Who is Carrie Bloomston?
My family is my reason. I believe in my hands and what they can do. I follow my heart. I offer you words + art, beauty + truth, love + soul.
The long version: I am an artist. Always have been. At twelve, I owned my first business–splatter painting t-shirts on my back porch in Alabama and selling to local businesses. At thirteen, I was making large-scale abstract paintings. Big. Five or ten feet long. I had my first one-woman show at seventeen and my earnings helped to pay my tuition at the Rhode Island School of Design where I studied painting and glass-blowing. I worked for some great artists like Kiki Smith during that time and worked at the Gagosian Gallery in New York and…wait…
…fast forward a bunch of years: I spent the next decade pursuing a life of art-school-girl recovery. Now I have two kids and an amazing and thoughtful, therapist husband and we live in a little house in the desert. Everything I do is for my kids, because of my kids or with my kids. My family is my reason.
I went on a journey six years ago when I began sewing and fell in love with the modern craft movement. I started a blog. Then I started a company called, SUCH Designs. I designed sewing patterns which led to designing fabric for Windham Fabrics which led to writing my first book, The Little Spark–30 Ways to Ignite Your Creativity. On that journey I learned a few things about myself and what I want. I quickly realized that I most definitely couldn’t teach people to sew. But what I could offer was all the art-school-girl in me: creativity/rule-breaking/color-theory/composition/drawing/painting techniques/art history.
But anyone can do that. In addition to my voice as an artist is another voice–the voice of self-love and compassion–the creativity enabler. I have logged many hours on the other end of a therapist’s couch. And I’m able to love myself after a lifetime of that work (and maybe because my mom helped with that as a girl). If you can combine self-love and trust with creativity…well, then you have magic.
Now I’m using all the aspects of me: loving, attentive mama, imperfect-yet-self-loving artist, sage-wielding-mystic, and glue-stick-and-scissor-having-fabric-designer, and mainly, apron-clad weirdo. There are two veins that run through my work: soulful, abstract painter and maker of wonderful, whimsical things. Because humans are full of complexity. We just have to let the light shine out and trust our hands and heart to guide us to wherever we are headed.
I hope I can help guide people to their whispers–the Source of their creativity. And the Source is deep because it is soul. If we aren’t swimming in the deep-end of the pool then we’re in the wrong end, my friends. It is our right and our luxury to know ourselves in this lifetime, to face our fears, to dig into what matters and leave the rest of all the distracting sh*t in the shallow-end. Going deep is the new black.
So, I’ll keep designing whimsical fabric and making big abstract paintings and teaching workshops and classes to help people plug in to the waterfall of self-love and connecting deeply through creativity and art–to self, others, community, and our ancestors. I hope to inspire you with my words and art.
