Meet Shelby Alexandra | Oil Painter, Podcaster & Art Consultant

We had the good fortune of connecting with Shelby Alexandra and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Shelby, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
What was your thought process for starting your own business?

When I was growing up, my parents gave me the advice to “always work for yourself if you can, so you can make your own hours and never have anyone telling you what to do”. Of course, I didn’t quite realize that “making your own hours” meant working twice as much as someone with a 9-5 when you’re an entrepreneur! Regardless, the decision to start my own business felt natural once I knew I wanted to be an oil painter. I don’t really think there’s any other option for a painter, honestly!

What’s one piece of conventional advice you disagree with?

Man… I think a lot of people, especially older generations, give the conventional advice that you should never pursue a creative career unless you want to be broke. Of course, I wholeheartedly disagree. Instead, I would say that one should only pursue a creative career if they can do it with an overwhelmingly intense vigor, commitment and love for their craft. If time doesn’t seem to slip away while you work, with hours passing by without your notice, you don’t have what it takes. You need to love the thing you’re doing with a passion that crosses into obsession. I’m talking staying up til 4 am to finish a project, going to bed excited to wake up in the morning and continue it, then jumping out of bed the next day and running straight to your studio. If that describes you, then pursue it!!

Risk taking- how do you think about risk taking and what role it has played in your life?

In general, I would describe myself as someone who could benefit from taking more risks. Risks scare me. No one wants to be judged, pitied or laughed at for their failures. I think this fear holds so many of us back, including me. The risks I have taken are what got me this far, and the risks I haven’t taken are what has held me back from going further.

What habits do you feel helped you succeed?
This question was meant for someone else, not me. I am terrible with habits. The only habits I really have are brushing my teeth and flossing. Everything else is a gamble, because I am too caught up in whatever creative project I’m doing to stick to any sort of schedule. This is a big flaw; I am aware!

What is the most important factor behind the success of your career?

Without a doubt, my inherent passion for what I’m doing has helped me succeed beyond any other single ingredient. When you’re pursuing a creative career, no one is looking over your shoulder and telling you you *have* to spend 500 hours finishing that project or painting. You just have to do it, even when you feel like pulling your hair out and throwing your phone against a wall. If you don’t TRULY love what you’re doing, the cracks in the plaster will start to show quickly, and you’ll never be able to patch them with any amount of self-talk or promised fame or money. When it’s just you, in a room with your work, for days and weeks and months on end, your passion has to fuel you. Without my passion for painting and drive to create, I would be nowhere.

What’s the most important lesson your business has taught you?

SO. MANY. THINGS. Will go WRONG. It may feel like the end of the world, like months or even years of work built up to nothing, but you HAVE to keep going. When most people give up, you have to push forward. This is the clearest path to success, and of course, the most difficult one.

Work life balance; how has your balance changed over time?

I have burnt myself out until there was nothing left but charcoal, time and time again, sacrificing my mental health for a dream that didn’t even work out how I wanted it to. Over time, I have learned that a certain amount of sacrifice may bring you success, but too much sacrifice will ruin your life. Now, I make time to call my friends, to go on walks, to see my family every Sunday, to cook dinner with my husband, and to cuddle my pet parrots every day. Art is important to me, but it can never be the *most* important thing.

How did you come up with your idea for your business?

My business is constantly evolving, but it started out with me deciding that I wanted to be a painter. In order to do so, you have to sell some paintings! So I started posting about them, taking custom jobs, and things kind of spiraled from there. Now, I have sold clothes with my art on them, high quality prints, crypto-art, and of course, many original oil paintings. Lately, I have been doing more custom abstract artworks for commercial spaces, and I can’t wait to see what this venture morphs into next!

Why did you pursue an artistic or creative career?

After I graduated from Pitzer college with a bachelor’s degree in Organizational Psychology, I was researching applying to law schools and following in my parents’ footsteps (who are both criminal defense attorneys). As excited as I was about the prospect of law school, I had a nagging feeling that I was neglecting the biggest gift I had been given by whatever God or Source of the universe there is– my creativity. I had previously fallen in love with oil painting while taking a local community college course for fun. The only problem was that I was allergic to the drying agents in oil paints. I would paint for hours and my eyes would be streaming with tears, my throat would be raw and my nose would be running like a faucet. I realized that this allergy made it impossible for me to be an oil painter.

Then, I met my husband. We actually met because I wanted to write songs and he is an amazing musician, but neither of us wanted to pursue music professionally because of how difficult it is to make money without constantly performing and touring.

One day, I was talking to him about going to law school, and he looked at me and asked me, “If you could do ANYTHING with your life, with no restrictions, what would you do?”
I thought about it for a minute. And then I told him, “Be an oil painter”. And then I explained why I couldn’t, because of the allergies.

My husband is a man of action. He immediately began researching oil paint. He learned how to make oil paint out of ground pigment like the masters from medieval times, without the toxins and drying agents present in commercially made paint. He turned his spare room into an art studio, built me a giant easel and canvases with thick, heavy frames. He installed lights and curtains and ground pigment into oil to make a huge selection of natural paints that gave me no allergic reaction whatsoever.

That is how I became a painter.

I decided to give myself one year to pursue being a professional artist before applying to law school. Thankfully, things went well and I started getting commissions from social media. During this first year, I was making only cents per hour but I could see that people had a clear interest in my art and that encouragement made me believe that I could make it… despite the stereotypes we all know about being a broke artist.

I can’t talk about my success as a creative entrepreneur without bringing up my parents’ unwavering support of me. I often get asked if they were disappointed when I decided not to go to law school and I always feel grateful to answer “no”. Or at least if they were, they never let me see it! My parents saw how I could spend 12 hours straight working on a painting without putting the brush down and were convinced that my passion for art was more than a passing fancy. It wasn’t a phase, and my parents believed me when I said so!

If I had had parents who discouraged me from making art my entire life, I would undoubtedly be a lawyer or a corporate girlie somewhere and never would have been able to let my creative flag fly. For this I will be forever grateful. I have since vowed to encourage my future children to always pursue their dreams regardless of how outlandish they may seem!

What are you inspired by?

My inspiration comes from every facet of my life. My fear of death, my love for things that scare me, my obsession with that golden-hour mid-summer feeling. More than anything, my inspiration is magic.

My forays with psychedelics and meditations have taught me that there is more to this world than meets the eye. Everything is made of energy, and is governed by forces and laws we don’t, or can’t, understand. Through my art, I seek to convey the magic in the world that is easily forgotten and trampled on by the depressions and anxieties of everyday life. This magic may be dark or light, but it is always beautiful. I seek to paint things not how they should be, but how they are… without the filter of our minds that seeks to dampen, diminish, and simplify.

I often find this magic in the wild, in animals, the female form, religion, the supernatural. But whatever the subject of the painting is, magic is the only indispensable ingredient.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
At its core, my art is an act of capturing the magic we often forget to see. Whether I’m painting the wild curve of an orca’s back, a golden-lit landscape of glowing flowers and snowy peaks, or an abstract explosion of color, I’m chasing the same feeling: that shimmer behind reality, that sense of wonder that reminds us there is more to our world than meets the eye.
As far as titles go, I am an oil painter and designer specializing in transforming spaces into environments that inspire, energize, and soothe. My work is rooted in the belief that art can be far more than decoration; it can shape how we feel, think, and connect.
My background has shaped my approach to art. I graduated magna cum laude with honors from Pitzer College in Claremont, California, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Psychology. This field is dedicated to understanding the factors behind organizational success and effectiveness, including the powerful role physical spaces play in shaping human behavior.
This analytical foundation informs every piece I create. Whether I’m selecting calming palettes to ease anxiety in a healthcare setting, designing vibrant, energizing works to boost creativity in a corporate office, or curating an entire custom series for a hospitality project, my art leverages psychological principles to help spaces fulfill their highest potential.
What sets my work apart isn’t just the subject matter—it’s the intention behind it. My paintings are unapologetically surreal, sometimes soft, sometimes unsettling, but always honest. I’m not interested in showing things as they “should” appear. I want to reveal them as they are, stripped of the dulling filter of practicality and expectation.
Every project, whether a single commissioned piece or a full interior design collaboration, is approached with the same conviction: that art has the power to transform a space and, by extension, the people who spend time there. My goal is to create artwork that feels like coming home to some secret part of yourself—a sacred corner of the world you might have visited once in a long-forgotten dream.
I’m most proud of the fact that I’ve built my career from the ground up, often with nothing more than an old paintbrush and a stubborn sense of purpose. From the outside, it can look glamorous to be an artist; flexible hours, self-expression, freedom; but behind the curtain is a lot of lonely, back-breaking work. I’ve spent more nights than I can count up past 4 a.m., exhausted and obsessed, determined to wrestle an idea onto the canvas before it slips away.
It wasn’t easy to get here. In fact, there were many times it felt impossible. When I first started painting, I was allergic to commercially produced oil paints—ironic, right? The one thing I wanted most in the world was quite literally making me sick. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet my husband, who insisted on researching and making my paint by hand, I would have given up before I’d begun. That experience taught me a lesson I’ve carried ever since: that the universe tends to meet you halfway, but only if you show up first.
Over the years, I’ve learned that there is no perfect moment of readiness. You never feel “qualified enough” to call yourself a professional artist. You just start where you are, with what you have, and you keep going when it all falls apart—which it inevitably will, over and over again. You learn to keep painting anyway.
If there’s one thing I’d want the world to know about me and my work, it’s that every single painting I create has a piece of my soul embedded in it. Each stroke of paint holds a fraction of my very being, my hopes and dreams, the energy expended and captured in visible form. My art is a love letter to the unseen—the invisible currents of wonder and fear and longing that tie us all together. My art is made to transform spaces, to capture your attention, to start a conversation, to alter your mood.
And if you’re someone obsessed with your craft, standing on the cliff’s edge of your own creative dream—terrified, convinced it’s too impractical—I want you to know that it is impractical. And that’s exactly why you should do it.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Los Angeles has always felt like a shimmering fever dream, full of lust and nostalgia and creative passion mixed with palm trees and plastic. If my best friend was here for a visit, I’d start by taking them to see my other best friend Kacie and my brother Eli and his wife Mao down in Laguna Niguel; family is always the first stop!

Then we’d drift north to Venice Beach, where I once spent college summers living in a sun-bleached apartment and working at a PR firm, learning how to write press releases by day and falling in love with the boardwalk by night. Even now, I never tire of wandering past the street performers and murals that feel like old friends.

No trip would be complete without a cocktail and crudite platter at my all-time favorite classy lounge tucked inside the Beverly Hills Hotel, followed up with a few nights at either Hotel Bel-Air, where I once had dinner next to Anthony Hopkins or The London West Hollywood—where I ended up sharing the rooftop pool with the entire cast of Stranger Things during an awards weekend.

For old times’ sake, I’d spend an evening at The Bungalow in Santa Monica. My friend’s dad used to own it, so we were spoiled with skipping the line and free tables and the feeling that the night could spin into anything at all.

And of course, we’d have to spend a day by the water in Malibu, followed by stuffing our faces with black cod miso and spicy tuna crispy rice at Nobu—or maybe slipping into the Studio City Sugarfish for perfect bay scallop nigiri. Inevitably, we’d run into some atrocious traffic and end up bumping Lana Del Rey while we creep slowly towards our next destination.
All in all, it would be a magical week. Of course it would! It’s LA, after all.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to dedicate my Shoutout to my husband, who is the reason I am a painter, my endless well of encouragement, my late-night brainstorm partner and my best friend.

Website: https://www.shelbyalexandraart.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shelbyyalexandra/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-alexandra-hayne-art/

Twitter: https://x.com/shelbystardust

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@chillseeker_podcast