This article was published in the May 2015 issue of Nashville Arts Magazine

by Rachael McCampbell

It’s amazing to think that visual and sculptural arts were around almost 30,000 years before the first language was recorded. Humans have always possessed an inherent need to express ourselves through art. Before the majority of the world could read, or the invention of the printing press, visual art was often the platform used to illustrate stories and communicate ideas to the masses (think of medieval narrative paintings of Biblical stories by Cimabue and Giotto and, later, cartoons). Art commissioned by the Catholic Church lead to private commissions by wealthy patrons of portraits, neoclassical themes, and scenes of ordinary life. Romanticism of the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries opened the doors for artists to express what they wanted to paint—their personal thoughts, observations, and feelings. This was a pivotal change that lead to all the “isms” and art movements we have today: Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Minimalism, Neo-expressionism, along with Installation, Performance, and Conceptual Art, to name a few. Continue reading I Was Here: A Look At Why We Create

This was published in the April 2015 issue of Nashville Arts Magazine

by Rachael McCampbell

I’ve heard it said that Picasso painted right up to his death at age 91. Since he began before his teens, that would constitute as a very long art career.

For most of us though, we have a good 4 to 6 decades to work. An exception being Grandma Moses, who began at 78, had her first exhibit at MoMA, and worked for over 2 decades—but I digress. The question is—how do we maintain long careers in the arts? Continue reading Long Live The Artist!