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Daily Inspiration: Meet Tyler Swain

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Tyler Swain.

Tyler Swain

Hi Tyler, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I started making art at a young age, mostly doodles on my homework and superheroes from comic books. I always had an interest in creating things, particularly in creating music as a teenager. For most of my teenage years my dream job was to be a rockstar playing drums for arenas of people.

Later, in college, I decided that a quieter life of creativity was more my scene, and I started aggressively trying to learn to paint in oils. My professor in college showed all his drawing and design students his personal studio, and that visit changed my life.

I decided that I would do whatever it took to make art my career. Now, almost 14 years later, I am living that dream with galleries across the country and hundreds and hundreds of paintings in collections around the world. It has been a long and difficult road, but I can’t see myself doing anything else.

We all face challenges, but would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The path to becoming a full-time studio artist was a long growing process for me. Not only did most people try to convince me that this kind of career wasn’t possible, my paintings were abysmal and I desperately wanted to figure it all out.

Technical ability was earned over many hours in the studio, putting brush to canvas over and over again. I would watch videos, read books, visit museums and galleries, and try to surround myself with other artists who could give me tips and information on how to improve. As my skills improved, I became relentless at entering any and every opportunity possible to show my work.

I would do shows in my parent’s living room, local coffee shops, local galleries, anything to get my work in front of people. Eventually my efforts began to pay off and opportunities would land in front of me. I feel very blessed to have had the right people and the right situations eventually find me on my way to help me get to where I am now.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I have always had an interest in realism. Trying to make an image on canvas that has the illusion of something with weight and dimension was my primary focus for the first years of my journey. There is only one way that I know of to gain technical skill, and it is by spending many many hours practicing and applying yourself to the craft.

After I had gained enough skill to feel like I was no longer held back by my incompetence, I began looking much deeper into the art I was creating and figuring out what I really wanted to say with my work. I discovered that I was deeply drawn to abstract paintings and artwork that represented some kind of intuitive freedom. Textures, different kinds of mark-making, and color combinations started to fascinate me more and more.

The work that I do now is really an homage to both sides of my creative self: my love for tradition and technical mastery, on the one hand, and my constant fascination with abstraction and spiritual and emotional freedom through unrestrained expression. My work is both calm and chaotic, always trying to balance these two elements in a meaningful way.

Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the COVID-19 crisis?
I learned that we need real-life interaction both with each other and with places and objects. Many galleries and museums began to focus on online sales and virtual openings, and it took away the most fundamentally important way we connect with artwork, each other, and our surroundings.

People love original art because of the physical presence of the thing. The surface, the textures, the evidence of the artist’s hand. This point was brought home to me during the time we didn’t have that physical sense of connection.

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