Meet Heather Clements

Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Clements.

Hi Heather, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I guess it was love at first crayon. Art is all I’ve ever really wanted to do. It’s a lifelong love and obsession which has gotten me through years of hard work and forever learning. For me art is sometimes an escape from the dark things in life and sometimes deep dive into those dark corners so I can better understand and process them. It’s my distraction and my therapy, all at once.

My entire childhood, I had zero clue how I would make my living as an artist, but I didn’t care, it was what I had to do. I went to art school at the Maryland Institute College of Art and got my degree of fine arts in painting. I then moved to Florida practically on a lark, only to have stayed here for the past 15 years.

I first owned an art gallery and cultural venue space for a couple of years. In art school, I only learned how to make a painting, but hardly anything on how to sell it. Through the gallery, I was thrust into figuring out the business side of art, from curation and marketing to making sales and organizing events.

After a short stunt as exhibitions manager at the Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida, I decided to try making my living purely from my art.

That’s what I’ve done for the past 12 years. I’m proud to be a part of an arts community that has flourished and started growing at an exponential rate. Throughout the years, I’ve created countless works of art, taught art to kids and adults, helped put on a wide variety of art events, been a part of an eclectic arts cooperative, helped create an annual international art projection festival, created multiple online courses, and most recently I’ve been creating murals.

Murals have been extremely fulfilling in so many ways. Not only do they get me out of my regular studio routine and out into the world, providing new creative challenges, but they are art that is for the entire public. I love that murals become part of the identity of a place, belonging to everyone that lives there.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Making a living as an artist is a challenge of perseverance and carving your own path. For most of us, we are figuring things out as we go, teaching ourselves how to be all sides of a business. For the first several years, I made less than minimum wage, but I loved what I was doing, so it was worth it.

Then our area was hit by a category 5 hurricane, Hurricane Michael. The majority of homes and businesses were destroyed or severely damaged. For millions of acres, we lost 75-90% of our trees. Everything halted, a large portion of our population was displaced or had to move away permanently. My family had many losses and struggles. I didn’t know if I would be able to continue making my living from art. Nobody had money or time to buy art or take classes, and most people didn’t even have finished houses to hang art for years. So I created my first online course to market outside of our devastated area. Then months after the hurricane, my students started telling me they missed my classes and needed to do something that wasn’t work and/or hurricane recovery for their mental health. In the weeks and months after the hurricane, I also had multiple deaths. I did the minimum to survive while I was drowning in grief and depression.

A year after the hurricane, and I had taught classes, but I hadn’t made any art. For the first time in my life, I had no motivation to create anything. I applied for an artist residency, hoping time away and in nature would help reawaken my creativity. I was rejected, so I made my own solo residency. I booked a week in a tiny treehouse AirBnB in the woods in the mountains of North Georgia. I had no TV, no internet, and nobody else with me. I went with the hope of making at least a little art and the fear of ditching my family for a week to fail at that and just cry in the woods. But every day, I hiked a little and reconnected with nature. I breathed in the trees that I sorely missed in the wake of the storm back home. And every day, I made art. I made so much art, all self-portraits. I created works that represented my losses but also the beauty that could be found within the pain.

My grief and depression left that week and have never been back. When the pandemic hit, I knew yet again I would have to get creative with my business to make the changes necessary so it could survive. But I also knew if I could make my business, and myself, survive the hurricane, it could survive the pandemic, too.

For many years my art encourages people to have a deeper connection with nature. Now I also focus on spreading the mental health benefits of enjoying and creating art.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I paint, I draw, I cut paper, I burn wood, I carve linoleum to create prints. I work with graphite, charcoal, ink, watercolor, acrylic, oil, and more. I tend to have medium phases. For a few years, I’ll do nothing but create art out of cutting intricate designs out of paper with an X-acto knife. Then I’ll yearn for more gradation and detail and draw for a couple of years. Then I’ll return to oil painting. I recently created watercolors for a few years. The past year has been primarily painting murals.

I’m known for detailed portraits of women interacting with botanicals. My portraits are often bold, non-realistic colors, sometimes with wild, flowing hair. Vines, leaves, flowers, branches, and mushrooms emerge from the portrait or mix together with the body blurring the line between humans and the other natural elements.

I’m most proud of my humble part in inspiring other artists, and people who don’t consider themselves artists, but have found great joy and respite in creating. When a newer artist tells me I’ve been a part of why they now make their living as an artist, it doesn’t get any better than that. When a recently retired engineer who felt lost after leaving the workforce tells me my art classes helped them find meaning and joy again, it doesn’t get any better than that. It’s overwhelming and humbling.

What matters most to you? Why?
For many years my art has aimed to encourage people to have a deeper connection with nature. Art. Nature. Mental health. All of these are linked and symbiotic. I know for me without art and nature, I would be a miserable shell of a person. Not everyone has the same kind of needs, of course. But art and nature can do so much more for people’s mental health than they realize. And the more we embrace art and nature, and the happier we are, the more we’ll do to create positive changes in this world.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.heatherclementsart.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heatherclementsart/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeatherClementsArt
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@heatherclementsart