Today we’d like to introduce you to Emma Celeste.
Emma, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
It feels like my hands have always known what to do with a brush. As children, my brother and I were encouraged to follow our art. My dad’s a musician, so our home was filled with instruments and art supplies. I was in a lot of pain when I was a teenager, and I discovered the power of meditation and the bliss of being in a creative flow state. I began turning my suffering into poetry through drawing and painting. In college and my early twenties, I strayed from my art, focusing on a “safer” career path, what I thought the world told me I should do. But going without my art only made me hungrier for it. It actually became an obsession, this voice inside of me that grew louder, constantly telling me to paint. So I started taking art classes, finding styles that made me feel most alive, and learning to paint like that. I moved to Austin in 2024 and found such a beautiful and welcoming creative community here. My painting style evolves as my consciousness does, and every day I wake up and devote myself to this path.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The most peace I’ve ever felt has been in a state of creation, which I first tapped into when I was going through really debilitating chronic pain starting at fourteen. I spent a lot of time in solitude, and at fifteen, I found meditation, which changed my life. I connected to the visualization of colors, energies, and going into the ether, the mystery. That practice has kept me afloat by giving my heart a compass. Still, the resistance to creation blocks me every day, and I’m constantly softening to that resistance, remembering that the shame I feel around being behind or failing comes from ego. The more I soften my gaze towards myself, the more easily those barriers to creation dissolve.
The creative freeze comes from anxiety and grief about years of wasted time. I’m hard on myself because I know my potential. I feel a world of art inside of me, waiting to be born. I have a deep and full knowing about that. And I avoided my potential for so long by disconnecting from my body and numbing my power. My ego says I should have hundreds of works by now, but my spirit knows that giving myself the art I’m hungry for is the highest form of reverence and celebration for my life. There’s a Sanskrit word that I always reference, svastha, which means “health” or “to be seated in the truth of who you are.” That’s how I feel the moment I’m in the seat of creation again. I also think about Georgia O’Keeffe a lot, who described her waiting to paint again during a long break: “I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
There’s a measure I use when my next painting is still just a seed of an idea, and that is: Does it set my heart on fire? There’s a feeling of aliveness and my heart being set aflame when I look at the works of female surrealist artists like Léonor Fini and Leonora Carrington. The figures I’ve painted in the last year are master studies from them, which I’ve learned is a great way to develop your own style. I paint in the same way that I write poetry. It’s very difficult for me to paint something that doesn’t speak to my soul, even just for practice, because I’m very aware that my time here is limited and sacred. My superpowers are my intuition and my ability to bring my visions to life. Grief of the body, romantic and familial love, prayer to the universe, and figures and scenes that I see in moments of intense emotion – that’s what my work is about.
My drawing teacher in Austin, Pehr Smith, taught me that a painting is finished once it’s alive, and that it could take years to bring one painting to life. He showed me the embodiment of an artist who has no resistance to creation. It’s a spiritual practice of softening your gaze, releasing attachments, and being in that flow of presence. Our hands are our centers of creation. And there’s a cord from our crown to our hearts to our hands that is the instrument for pure magic to occur. So to answer that, I’m most proud of my resilience, my devotion, and my connection to that source.
Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.
My risk-taking looks like working with slow, careful intention, guided by a nudge, a curious feeling to move in a new direction. It’s quiet courage, a small step, and then finding out if that step feels right before I take the next one. Every painting feels like a risk when you’re sensitive and devoted. Risk is the way we expand. It’s the way we find out what we want by experiencing what we don’t. We mold our lives into what feels good by taking risks. In its fullest potential to expand us, risk is really just intuitive action.
The more compassionate I am with myself, the braver I can be. Risk-taking can start to feel like play when we detach from the ego’s story that says “I am the failure” or “I am the success of this.” More truthfully, I am the play in between, I am the flow state, I am the curiosity of the voice that tells me to take the risk.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://emmacelesteart.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmacelesteart/
