By: Kami L. Rice
LIVING IN THE PLACE WITH UNLIMITED INSPIRATION is important when your livelihood depends on being inspired. Creative Spillage’s Laura Amstutz found that place when she moved across the Cumberland River to East Nashville in 2005.
“My entire life revolves around East Nashville now,” she smiles from her seat at Ugly Mugs, one of her favorite East Nashville haunts. “I moved to East Nashville because it represents the way I think life should be lived. Most everyone in East Nashville is pursuing some sort of dream.”
Though she’s been selling her artwork since 2005, 25-year-old Amstutz didn’t officially create her business until 2008. Now Creative Spillage is the umbrella for four different streams of work: sales of her paintings, commissioned artwork, creativity workshops and live performance painting.
Before it happened, Amstutz never expected to work full-time as an artist. Instead, she says, “Art was purely a way for me to express myself.” But people started noticing her paintings and connecting with them. And she started to believe she might be able to support herself through art.
After graduating from her Indiana high school, Amstutz began college as a studio art major, but she wasn’t painting then. Instead, she was doing pen and ink drawings and printmaking. Her work was realistic rather than abstract. Two years later, in 2004, she left Ball State University and moved to Nashville, where she has since completed a degree in ministry at Belmont University.
Amstutz says she moved to Nashville for healing. “Art school took a bit of my soul. It slowly whittled away at my creative soul and turned me into a technicality. I lost my artistic voice in art school.” In the process of finding it again, she traded her black and white, two-dimensional creative experience for the colorful, inspired, textured world that makes her paintings so distinctive.
“Her art is special in that her style is very unique,” says Molly Watson of Lululemon Athletica in Green Hills. A company that sells athletic apparel for yoga, as well as running, dancing and other sports, Lululemon has a Nashville showroom that hosts a rotating exhibit of Amstutz’s work. Watson says patrons regularly comment on the showroom’s warmth, which the paintings help create. The art fits right in with the showroom’s yoga themes because it is “whimsical and fun, but at the same time has an earthy feel to it,” Watson says.
For Amstutz art is about participation, not just observation. “The first thing I say to anyone who’s looking at a piece of my art is, ‘Feel free to touch it.’ In fact, I encourage [them to touch it],” she says, because that closes the gap between the person and the art.
Amstutz attributes part of her own healing to a shift from surviving life to really living it, being an active participant. She seeks to use her art to help others do the same thing. This is perhaps best embodied in her creativity workshops where she acknowledges that she basically does art therapy, though she doesn’t have specialized training in it. And that’s on purpose. She wants people to know that she found healing through art, so they can too.
One appreciative participant of Amstutz’s workshop is Nashville resident Lisa Davis, who works for Belmont’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. “The thing I loved most was that, for the first time since I was a child, I created something with no preconceived ideas, without thinking about where it would hang or what colors it matched,” Davis says, describing her workshop experience.
“There’s a freedom that’s felt. It’s such a safe environment where there’s no judgment. You can bare your soul on the canvas.” Amstutz holds the workshops in the studio of her beloved East Nashville rental home with its multi-acre yard. Davis says the workshops work because of who Amstutz is. “She’s wise beyond her years. She’s a very strong woman. And this will sound cheesy, but she radiates love and acceptance.”
From the workshops to the live performance painting Amstutz began doing this year, her work is permeated by a connection to people.
“My passion is people living life authentically,” she says, “but my language is art.”
In addition to helping people look inward, she also encourages them to look outward. “To me art is an invitation to see life from a different viewpoint than your own. It should inspire people to act and to have more authentic interaction with themselves and their community,” she says.
Amstutz recently began a new series of paintings inspired by the documentary Beyond Belief, which tells the story of two September 11 widows who started the charitable foundation Beyond the 11th to help widows in Afghanistan provide for their families. She’s now partnering with the nonprofit’s founders, exploring ways to raise funds for Afghani widows who have lost their shade, the protection their husbands provided.
People often romanticize artistic careers, says Amstutz. “My life isn’t glamorous, but it’s 100 percent authentically mine. It’s who I am at the core. But I don’t paint all day. I don’t sleep all day. I have a regimen. Sometimes I spend all day looking at finances. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
To others considering careers as artists, Amstutz says that taking care of yourself—spirit, mind and body—is essential because being an artist requires so much giving of self. She also recommends picking the brains of others who have done this before, pointing to fellow artists and others who have guided her as an artist, a businesswoman and a person.
For Amstutz, part of maintaining health comes in staying connected to others and to her East Nashville community. “If all I did was paint and be creative, I would be in my head all day and be removed from humanity,” she says.
This connection to the world outside her head is reflected in her paintings. As Judi Winfield-Ferri, executive director of the Margaret Maddox YMCA in East Nashville, says of Amstutz’s rotating exhibit in the lobby, “People are always drawn into Laura’s work.” Winfield-Ferri adds that it’s been wonderful to work with Amstutz. “We really like what she has to offer because it’s diverse and it represents East Nashville.”
And somehow it seems like that’s just how an artist’s relationship with her community should be: the community that provides her creative fuel is enriched by the fruit of the energy it offered her, creating a beautiful circle. ✪
“Check out Laura’s art at Ugly Mugs, Lululemon Athletica and the East Nashville YMCA.”
Tags: Main Street