Today we’d like to introduce you to Stacia Baldwin.
Hi Stacia, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
When I was little, I wanted to be a cowboy, paleontologist, or National Geographic photographer. But I pretty quickly learned all three wouldn’t mix well with the health issues I had as a kid, which then included severe asthma and heat sensitivity. So I spent a lot of time reading, trespassing in Midwestern fields and forests, and making art and charts and self-imposed research papers about my favorite dinosaurs, flowers, and anything I found to poke a stick at.
For a time as a newly-fledged adult I pursued digital illustration and character design through an illustration certificate program with the Rhode Island School of Design, compelled by story and the way it can take us where our physical bodies can’t (something that was magical and freeing to hurting body). But didn’t like the disconnect I felt with my work from creating digitally. I’d always been tactile, using touch to inform what I created and bring my art to life with a familiarity that only comes through interaction. So, when I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I used the proximity to stunning mountain and ocean ecosystems to reconnect with my first love, the wild. During this time, my health failed worse than ever before, and several months of barely being able to walk once again prompted me to create little paper creatures in honor of the real ones I couldn’t get close to.
This months-long stretch of daily pain was what also turned me toward the memento-mori art form, which prompts us to remember life is fleeting, and therefore precious, whatever each day holds. Bones are a common motif in memento-mori art, so creating art in this genre also was cathartic to me, helping me to view my aching, misaligned, and (in some cases) incorrectly formed bones not as a hindrance, but as something beautiful, working to support and protect me despite everything.
This is how Beastie and Bone was formed: my paper art, illustrations, and linocut printmaking combining a love and compassion for the wild world within and around us, and the transformational ways life has always adapted, changed, thrived, healed, and made way for the new in its turn.
I launched Beastie and Bone as a business in Seattle in 2020, the week before Covid came to the US. It was not an ideal time to launch a business, and the first several years were very difficult. Art markets were cancelled, nobody came to gallery show openings, sales dwindled. But this situation also impressed on me how important it is for art to address the difficult and dark in life, but cling to hope and the needs and loves we all have in common.
This desire for deeper connection and reprioritizing prompted my husband and I to move to Tennessee in 2022, in order to be closer to his family, and with this move, I stepped into art full time. I’ve been working through Beastie and Bone full time since, and am deeply grateful for the artistic community in Knoxville for providing a stable and supportive landing place. Knoxville may be small, but I find the Maker City a thriving creative hub that rivals larger cities I’ve lived in, and owe much of my success in the last few years to it.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Absolutely not. As mentioned earlier, many of the opportunities I reached for early on in launching Beastie and Bone were cancelled or barely scraped by due to Covid. Those precautionary cancellations and small turnouts were for the best health-wise, but they certainly took a toll on my confidence and all that I had invested in my business. Only now, five years in, am I starting to hit goals I’d had for the first couple of years as a professional artist.
Additionally, though I have several years’ worth of college-level education in fine art and the certificate in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, I had no training in business, sales, or promotion. All my success in these areas have been mainly self-taught and self-funded. In talking with other creatives over the years, I’ve found this is a common theme, though, and one I take issue with in the greater art education world. It’s not enough to train artists in art. The majority don’t have guidance in promotion, administration, or even how to frame their work for sales or gallery presentation.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
While I also create digital illustrations and linocut prints, I am becoming most recognized for my paper art form. My technique combines my background in art framing, bookbinding, watercolor painting, and illustration into a detailed, semi-dimensional result that seems half specimen, half scientific illustration. The entire process is done with my own two hands, starting as a digital sketch then color illustration, which I then use as a guide for cutting out sometimes hundreds of individual pieces of paper that I detail with a variety of paints and ink before layering and intersecting together. I use no AI, no laser or die cutting, and no pre-made components.
Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
To my fellow creatives: Be patient with yourself, and prepare for the long term, not a swift success. An art career takes time. I know everyone says it, but it’s true. Success comes largely from developing a unique visual voice, and identifying and communicating clearly what your work is about, why you are passionate about it, and why it helps the world.
I started making paper insects in my un-air-conditioned college apartment with an idea of someday selling them. It was frustrating not to get into art full time until almost ten years later. But all that I experienced, and experimented with creatively, in that ten years, honed what I was about and how I shared it. In a world that’s being increasingly being swamped with press-button soulless AI and swift trends, knowing who you are and what you make with deep conviction, and how to communicate that, is attractive. It will attract the opportunities and people who will support your career longterm.
Pricing:
- Prints range from $5 to $60
- Downloadable Paper Insect Kits are $15
- Paper art originals range from $290 to $5,000
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.beastieandbone.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beastieandbone/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@beastieandbone
