Meet Tesia Blackburn | Visual Artist, Teacher and Author

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

Hi Tesia, what role has risk played in your life or career?
I took a big risk in becoming a visual artist. I had left a marriage and was sort of at my wits end. It took me a couple of years to figure it out, but I knew I wanted to do something creative. I enrolled in art school in San Francisco and took various odd jobs to get me through school. Then for a few years, I worked two jobs, one as a medical transcriber and one as a visual artist. Just getting the job as a medical transcriber was a big risk because I bluffed my way into it. But eventually, that really paid off because I could work at night in the hospital and paint during the daytime. It took a few years, but I managed to parlay my visual art into graduate school. From there, I was able to launch my teaching career and give up medical transcription. For 25 years I taught art, created paintings, and had many shows and sales.

I took another big risk at the start of the pandemic. My partner‘s mother had cancer and so we decided to relocate to Southern California from San Francisco. Overnight, the teaching career I had built in the Bay Area came to an end. Rather than starting over, I reinvented how I taught by creating an online community and school. Atelier.AcrylicDiva.com became a new home for my students and me, allowing us to continue the creative conversations and connections we had built over the years.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I made my first painting when I was about 10 years old and it was from a paint by numbers kit. I didn’t know then and no one in my family knew, that I would end up being a professional visual artist. It was a long and circuitous route, but eventually I got there. One of the big lessons I learned along the way is that you should never give up. Even when the going gets hard, persevere, You never know what’s around the corner. The other big lesson I learned is to measure your success against yourself not others. What I mean by that is decide for yourself what success looks like for you. When I was about 45 I realized that I was never going to be on the cover of Artnews magazine or have a Whitney retrospective. After I mourned the loss of the big splashy art career that I thought I was going to have, I realized I already had a level of success that many of my peers had never reached. I was actually making a living as an abstract painter. Yes I was teaching, but I was also selling paintings and I wasn’t working a part-time job at Starbucks. I had achieved a level of success and I was happy, truly happy.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Well, I would have to choose San Francisco as my city to visit, even though I no longer live there. And I would start with a visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, of course. Then I would hit the deYoung museum and definitely have lunch in their café. From there, I would end up at Chrissy Field for a long walk and maybe head over to Mai’s Vietnamese restaurant on Clement Street for chicken rice in clay pot. I would end the evening at San Francisco Jazz, seeing whatever magical musical wonderment is on the calendar.

If I were in LA, I would definitely start at the Broad and hopefully we haven’t missed the Yoko Ono exhibit. Lunch would happen in a restaurant in Thai Town. There are so many to choose from! I would definitely have to take my visitor over to Venice Beach after a drive down Sunset Boulevard of course. I might end the night at Disneyland to take in the fireworks and a couple of rides.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My students deserve a lot of credit from my success. Many of my students have been with me for 15 years or more. My success is directly related to their faith in me as a teacher.

Website: https://Acrylicdiva.com

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Image Credits
Tesia Blackburn