Meet Rebecca Lopatin

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rebecca Lopatin.

Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
Art has been who I am ever since I can first remember. It’s the only thing I ever completely loved doing from the time I was a toddler, on. When I was about 5 years old, my parents enrolled me in private art classes with Trish Mayberry. Trish is an amazing abstract painter and art teacher, who I remained in private art classes with for the following 13 years, taking primarily drawing and oil painting classes from. I went to New School for the Arts, a charter art high school in Tempe, when the time came, where I had the opportunity to spend half my day in art classes every day. I began taking life drawing at that time, which I felt really benefited me to have the opportunity to start practice anatomy drawing so early on.

After high school I ended up at Arizona State University, which I felt had a wonderful art program at the time. This is where I truly began to be molded into a serious artist, not due to the skills I gained, but due to the mentality my professors helped instill in me, and how I was challenged to think about my artwork, and the world of art in a much more critical manner. During this time I had the opportunity to study abroad in Florence, Italy, where I had the opportunity to study Renaissance art while leaning from classical painters and sculptures.
After I graduated ASU with my Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting, I struggled for many years to find a job that would pay enough to make ends meet with my only real skill being in fine arts (this is the story of every artist I know, I’m no exception).

I spent a few years struggling to make contacts with magazines, publishers, people who might need design work done by hand rather than digital, places that could show and sell my work, it went nowhere. They were all dead ends. Eventually after enough years of working multiple jobs, most of which I really was not happy in, I quit my full-time job, started my own face paint business to support myself, and went back to school to get my masters of social work. Now that I have my masters in social work, I work in adult behavioral health using art as a catalyst to help individuals work towards recovery. I feel very liberated from the position I was in several years back where I felt my livelihood rested on my ability to make, promote, and sell my art. Now I am able to get back to focusing on truly enjoying art, and pushing myself to be a better painter again, rather than worrying about what will sell and how to make money off of it.

Please tell us about your art.
So, most of my life, my main focus has been oil painting. I’ve always been interested in figurative work, making something that has some kind of narrative, or evokes an emotion. Usually there is an underlying feeling or mood that relates back to what was happening personally for me in my life at the time. These days I really find myself working to improve on my skills the most. The paintings I have been doing the last few years have moved from being more conceptual to working to capture people, places and moments just as they are.

I really enjoy plein air painting a lot, and I want most for someone to look at those paintings and feel what it was like sitting in that moment. When I take a minute to think about it, I really think I’m documenting my life with paintings. I’m documenting the people I know and love through portrait paintings, all the places I go, all the moods and different frames of mind I have been in throughout the years. Sometimes I do still come up with playful ideas that I have fun messing around with. Those usually occur when I am doing a project for someone else and I get to challenge myself to get outside my comfort zone for the sake of doing a book cover, as I’ve done several, both for a friend and my sister.

In the end what I would want someone looking at my artwork to take away is connecting with a moment, a mood, a feeling. Even a very mundane moment, it’s part of life. Having happiness, sadness, pain, joy, humor, anger, agony, love, this is all part of what makes life, life. I think personally for me, I use to fight against all the unpleasant emotions and feelings I’d experience, and as I’ve grown, I’ve come to realize that it’s the full spectrum of all of them that make us human, that let us know we are alive. I really try to embrace finding the value in all those feelings, all the moments I’m living, even if what I’m experiencing isn’t ideal. I think I want to connect people to that, to life, the only way I know how, through the places, moments and people I experience.

What do you think about conditions for artists today? Has life become easier or harder for artists in recent years? What can cities like ours do to encourage and help art and artists thrive?
If we are considering conditions for traditional artists now versus historically, I would say things have become much harder for artists these days. Technology has taken over, and where painters and illustrators were once used for all advertising, movie posters, book covers, magazines and newspaper designs, we now have digital artists and designers to do those jobs. I mean no disrespect to those artists out there that work primarily digitally, I am simply pointing out that classical and traditional hand done art that is not produced on the computer has been siphoned out of the equation these days.

There are really nowhere artists such as myself can go to gain employment working in their trained field. There are the occasional major art production companies out there (one of which I did work for, for several years), who work with high end hotels and interior design companies, and provide employment to painters. The only problem with these companies is there are so few of them that it is hard for most artists to get in, often the work is unreliable and artists can count on the possibility of frequent and continual layoffs, and usually artists are incapable of surviving on this as a job alone and still continue working others jobs simultaneously.

In some cases, artists lose the freedom to create and show their work anywhere else while working at such companies, which can be a sacrifice that is made to secure semi regular income off of their art. Once again, in no way am I trying to condemn such art production companies, I think any business that offers employment to painters and traditional artists is a plus. I’m pointing out the need for more opportunities in different areas to create varying types of work for artists. If local businesses chose to appeal to local artists to do murals, to hand paint their designs for menus, magazine covers, illustrate the design work within their pamphlets, and look to show art at their establishments, there are artists out there looking to do the work for them.

I also think there needs to be more galleries out there willing to take those artists at the weird phase of their career between showing art at First Fridays and having work in the high-end Scottsdale galleries. There are galleries out there that do this, but I feel there is a point for most local artists where they have progressed to a point that they want to expand beyond showing primarily at First Fridays, but there does not feel to be much opportunity unless they are at the very high caliber of artists that show in Old Town Scottsdale. Even so, many local artists do not possess a style that suits the Scottsdale galleries even if their talent is equal in quality.

How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I have an Instagram page where I post my artwork pretty frequently, and a Facebook page where I also post my art, not quite as frequently. The most blatantly obvious way people can support my artwork, which is so screamingly apparent that it’s embarrassing to say is just simply…. buy my work. Really more so than that, and aside from the money aspect, I really, I just want my artwork to be seen, and for people to keep looking if they like it. Having the opportunity to show my artwork around the valley would be great.

That can easily be having work shown at restaurants, shops, galleries, just getting it out of my garage which is my studio would be a definite plus. I’m also now in a position where have can easily have quality giclee prints made, so if people are interested in buying my work, but don’t want to spent the money I might ask for an original, people can contact me and I can now have prints made that I can sell at a lower price.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @rebeccalopatin
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RebeccaLopatinArtWork/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

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