Makers & Dreamers Spotlight: Artist Shelly Olmstead
Makers & Dreamers Spotlight #1 with artist, photographer, general dabbler in the creative arts & founder of The Anartist Collective Creative Arts Magazine & Review Shelly Olmstead
I thought I would start off with myself for the artist spotlights so people can have a background story about who I am, my background and why I started The Anartist Collective so here’s my official introduction.
My name is Shelly Olmstead and I’m an artist, occasional photographer and generally artsy craftsy person. I love learning new forms of art and even if I don’t end up being particularly good at something I love the process of learning and experimenting with new art forms. My whole entire life has been submersed in the arts, of all sorts, so my background is just a touch involved so I’ll just give you a brief background.
I was born in Oneonta, NY in 1980 to a large extended family on both sides and the larger of my mom’s side full of artistic, creative and intelligent people. My mom was an artist and musician, my brother too, my sister has her own talents and I’ve been surrounded by artists, musicians, craftsmen and all creative types since the moment I was born. My entire hometown is full of creative people from musicians and artists to writers, performers and everything in between. The list is so long it’s just best not to begin. I started drawing when I was 3, was very involved in arts and crafts in grade school including Saturday Seminar art classes in the SUNY Oneonta Fine Arts department where my father worked for 30 years (25 in the fine arts building), took all of the art classes Oneonta High School had to offer halfway through my junior year and was allowed to have free art class periods where I made up my own curriculum so I went heavy on the portfolio fillers specific to fashion design and general multimedia portfolio art and ended up getting accepted to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY for Fashion Design and Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica, NY for Fine Arts in 1998. When I went to Munson it was a sister school of Pratt that had a 2 and 2 program with the fashion design department so I decided with that program but since then Munson has been completely absorbed by Pratt Institute and is now a Pratt art school. I ended up leaving after the first year due to chronic health problems. After working for a while and injuring myself at work, I went back to college in 2003 at SUNY Oneonta for a double major in anthropology with a concentration in cultural anthropology of the Americas specifically Caribbean and a major in studio art with a minor in art history. After a couple years I left school for chronic health issues and the injuries. After working for a couple years I went back to school for a couple more years for the same majors and again had to drop out due to chronic health issues and injuries. I’ve been on disability since but I still volunteer in the arts wherever I can, paint, draw, take photos, and now I’ve been learning how to make videos and I do some graphic design as well have started reversing some of my lifetime chronic health issues and have even put some into remission. Visual arts aren’t my only interest either. I absolutely love music, I can’t work on art without music. I was in school chorus from grade school through part of high school, was in Otsego all county choir freshman year of high school and involved in high school musicals in drama club, and I was in church choir through grade school. I also sew and have a bunch more creative interests, it just happens when you’re immersed in the arts your whole life.
In the year prior to going back to college for the last time I started a series of pop art acrylic paintings. I took photos of some of my artwork to CANO (Community Arts Network of Oneonta) in Oneonta, NY and ended up getting a show for my acrylic paintings in the Kubiak Gallery in January 2007 or 2008. I had a room for all my paintings and it was joint with glassblower and former Hartwick College art professor Erik Halverson and one of Andy Warhol’s master printmakers. I wish I can remember his name but I do remember he’d had a massive stroke and painted with a paintbrush in his mouth on torn-up cardboard. Twelve of my paintings were on display in the gallery. I painted them so smooth that people that came to my opening assumed they were vector drawings screenprinted on board. I had started college again just after the opening of my show and one of my art professors was aware of it so she took the class to CANO early in the semester so the students could see another student’s work in a gallery show.
The voodoo doll painting with the hearts, that’s called Voodoo Love. The symbol in the background is the veve for the Voodoo lwa Erzulie Freda. It’s the painting that got me my show so I drew my own version of the veve and got it tattooed on the inside of my left forearm. I was also taking Caribbean cultural anthropology courses at the time while my professor was writing a textbook on Caribbean folklore (Caribbean Folklore: A Handbook by Donald Hill) and asked if he could take a photo of it for the book as an example of the spread of Caribbean culture. He also loved my voodoo doll paintings so much he bought Voodoo Revenge and had it on display in the reception area of his office at SUNY Oneonta. Donald passed some years ago but I still think of him fondly.
I also took a watercolor class in that same time frame and one of the paintings I painted for my final projects was accepted in the SUNY Oneonta juried art show in 2008 and it won best watercolor painting in show.
Over the years I’ve had some hand surgeries and some other issues so I took a bit of a hiatus from art from the most part. I moved from doing such tight, detailed work and forced myself to explore and loosen up and I’m really enjoying the results.
This one is called Angel Eye. I painted/drew this in 2024 with india and acrylic inks. I didn’t prepare for this one at all with sketches or anything. I just sat down, drew what was in my head in blue-tinted water and filled in the rest. I let the painting reveal itself as I went and that’s the process I prefer these days.
This one is called Across the Ages and I think this might be my favorite of all my artwork. I painted the canvas with splashes of Golden Artist Colors high flow acrylic paint and water, using it like watercolor and adding a bit of salt. Then I cut out a few images from books. The celestial map is from an old encyclopedia, the angel and madonna I cut out from a vintage Fra Angelico coffee table art book and I painted them in with Golden high flow acrylics. Then I layered them in between layers of Golden clear leveling gel with high flows and heavy gel medium. I also used some mica pigments mixed in with some of the gel medium. There’s a lot of layers, the merkebah I made using two different size printouts, layered with leveling gel then peeled off the back when dry to make a photo transfer then layered those on the canvas with layers of gel and color in between and on top. It took a lot of time, A LOT of drying time, but the outcome is so satisfying and I loved seeing the progress every time I finished a layer. Each layer is a different painting. The plasma around the merkabah is based on an orb I saw flying across the sky in Pueblo, CO July 2024 outside of the Blo Back Gallery when I traveled to help out with the Third Eye Carnival that summer that expanded into a large ball of plasma, then shrink back into an orb and continue traveling across the sky. I wanted to get that in some kind of art and it ended up working its way into this piece, which I began within a few weeks of getting back home from Colorado. I hand delivered it to its home in Chico, CA where I traveled in March 2025 to help out with the Maker’s Muse Festival at Maker Radio/Chico Fab Labs. It seems appropriate that it started with one event and ended in another place because of another event I helped plan. This was an experimental piece for me and now that I know what to do better and what not to do I’ll be ready for my next one which has already been started.
Another one of my more recent favorites is Vibrate. It’s a smaller piece, 8”x10”, done in Derwent water-soluble graphite pencil with Qor watercolors lined with handmade gold watercolors from Glimmery Watercolors (they’re legit, I love their watercolors, they’re beautifully pigmented and they’re very affordable especially for handmade watercolors!) on Blick hot press cotton watercolor paper. I see the vibration and color of music and sometimes it crackles like this so it was fun just letting loose and letting whatever comes out come out.
I have a lot more artwork you can see from over the past couple decades in my deviantART.com gallery as well as my photography and some of my graphic design/digital art. I’ve also been learning how to edit videos and you can see pretty much all of my work through The Anartist Collective and all our channels. I’m also uploading shorter finished videos to my deviantART gallery. I started taking photos well before I got my first camera for my eighth birthday using my mom’s camera. While in high school I used one of the local studio photographer’s Pentax SLR cameras he loaned to students who showed promise in photography. I used it to take photos for the high school yearbook and newspaper as well as practice taking photos with a SLR camera. I bought my own film SLR camera around 2000 and my first digital SLR a few years later. I’ve taken photos with all sorts of cameras and currently have a dSLR but I really prefer my phone camera. I can take it anywhere with me and get all the interesting things I see while out and about without having to carry a heavy bag full of camera equipment and the quality is excellent these days. I do miss film photography and I hope to get back into it someday. Here’s some examples of my photography and digital art.
This is my first music video type video made using CapCut video editor and scenes cut from the 1962 movie Carnival of Souls. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that I finally know how to edit video because I’ve been wanting to make art/music videos for decades! There will definitely be more coming in the future. And all you have to do is follow The Anartist Collective and watch the videos to keep up on most of my video work. It’s how I’ve been learning how to do everything and I really do have so much fun making videos.
There won’t be a video from me for my artist spotlight. I feel uncomfortable enough recording video for the collective and I designed these spotlights to be done in any way the creative artist feels comfortable with, from video and audio interviews to self-written essays and articles. I’m weird and awkward and I’m painfully aware of it. I have speech issues and always have. I also feel super weird about staring at a blank screen with no one on the other end just talking at…nothing. It’s so freaking weird and I honestly don’t know how podcasters can do it. Hats off to everyone that can talk at a blank screen to yourself over and over again. Does it ever get any better? Any less awkward? Who knows, perhaps I don’t want to get used to it. I’ve been socially isolated for years living out in the middle of nowhere central NY in Norwich where I have virtually no social interaction on a daily basis. I already talk to myself enough as it is. If I’m recording video or anything like that I think I prefer for someone to be on the other end and having a good conversation and learning new things about others. And that’s what I made The Anartist Collective for. I started it when I was getting back into my artwork and photography and was building a website for myself. I thought it was a bit excessive having all the room for so little work. I’m not a prolific artist, I’m not creating new artwork constantly and there are times where I can go months and months not working on physical artwork (though I’ll be working through other creative outlets"), and I’m always finding new talented people, and a lot of multitalented people. I wanted a place to share all the creative artists I know and continue to meet and it’s just expanded from there. I want everyone to get to know creative artists the way that I get to know them, as holistic human beings, as friends, as family, because we are all part of the creative collective consciousness. I have always believed that creative artists are channels for the divine. I felt it as a child and I feel it so much more as an adult and I think if we as a creators work on our craft with that in mind amazing things will happen in this world. The act of creating art and really anything at all is alchemy. You take all these little bits and pieces of things and make one whole thing out of it and that’s exactly what alchemy is and I want to put a fire under everyone’s butt to go out and be alchemists and channels of the divine. Have you always wanted to paint but never think of yourself as an artist? If you paint, you’re an artist so do it! Have you ever listened to your favorite music and wish you could do that? Start singing, buy a cheap guitar and start learning. Who cares how you sound, practice makes perfect and you’re still doing something new. Have a favorite hobby you put aside years ago and really miss doing? Put aside a few minutes a day and start doing it again! Everyone can put aside 10 minutes a day. The Anartist Collective Creative Arts Magazine is for sharing all the ways people create beautiful things, showing the process and the end results as well as why people do the things they do and through that those people will share the creative artists and arts they know of and on and on. It’ll be a daisy chain of the creative arts and I am so excited about this relaunch!
Because The Anartist Collective is for sharing everyone and all of the creative arts as well as a crowdsourced effort access to everything is free. I run this myself and I can barely afford to live but I pay for subscriptions and services out of my own pocket unless I get donations. We don’t have any sponsors (I’m not exactly against it, it’s just not a thing right now) and I have to set up a store page for merchandise so donations would be greatly appreciated. You can donate to The Anartist Collective using direct donations on our Linktree, directly to me if you just want to tip me using direct donation links on my Linktree for the work I do, or you can buy some of my art. I do have some pieces for sale. I have to fix my Ko-Fi shop but if there’s anything in my deviantART gallery you’re interested in feel free to ask me if it’s available and if it is we’ll talk further. You can DM me here or email me at shellyolmstead@gmail.com. I’ll edit in my Ko-Fi shop link once I get it fixed.
And now that I have the first spotlight taken care of, published and my own introduction out of the way, on to the artist interviews! I’m super stoked, I have people lined up and I have a lot more to ask. And there’s a lot more that I have planned for the future!
