Today we’d like to introduce you to Clara Lieu
Hi Clara, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My parents were immigrants from Taiwan who came to the US in the 1960’s, and I grew up in a suburban community in the Boston area in Massachusetts.
My mother says that I “learned to draw before I learned to talk.” I still have sketchbooks and drawings from I was four year old to now. I see my sketchbooks as a documentation of my creative life as an artist. There are drawings that I haven’t looked at in over 30 years, but when I do see them again, I remember every line color like I made the drawings yesterday.
I was very lucky that I had an elementary school art teacher who was incredibly enthusiastic about my artistic progress. She came to my elementary school in fourth grade, after a string of art teachers who only stayed one year. She selected me to participate in an all-city art class, where students from every school in the city came together to work on advanced projects. I remember being absolutely silent during my regular art classes at my school, while my classmates were often socializing loudly around me. That was one hour of the week that I waited for every week.
Art always felt really serious to me, even at such a young age. Which is why it was incredibly disappointing to me in middle and school and high school that everyone treated art as a lame activity that garnered no respect, while athletes and straight A students were constantly celebrated. I felt like I was the “only” artist in my school, and remember, this was pre-internet! There were no opportunities for me to connect with other artists who were like minded. I took classes at the Museum of Fine Arts on the weekends, but they still didn’t completely fulfill my desires as an artist.
That’s why attending the RISD Pre-College was such a life changing moment. This was a six week summer program, and I still look back on it as fundamental to my direction as an artist. The teachers took art seriously, and for the first time it felt like I was in the “right” place. My peers matched my focus and we spent many long hours into the night, working on our projects together side by side. To this day those are some of my best memories, being in the studio together.
I did my undergraduate degree at RISD where I was in the painting department for one semester. The department turned out to be the wrong fit. At the time, all I wanted to do was realistic figure painting and that wasn’t something that was encouraged. I didn’t know what to do, so I followed a friend into the illustration department.
Apparently, the professors who taught figure painting were in the illustration department, but this wasn’t exactly advertised when deciding on a major. I was an illustration major, but outside of class assignments, didn’t do any illustration! Most of the people I went to school with aren’t doing what they majored in, which to me is a sign of how the creative process can point you in so many unexpected directions and broaden your view.
I knew I wanted to do my MFA so I could eventually teach at the college level. I really felt like I needed a break after my BFA, so I spent a few years teaching art at a lovely elementary school in Back Bay, Boston. Ultimately I ended up doing my MFA at the New York Academy of Art, and within a year of graduation I had my first college teaching position at Lesley University. Other teaching positions followed at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Wellesley College, and eventually RISD where I stayed for 16 years.
In 2014, I could feel something shifting for me in academia, and I had the idea to start an online educational platform, which today is Art Prof. Keep in mind that this was before the pandemic, when teaching online was NOT cool, to the point that I actively hid that I had a YouTube channel from my colleagues.
I was becoming increasingly more and more frustrated with my lack of progress in academia, until I gave it up for good in 2020 to commit to Art Prof full-time. I moved to Salt Lake City and didn’t look back.
Alright, 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 spent 16 years in academia on my hands and knees, begging for scraps as an adjunct professor, and groveling for curators and gallery directors to take notice. I felt like I was always waiting for someone else’s approval which was exhausting and made me feel powerless. I came out of graduate school with what I eventually called “my poisonous checklist,” which was what you are expected to do in academia.
This included getting a tenure track position, doing gallery exhibitions, winning grants, being in museum collections, doing residencies, and more. When I look back on that “checklist” I realize just how incredibly rigid and narrow minded that list was. I was working so hard to make myself fit into that profile, but I didn’t. I was a female minority in academia which at the time wasn’t something that people in academia cared about.
It was gut wrenching to realize that after 16 years of working so hard to achieve these goals, I didn’t have any of them, and that my position at RISD was only getting worse. I could my ships sailing when people much younger than me, and who had very little teaching experience were getting hired over me.
Boy, if I had a dollar for every person who was hired because they had a personal connection with someone on the search committee… I’m sure I could fly first class all the time.
Actually, the biggest obstacle I overcame was what made me the most proud: creating Art Prof entirely from scratch into a platform that has 215k subscribers and an extraordinary global community who have made my world so much bigger than the academia bubble I had been living in.
I remember when I had the idea for Art Prof someone said to me “why don’t you just teach a class on Skillshare?” What I had in mind was really specific, and based on over a decade of teaching experience, and I knew that nothing out there would realize it’s vast potential.
The beginnings of Art Prof were incredibly rocky, I had no idea what I was doing! I had zero experience with video production, directing, editing, and had to learn literally everything on the fly. We made SO many terrible videos and I cringe and laugh when I look at the ones we made at the beginning.
I felt like the oldest fart there was because social media really baffled me, I couldn’t understand the rationale between what people reacted to, or the viewing habits they had formed.
One of the reasons we worked through all that awful content is that we made sooooooo many videos and kept experimenting with tons of different formats and ways of delivering the content. Once you have over 2200 videos on your channel (this doesn’t even count the hundreds that I unlisted over the years) you definitely begin to figure things out. I get it now!
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
While I have a staff of 6 artists, I consider myself to be the administrator, director, accountant, payroll manager, editor, web developer, travel agent, janitor, basically, anything under the sun I have done for Art Prof.
I have gotten on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor because a graphite video I made got graphite everywhere. I have sat down and spent 2 hours organizing files on my phone, learned new software. Someone once told me that having a small business is basically like having a leaky bucket that you just have to keep pouring water into.
What distinguishes Art Prof from other platforms is that our website and video content is 100% free. I wanted our content to be accessible to people who can’t afford to take art classes, who live in remote places where there are no art education options, and more. I discovered that many people in our audience who have chronic illness or disabilities that prevent them from visiting a museum in their town. Our audience is so much bigger than I ever thought it could be!
All of those tedious tasks are worth it to me though, because I have absolute creative freedom. We can brainstorm something and it can end up on the website tomorrow. I academia proposed a course, “Personal Narratives in Drawing” that must have gotten turned down at least 3 times.(it was never accepted) That course is now on our website and free to everyone to use.
That creative freedom has never been so delicious as it has been with Art Prof. The diversity and number of projects I have swirling in my head daily is absolute chaos, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!
I might be doing research to prepare for filming at a museum, reaching out to artists to have as guests on a live stream, filming an extensive tutorial on woodcut, brainstorming with my staff for video ideas, working out online structures to match what we are want to teach.
I probably need an arm of clones to realize all of these ideas, and this is just Art Prof. I am still holding onto a pipe dream of having my own art and travel show where I paint on site, visit museums, and see local art supply stores. If any of you ever invent a cloning machine, I’ll be the first to know!
Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
My staff of artists at Art Prof, some of whom have been with be from the very beginning: Lauryn Welch, Deepti Menon, Amelia Rozear, Cat Huang, Jordan McCracken-Foster, and Dorian Epps.
Too many colleagues and artist friends to count, but Andrew Raftery and Tony Janello who believed in me when I didn’t, and who have stood by me over several decades.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://artprof.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/art.prof/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/claralieu/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@artprof/featured
- Other: https://claralieu.com/
Image Credits
Clara Lieu
