struggle with chronic illness or mental illness, if you are part of a marginalized people or faith group or have any sort of cultural stigma placed upon your identity or circumstances, I invite you to embrace art, and to work toward the advancement of your causes and demand your voice be heard through your work. Your voice is the most precious tool you have. It’s the greatest resource we have for progress!
You can download Anna’s Women’s History Coloring Pages and follow her work on Instagram.
