The Art of Discovery: Meet Kellee Wynne Conrad
There are often places in your artist life where you will realize something big.
Those ah ha moments that expand beyond the normal stepping stones of learning to paint. Something that changes the direction of your life.
For artist Kellee Wynne Conrad (Ep.42, early access here), there have been several of these. Sometimes they’ve been slow coming. Sometimes they’ve been lightning fast.
But no matter how they’ve arrived, the artist knew to pay attention.
Moment 1: Walking Away from Art
Conrad grew up in a practical fairytale of art making.
“I lived in a very strange neighborhood where everyone was an artist,” she says.
Conrad describes a community where husbands and wives were practicing artists and had studios with children running through.
“I know that sounds like a dream world,” she says.
Conrad was surrounded by both neighbors and by family who were all artists in one way or another including a father and great uncle, both successful artists. She saw artists making work and also making a living.
And maybe, Conrad admits, that that was some of the challenge.
“I had no idea how unusual that was. …it didn't turn out to be as easy as they made it look.”
Something wasn’t clicking in Conrad’s own artistic life. She needed more structure.
So, unsure where to go next, Conrad made her first big choice: She dropped out of college and joined the Army.
She then got married, had kids and took on the full-time duties of child raising.
Moment 2: Answering the Call
Conrad found her way back to creative pursuits through scrapbooking. She was getting published and doing the big trade shows.
She was also voraciously curious, reading art books and going to museums. She loved spending time with her great uncle talking about art.
When her last son was born, something shifted.
She realized that while she was having success in the scrapbooking world, she didn't like that all of the elements in her work were,well, someone else's.
“Here, I was using someone else's ideas, someone else's design, someone’s stickers, someone's pattern paper, and I was creating lovely layouts,” she says. “[But] there was this moment where I was like, Okay, well I really want to create something that's just a completely original thought of my own.”
Thinking about wanting to create her own work, she was watching her father excel at his career and she loved seeing the breadth and width of her great uncle’s art making in the last years of his life.
She couldn’t help but ask herself:
“This was what I was born into doing, so why am I not going back to it? What was the fear? What was holding me back?”
And so, Conrad got to work.
It would take her four years until she showed her first piece in an art show. But after building those foundational skills and finding her voice, her career as an artist (and teacher) took off.
Moment 3: Color Combinations
If you follow Conrad’s work, you know she loves, and is known for, color.
She runs a whole color conference and she just published a book called, “Mixed Media Color Studio.”
But even Conrad, who has spent her career immersed in color, still had a huge realization about color just a few years ago.
She had been teaching (and still enthusiastically does) that you can make almost any color using the modern primary colors, primary magenta, primary cyan, and primary yellow.
But, like many of us this past year, she burned out.
“I took a very long break this year. And when I came back, I wanted to push myself into new realms.”
One day she picked up three random colors and mixed.
She was blown away by the combinations and unique color mixtures she was getting that she would have never considered using her core three.
“I surprised myself by picking up colors that I had never really used before… I picked up the colors that I'd use the least,” she says. “Suddenly, I was having the most fun and seeing the most interesting color combinations come alive colors that I hadn't really used before.”
This revolutionized how Conrad worked and sparked new invigoration for her art and teaching.
Big Change and Curiosity
Big change comes from the life we’re living. Through curiosity and asking questions about who we are and what we want.
Sometimes the answer is, “I have no idea.”
But change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Even though her big breakthroughs seem fairly different, they all happened because Conrad ACTED.
She said yes to the Army. She said yes to a career shift. She said yes to three random colors sitting on her desk.
“We should always be having breakthroughs,” says Conrad. “We should always be learning new things. And new information is going to come and we're going to discover through our play.“
What’s great about honoring those discoveries, is that they make us more the artist we ARE and will become. A path that’s never too late to begin.
Let’s see where you, and Conrad, go next.
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