A Conversation with pastel artist and muralist, Deborah Shea
Deb Shea is a visual artist of floral wonder. Shea, a colorist currently working primarily with pastels, studied art and design at UC Davis where she began a career as a graphic designer. Shea worked in design and branding for many years before focusing her attention on her own art practice, which includes pastels, fiber arts, and public art murals. We conversed, with intermittent laughter, in her studio at Art Bias and then visited her solo exhibition, From Bud to Bloom, in the Art Bias Gallery.
Nanette: Tell me about your background.
Deb: I studied studio art with Wayne Thiebaud and Roland Peterson. They were great. Thiebaud was an especially wonderful professor, and a very wonderful painter and colorist. I really enjoyed that quite a bit.
I had to work while in school to support myself. I had a scholarship and worked as a graphic designer to pay for my education. I did graphic design for several different agencies in the college: the newspaper, posters for Arts and Lectures, all that kind of stuff. I took that up as my career after I finished school. I was hoping to go to San Francisco Art Institute for graduate school, but I never had enough money. I was paying off my student debt for quite a while. So, I became a designer! I worked for a while in Sacramento, then I moved to San Francisco. I continued to be a designer, then an art director, and then a creative director.
I moved from San Francisco to the peninsula about 30 years ago. I worked for two or three software companies as a creative director. One was based in Oslo, so I was traveling to Norway quite a bit, and two other software companies. I had my own marketing business for about ten years. I was doing artwork as well but primarily designing, illustrating and branding—a lot of branding and identity work, for many kinds of companies.
Then the recession hit in 2008. So, my business really suffered after that. Marketing budgets kind of go by the wayside when you have a real economic crisis.
I started to work full time for a client for about five years. Being a creative director and doing all the illustration and design work for all their packaging.
Nanette: Was that Pamela’s?
Deb: That was Pamela’s. I worked for Pamela for about 25 years altogether. I first started freelancing for her when my daughter was born, and then slowly but surely, her company grew and grew. When I first met her, it was just her and her warehouse manager. So, we went through a lot together! After some years, I had enough of working for a small company and a lot of deadline pressure that was very stressful.
Then I had a bit of a health scare. I got over that but decided it was finally time to dedicate myself to my art full time.
Nanette: Were you engaged in your own personal artwork while you were having a design career?
Deb: I was.
Nanette: Has it always been pastels?
Deb: No. Previously I did a lot of acrylic work and collage work. I did take some courses at the Art Institute in San Francisco. It was wonderful. I did a lot of very large oil paintings and acrylic paintings in those classes.
Nanette: But now you work primarily in pastels?
Deb: Yes primarily. It’s a medium that I started working with for my illustration work, because a client was looking for an artisan feel to the packaging design. So, I started to do pastel drawings. My employer was paying for all my supplies. They said, “Buy anything you want.” That was great, because I got to use really nice stuff. Then I had deadlines, of course. So, I learned to really dive into the medium. I was enjoying it very much, too. That was fun.
Nanette: What is it about pastels that engages you?
Deb: I got some pastels from my grandfather went I was very young. I’ve always been very comfortable in drawing. I really, really enjoy the emotional quality of drawing. I think that was one of the reasons why I kept up with my artwork while I was a designer. There was such a great emotional attachment to touching things rather than working on a computer. I also love to do things in textiles, like knitting, and crocheting, and felting, and that kind of stuff, working with the paper flowers. . . I love making things. So, pastels, I’ve always loved their quality, the velvetiness of them, and the super beautiful colors.
Nanette: The tactile thing—do you feel like you can get your hands into the pastels more than you can with paint?