Meet Lindsey Allyn O’Shields

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsey Allyn O’Shields.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I’m an artist by birth. My grandmother was a painter and my mother is a fiber artist. Born at Grady, brought home on MARTA, raised in Midtown on Myrtle St, right down the street from my great-grandparents’ home. As a baby, my mother would tape paper to my high chair tray and hand me a black magic marker and let me go to town drawing. I asked for art supplies for every birthday and Christmas, (with the occasional head turn toward Cabbage Patch Kids or Monchichi, or Smurfs.) I had a pretty rocky childhood that I’ll tell you all about when I know you better, but I always had art as an outlet to keep me sane. I only had a few art classes here and there as a kid so I’m largely self-taught by way of work.

I’ve painted as a scenic artist for 23 years for theater and film. A scenic artist paints scenery to look like other materials such as wood, marble, or stucco using house paint and rollers and 4” brushes at high speed and under a crazy deadline. It’s dirty, sweaty work, but you get pretty ripped and the crew is usually a lot of fun. Cursing is mandatory.

Hubs and I married young and in our 26 years married we have had four children. I’ve been a wife and mother all of my adult life and I love it! My family and Christian faith are my core.

Four years ago one of the kiddos presented with Angiomas and all things medical took over my life. I cut back scenic work, (12 hour days!) and focused on the child. This re-focused my art toward oil paintings and encaustic since I could do it at home. This has been the blessing within a very dark time in my life since I have been forced to slow down and paint what I want to paint. My work from the past few years is very much about me dealing with angiomas, fear, doom, faith, and holding on to hope. The child had experimental surgery and is definitely on the mend so hopefully my art will now swing away from Addams Family mode and toward a lighter theme. One large step toward this has been working with the Marietta Arts Council and the amazing Bonnie Reavis and Donna Krueger to get eleven murals up around downtown Marietta. Three of the murals are mine, and my eldest daughter Stokes O’Shields and I helped get the other murals approved and paid for and up. More than anything, it was such a great joy to create an opportunity for artists and to work alongside other artists.

Please tell us about your art.
I use mostly charcoal/sanguine, encaustic, or water-soluble oils to paint portraits, plain-air landscapes, or metaphysical musings. My style ranges from realist to impressionist to abstract because my mood changes and I paint for myself and what I need to get out at the moment. My idea of art prison would be to have to paint the same thing over and over in the same style- like it makes my chest tight to even type this sentence. This may have a negative impact on my marketability since my body of work is visually diverse, but like I said, I paint for myself. What I want for people who see my work is for them to feel what I felt while painting. I don’t mind if they don’t like my work since we all see things differently, from our individual perception of color and light to our personal life history and emotional experiences, and I really enjoy hearing other people’s perception of what they see and how they feel about it. Obviously ultimately I want to have a positive impact on others and to leave a positive lasting impact on the world, but as a day-to-day model I just paint what is on my heart.

There are a lot of angels in my more recent work because I have been both dealing with family illness and the need to hold God even closer, as well as feeling a real tectonic shift coming both in my personal life and in the world at large. It might sound crazy but I feel like awareness of our own guardian angels as well as awareness of the opposite forces at work all around us is growing. People are starting to be awakened to the great spiritual depth of life, dimly visible through the veil of surface reality.

From what I’ve read and heard, angels look like large humanoids made of light or energy, or they look like large people with six wings. I haven’t been painting them this way, but more like the standard two-winged human-looking angel either using a many-layered glazing method of oil painting or encaustic paint with pan pastel, watercolor, and charcoal or sanguine. Oils I use for a challenge- like the vegetables of art. Encaustic is dessert for me- so easy and fun and versatile! I feel like with encaustic I just sneeze and there is something I love in front of me. Melting the encustic medium makes my whole studio smell like honey, and being able to throw in so many other media and melt it all together really plays to my need for diversity of experience.

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing artists today?
I’m hardly qualified to chime in for the planet of artists, but for myself it’s our busy modern lifestyle. With so much technology designed to make life convenient and easy, we are somehow thoroughly burdened with ridiculous and impossible schedules, driving, sitting in traffic, and an endless to-do list. Real art, in my opinion, requires a period of quiet thought first. Blindly stabbing at your work with no clear vision in your head is a recipe for failure or at least frustration. We all need more observation and contemplation, less escape via blue screen.

I think this goes along with my never-ending preaching that each of us has a God-given art form within us and that stifling that art is not good. Whatever one’s gift, and by gift I mean a driving force that compels you to create, (since every master begins as a novice and practice is the fuel for building a great outcome,) whatever your gift- you must exercise it! When people tell me they don’t make their art/music/writing, dance, etc. for reason x, I tell them that they must re-arrange their lives to accommodate their artistic passion. It is a fundamental building block to life and society and without it we are forced into a stiff and stifling frame as crude beasts, automatons without hope or beauty. To exercise the creative part of ourselves is to allow our spiritual flow to manifest itself externally, to be shared with those around us and is as fundamentally important as prayer, food, sleep, and exercise.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
My work is a little quirky and few pieces are easy “to match the couch,” but I do sell, so my work is primarily in my studio, Iron Thistle Studio, or in their owner’s home. My work can be found on Instagram or Facebook or my web site, and we will have a fall 2018 show alongside my sister from another mister Heidi Daugherty, details to be announced.

https://ironthistlestudio.com

https://m.facebook.com/IronThistleStudio/

Instagram: @ironthistlestudio

There are also my murals near the Marietta Square, if you want to come enjoy a meal and walk the mural circuit we have an interactive map. I’ll give it to you within this article so you can plan your trip if you so choose:

https://www.ajc.com/news/local/take-walking-tour-marietta-murals-with-neat-interactive-map/luf6eUXHOciq4tqszS8AvK/

Additionally, my illustrations are in this wonderfully written adventure book for girls by Hart Law:
https://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Zeliha-Dog-Island/dp/0996856811

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ironthistlestudio.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @ironthistlestudio
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/IronThistleStudio
• Twitter: @IRONTHISTLE

Getting in touch: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.