Drawing has always been a wonder to me, mainly because I can’t draw a stick figure, but that is besides the point. Art, of any form, is self-expression. Art tells the stories of our emotions, our fears, everything can be poured out onto a canvas, a song, a photo, etc. Queer people cling to art, because it can tell our stories. However, we like to limit ourselves at musical theatre. We as humans are multifaceted in nature, and so are many artists. However, said artists have boxes to check and bills to pay so they create formulas for success. We as queer people though are meant to challenge the “norms” that have placed in our society. So art should be no different.
This week's interviewee is a medium, a painter, a sculptor, a photographer and all around talented artist, Allison Phamarkis. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Allison works with different kinds of visual art and pairs it beautifully with spiritual work. She believes in being a channel for muse in her art, letting it take her wherever. She has an eye for memorizing pictures, emotive sculptures, or hypnotizing paintings. She is also a queer woman, who toches on her expeirnces, and who is testament that we can do it all. We can be multifaceted in the arts and not be ashamed, Allison Pharmarkis is proof that is it possible.
Q1. What inspires your artistic choices ?
“I have had different things inspire my choices over the years. Sometimes it was trying a new technique or a visual I got. Over the last three years it has been geared towards my spiritual growth. In my case, I have documented my spiritual developmental ebacsue I felt like a lot of people around me were going through similar things, I found that when I shared my experiences, people would identify with me sharing with them. I realized that there was something happening here where I would share my process and people would share theirs, and then I could put that in my art. I realized it needed to be strictly spiritual experiences. I do mediumship work as well and I let that inform my fine art and sometimes I will channel specifically for artwork or healing they need when they look at my work. I infuse that with hope and transformations for them. I aim to connect with people in a mediumistic way. I did not realize that’s what I was doing for a long time and when I did I began to really work with that process. I also shoot inanimate objects as if they were people. I try to find the personality if it’s a flower or a vase or something like that. It sometimes can be that I am picking up the personality of someone who has owned that thing, or the life of a flower. So I am not constrained by things like that.”
Q2. Does being a part of the LGBTQ+ community affect your work?
“I think it affects my work in that I ama queer artist, and I think that all queer artists should be heard, espeically what it’s like to walk through this life as a queer person. So inherently, yes it does have something to do with it. The other way it affects my work is that, some other queer person will see my work and they can see that they can also be an artist, and working full-time as one. I am 40, so growing up I didn’t have a ton of queer role models. We live in an advantageous time because it’s more accepted than it was, we still have a long way to go, but it’s more accepted. That’s why I think it’s super important for queer people to speak up and claim that when they are putting themselves out there, so we can all identify and stick together.”
Q3. Who are some of your favorite photographers and why?
“My favorite photographer was a man named Martin Parr. He was super popular around the 70’s and the 80’s and he shot mainly portiature in the U.K. His technique is that he used direct flash on subjects and he would do it even in the daylight. It would really pull out the saturation and color and you really got to see the vibrancy of a person. Nothing fell in the background because everything was lit up. The person in the corner was just as important as the main subject. I loved his work and I loved how he could be a fly on the wall. You could tell he would capture the rawness of what was happening in a room or scene and it was almost as if he wasn’t even there. Which, I love because there is so much beauty that happens. Like when you set up a composition shot, you set up the composition and you wait for people to interact and watch what was happening within the frame and when you find that there are many stories going on, you just click the shutter. He was a master at that, I was totally taken by his work when I saw it, I still am today and I try to figure what was going through his mind. For visual artists, Louise Bourgeois she was definitely ahead of her time and she examined what it was like to be in a female body. She really communicated that through her art. I really loved that growing up, I was in a female body and I was trying to figure out, and there was a lot of shame and she really spoke to that in her work. She didn’t limit her medium, she would paint, draw, sculpt, and she would let the spirit flow through her. I relate a lot to that, I paint, draw, sculpt, do soft sculpture, photography and I kind of had that similar thing where I follow where the muses take me.”
Q4. Tell me about your business!
“My main business is my mediumship business and I started that about 3-4 years ago. I have always had the gift of mediumship but as a kid I had always had the fear that a ghost was going to reveal itself to me and I was going to have a heart attack! It wasn’t until my late 20’s- early 30’s that I started doing a lot more automic drawing, and it was a picture and not words like, ‘You’re going to die in three days…’ I worked with a reader in New Mexico and she was like, ‘Your spiritual art is your life work.’ I was like but I do all this photography, I was trying to be famous with all that stuff, and she was like, ‘You’ll continue to do that but you're supposed to be putting your hands on people. She was like, ‘Just try to hold hands with someone and draw.” I figured I would try it with somebody, do a painting that was different from ones I had done before. I tried with a friend and all this information came out, I was not expecting to get mediumship, I thought I was gonna draw. We both sat outside like woahhhh. All these friends that had passed had come through and it was just a lot. I was just as astounded as she was. Then I started practicing on people that I didn’t know as much, like people from coffee shops who I was acquainted with, and then people who I did not know at all. I was getting all this accurate information and then I started charging little by little until it turned into a business. Now I’m just rolling with it. It’s fantastic, I love it, and it was not what I expected. I knew I was going to do something with my mediumship and art but I didn’t know like this. It caused me a lot of stress, to try and figure what it was going to be. The minute it clicked was when I stopped trying to figure it out, and let spirit guide me.”
Q5. What is the biggest obstacle you’ve had to overcome with your artwork or business?
“To be honest with my business it was trusting that I could do that as a sole vocation. I am of that generation where my parents were like pick one thing and stick with it. I was always pushed towards professional things/careers. It was like if you’re going to do photography, go shoot weddings or something like that, where there is guaranteed money. The prospect of stepping out, running my own business, being the sole dependent, and it being something as fruity as mediumship. The biggest challenge is trusting that I can run my business and I always looked around at my other friends with business and thought I don’t have a seat at that table. They must have something that I don’t have. But they were like, ‘I’m just doing manifestation work, and showing up.’ I am at a point, I started doing my mediumship work a year ago before COVID started, where the business is moving. With the art stuff the biggest hurdle was that the art was for me. I had to make my art for me. I was trying to have my art fit somewhere, like I would be like my art could fit in this gallery. I was really struggling with the mindset of others and what they wanted to see. The way that I got over that was that if I am creating art, I need to impress myself. I want to walk into a gallery, with my art, and be like ‘I want that piece.’ I was setting the bar, where I was the bar.”
Q6. When did you realize that you wanted to be an artist?
“When I was in high school, I did not want to go to college. I was to travel in a pickup truck, go cross-country, and make art. I wanted to be free. My teacher took my artwork and submitted it to Scholastic Art Awards without my permission. I ended up winning a Gold Key award and got a scholarship to go to art school. I went to college, and I did not complete college at that point. I did it for two years and I was like, I gotta go. But it was at that point that in art school, when you do all the foundation work, I just knew this was what I was going to do. I felt like I didn’t school for some reason, I know think that was dumb because that school is awesome, but it was at that point that I felt that I needed to be doing this in my life. The second time that it hit me, was last year. I was working in film the last seven years, I did a number of different positions, I was feeling like this isn’t enough time for my art and my mediumship. So now I am able to do my fine art and my business.”
Q7. Any advice for aspiring photographers, artists, or even entrepreneurs?
“I would say, just to trust your intuition. If you don’t get the results you want right away, it doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to be doing it. That just means that you need to keep putting more time into it, and commit. Some people give up before it has even had the time to land. Something solid and lasting doesn’t always happen right away. If you feel it in your heart that is what you’re guided to do, stay true to that, and cling to it. It will navigate you to where you need to be in life, it may not be where you want to be but it should be in the general area.”
My first art gallery was in 2017 in Sacramento, California. I had never before seen so many beautiful paintings, sculptures, in a pure art form. It almost made me emotional almost, looking at the pure emotion being displayed. My favorite was a woman who was naked wrapped in a light piece of cloth. She was looking down and a flower was laying in her hair. It struck me and had me stop instantly. I still remember that picture and how it made me feel. Art does that. It tells a story, an art piece can be a whole book series. An adventure. Allison Pharmarkis is someone who makes art like the piece I saw a few years ago. She also makes all the other art I saw throughout the gallery. Being queer is already outside the norm, being someone who does more than one specific art style is also outside the box. We live constantly outside of the majority, don’t start sticking yourselves in a box now.
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