Today we’d like to introduce you to Albin Veselka.
Hi Albin, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My love for art started at six years old. At first, I was no better than anyone else, worse if it came to that, but I loved the idea of drawing, so I started doing it all the time. I took it as about as seriously as a kid with no instruction could. I also had a lot of encouragement from my parents, so I thought of myself as an artist and never thought of giving up.
My formal training began and ended at BYU Idaho from 2001 to 2006. At that time, there was a good faculty there that taught the necessary fundamentals that put me on a track of learning that developed my skill set and a vision from which to springboard the rest of my learning.
Since then, I have devoured books, taken workshops, and developed relationships with other artists that greatly enhanced my development. While at college, I started selling my artwork in galleries and shows. This was the beginning of what would eventually become a full-time career in fine art oil painting.
I say eventually because it took about seven years after I graduated college before I could paint full-time. During those seven years and the five years making up my college experience, I worked full-time to make a scant living. I got married in 2001 before college and by 2002 my wife delivered our first child. It was both of our dreams to allow her to not have to work outside the home so she could focus on raising our children. I took this very seriously, so I was the only one with an income from the time my wife was too pregnant to work.
I worked as a farm hand, a door-to-door salesman, an occupancy inspector, a fast food cook and delivery driver, a night security guard, a stage crew, and a few different positions in the grocery business among other things, including a phone surveyor. Yuck! It was a long haul and it seemed it would never end, but I had faith that I would one day be able to do what I love for a living.
Through that time, I took whatever free time was not needed for family support and kept developing my skills and supplying galleries and shows with enough work to maintain a bit of momentum in the direction of an art career.
Finally, after all those years, I found myself painting full time and looking back on the past with the relief and gratitude that only comes from having received the blessing of having persevered through something difficult and receiving the reward I had so long hoped for. Finally, all the hope, patience, and financial struggle my wife and I went through together paid off in the career we had been hoping for. Then the next chapter began.
Having the reality sink in of my ability to do what I love for a living, I felt free and grateful, but with it, new challenges. Now I had to think about my direction and ultimate goals with my career. What would I paint, and why? What did I want to give the world and what would I be remembered for? How would I balance what I think the public would want with what I have to say? How would I balance further skill development and the production of worthwhile work? I had to start thinking of my career, no longer as something to achieve, but something to preserve.
What if something happened to the market or my health that made me unable to continue selling my work? All of the positives and negatives started working together to create a whole new dynamic that I’ve had to deal with ever since. Moving forward with just enough faith to put the worry into its proper place, just enough production to keep the money coming in, and just enough skill development and experimentation to keep the excitement and growth in me is the new game. The game that I am in the middle of to this day.
This is where I’m at, and how I am moving forward. It’s been a great and blessed journey so far.
But allow me one additional word. As much of a blessing, as it is to do what I want to do for a living. nothing compares to my relationship with God and my family. True happiness doesn’t come at the end of a paintbrush, any amount of money, or acclaim in any field of endeavor. It comes as we focus on the people closest to us and a deep relationship with God.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Struggles were abundant, but such is life. At times, I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders and saw my situation as uniquely hard.
Self-doubt, rejection from shows and galleries, seeing the disparity between where my skills were at compared to where I wanted them to be, seemingly insurmountable financial problems, not to mention personal and family struggles unrelated to my career made for a pretty rocky road at times. The details can be entertaining at times when looking back on them, but they were very serious in the moment and we all have them in different ways. The key is to acknowledge them, put them in their place, and overcome them.
A life focused on faith and a wife who gave me her full support and confidence through it all made the long messy, rocky road an obstacle that needed to and could be traversed rather than any kind of an insurmountable roadblock.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I create traditional oil paintings of a variety of subject matter. I have had a bit of a varied career in terms of subject matter, but I suppose I am mainly known for multi-figure narrative painting, especially depicting the historical American West.
I’m not sure I can answer what I am most proud of. No magician is enchanted with his magic tricks. I’m constantly looking for ways to learn how to do the things that I can’t do yet. When I can do them, they no longer impress me. I will say, though, that sometimes a painting seems to come through me and I don’t know how I did it. I attribute those to God. He always impresses me.
What sets me apart from others will have to be decided by others. I’m no judge of that.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I’m not a big believer in luck, but I do believe I’ve received a lot of blessings from God that were outside of my control. For one, being born to parents who believed in me as an artist shaped my self-identity as an artist who would not accept ultimate failure.
Paradoxically, a big blessing was being raised in a financially struggling family gave me the ability to appreciate hard work and an acceptance of living without things that my scant living in my struggle to become an artist couldn’t provide. Likewise, the same goes for my wife. She put up with all kinds of deprivation relative to our time and place in the world, though it pained me to see it.
But also being born in a country and a time when I had the freedom and relative prosperity to decide what I wanted to do and was allowed to pursue it was huge. Relative poverty at this age in America is opulence when taken into the perspective of history and even compared to most of the rest of the world in all-time low levels of starvation and abject poverty worldwide.
Pricing:
- $800- $50,000
Contact Info:
- Website: AlbinVeselka.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/albin_veselka/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/albin.veselka
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmNTS5Vke5ur-3mY7H6dOlw
