#28 – Express The Mess: Real Life & Honest Art | Kelly Williams
Candice welcomes truth-teller and gifted encaustic artist, Kelly Williams, to the podcast. Kelly shares how a unique and challenging childhood shaped her reliance on self-expression as a means of survival and how, many years later, she discovered painting as an outlet for deep healing and personal transformation. She describes the fascinating, natural mediums through which she works, and how the process of painting offers a therapeutic avenue for the expression of the unspeakable. Kelly now guides students to reveal their secret selves safely, without the risk of unhealthy emotional over-exposure, explaining how art is an object lesson, revealing its maker, and how making a mess (or not) can become a valuable tool for self-awareness and/or social commentary. She and Candice discuss the difference between healthy exposure and performative vulnerability. Candice shares a personal discovery – how trying to be of service to others inadvertently gets in the way of being helpful – and together, they get real about things like imposter syndrome, survivor guilt, and sustaining creative integrity while operating in an online marketplace.
Kelly Williams is a contemporary multi-media artist, painting primarily with encaustic, oils, and acrylics. Her large-scale encaustic abstracts are deeply layered, energetic, and textured expressions of internal emotional mapping. Her figurative work explores the more subtle dichotomy of narrative identity, sensuality, and expression. With a background in psychology and social work, Kelly found art to be a powerful tool in helping facilitate communication around that which is unspeakable. Her approach is an extension of the visual narrative as a method of psychological processing. As a full-time artist, she incorporates similar methods in her own process as well as working with individuals and small groups in a studio setting. Kelly continues to educate and mentor both amateur and professional artists, blending multiple methods and materials with a narrative psychology approach to inform her personal work, group workshops, and private sessions.
kellywilliamsart.com | IG: @kellywilliamsart
The stories and opinions shared in this episode are based on personal experience and are not intended to malign any individual, group, or organization.
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