Alice Stone Collins: Member Q & A
Alice working in her studio (2019)
Q: Firstly, tell us about yourself!
A: While I was raised in the Southeast, work and family have taken me across and back these United States from Indiana to Colorado and now back to Georgia and metro Atlanta. This journey has given me a fluid sense of home while sharpening my eye for the specific features that make a place unique. These moves have also happened in between the births of my two daughters, now ages 8 and 5.
I tend to pull imagery for my work where I am, so it changes when I move or when something (like the birth of a child) in my life changes. I am drawn to landscapes, architecture and themes of consumption and conservation in the places we make home.
Q: How do you continue to engage with your art practice alongside raising children? Do you have a dedicated studio space and routine, or do you work from home in between other things?
A: Children make you question yourself and your work in unexpected ways. Some of it is practical. How can I squeeze in an hour in the studio and pump? Can my three-year-old draw beside me as I paint? Are four episodes of Daniel the Tiger an adequate babysitter as I stay in my studio? The hours of the day can fluctuate between intimacy and uproarious laughter one hour and then loneliness and silence the next. Because of that, it is hard for me to not think about one without the other. My studio is located in a second story spare bedroom of our suburban Atlanta home. From that window, I look for beauty in the small, strange everyday moments of contradictions. The neighbor remodeling his bathroom and putting his old tub in the trash. A flooded playhouse in my backyard. The flipped over traffic cones the power company puts out. These don’t always get interpreted in my work as they happen, but they might get combined with other ideas and images I see when sitting in the carpool line at school, going for a walk with my daughters, or watching them dive into the cold water at swim practice.
I also teach full time at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Most of my classes are in Drawing, 2-D design and Art Appreciation. I enjoy teaching and do feel that it makes me a better and more active artist and parent. My students engage in questions and artists that allow for a sense of community to evolve. Often studio space and kitchen table space become the temporary home for student work as I grade so our entire family experiences how learning can be experiential, varied, and layered.
‘High Tide’ Acrylic and collage.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you and how much time do you manage to carve out for your own work?
A: Being a mother and teaching full time means that my studio time is limited, and I want to make that time count. Sketch books are my go-to medium on the days that I work and have limited studio time. Sketches help me form a vision of a new idea or ways to modify a work that is in progress from the day before.
That doesn’t mean that everything is sketched out and I don’t experiment, but I don’t go into a piece blindly. With my work being more collage oriented, that is also where a lot of my play comes in, through placement and different papers.
I try and work as much as I can on the two days a week I don’t have to go into the College to teach. Those days are still filled with morning workouts or runs, pick-ups, drop offs, and after school activities, but I can usually squeeze a chunk of time out on those days.
‘Flattery Will Get You Nowhere’ Acrylic and collage.
Q: Have you come up against specific challenges as an artist and mother? What were they and how have you navigated these challenges?
A: After I had children, I lost some of my confidence as family life began to take on more of my time and focus. I think in part by the sigma of the art world and thinking that my career as an “artist” and not just an art teacher was over. It took me way longer than I want to admit to take that leap and put my work on social media and instagram and to start reaching out to artists in the areas I lived. I was afraid that because my subject matter wasn’t as politically charged, as aggressive, that it wasn’t successful. But we all need quiet. We all need reflection. And that is what my pieces strive to do now.
Q: What is the best piece of advice you have been given?
A: The one mentor from graduate school that I have continued to keep up with was also the only women professor I had. Professor Marcia Goldenstein told me in my first year to never think that any opportunity was too good for me. In my last year, she told me to never stop making work. In those years after first becoming a mother and dealing with questions of where I belonged and what was next, I never stopped making. Now, when I am frustrated or staled, I remind myself of her words (create, create, create) and that we all have to start somewhere.
‘At Least He Mowed The Grass’, Acrylic and collage.
Q: Who are your role models? Who or what inspires and encourages you?
A: I have many other mama/mothering communities that I have been a part of since starting my own journey with motherhood. And plenty of mentors and friends in the art community as well. But since joining Instagram a couple of months ago, seeing so many other artist mothers create and parent side by side has been so influential and uplifting. It was never a moment of not thinking it was possible, but often thinking that I needed to separate the two and hide parts of my life from certain communities and vice versa. Now, I see from so many other makers and hearing from so many other mothers, that the process of parenting and making were actually made for each other. One can’t help but to influence the other.
‘Within’, Acrylic and collage.
Q: How has the experience of motherhood impacted your practice on an emotional/intellectual level? Has it made you view yourself/your work differently? Are there things that influence your work now that you didn't think about pre-kids?
A: My work has always been impacted by my immediate environment and events in my life, so that has stayed consistent. But when I was younger, my work was more obvious with its questions about tradition and resistance to change. I was still dealing with similar ideas of home and leaving and family and freedom, but when I look back on this work, it can seem judgmental and too fast at times. Having children, I think I have become gentler with myself and the statements that my work makes. So, in many respects where I thought my life would speed up and become more impassioned, it has also slowed down and become more reflective.
Q: If your child(ren) were asked “Tell me about your mother” what do you hope they would say? Are there particular things you are trying to show/teach them as an artist, a mother, a woman?
A: They would tell you that I can fix things. That I can draw a great unicorn and sloth. That I like a clean house. That I’m impatient. That I make a mean cheese quesadilla. That I do things wrong, but I know how to apologize and start over.
I want them to know that it is ok to not know what they want to be even when they grow up. That I will always support them, but they do have to fight for what they want. That I will always draw them unicorns and sloths.
‘It Gets Worse Here Everyday’, Acrylic and collage.
Q: What drives you to continue to create work?
A: I once read a quote by the artist John Register who said of his western cityscapes and landscapes, “I look for offbeat beauty. I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it…I like the patina of things that have been battered by life.” I can’t be done making work if I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t want to miss it. I want to be awake, open.
Work in progress.