Meet Chelsey Magaoay | Painter, Illustrator, and Entrepreneur

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chelsey Magaoay and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Chelsey, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking.
To be frank, I’m not a fan of risk. The idea of risk often leaves me in decision paralysis and sometimes churns my stomach. However, I understand that I’ll never make good art without risk, and I’ll never learn about the depths of what I can accomplish. In the last few years, I’ve realized that playing it safe has only ever stifled my creativity and kept me from making the art that could have been. Something I regret.

Lately, I’ve been looking at building a healthy relationship with risk. In 2023, I divorced my long-time partner of 12 years and that sent me down a rabbit hole of taking a risk on myself. We came together when we were kids, just 15 and 16. I built my identity alongside someone else, so leaving what was once comfortable and whole to live in a different city and fully pursue being an artist felt like a bigger risk than getting married before I could even have a legal drink of alcohol. 2024 was my year of risk. I learned how to live alone and be comfortable dictating my own life without the support of a partner. I told myself I’d give it a year to see if I’m capable of being a full-time artist. That’s terrifying because I’m too proud to fall under the label of being a starving artist, but if I never took that chance, I wouldn’t have learned amazing life lessons.

As a 27-year-old divorcee, I could have relished the safety of moving back home with my parents in a rural mountain town in Northern California. That would have been the financially sane route to go, but I traded the comforts of home and safety for a year of finding what makes me feel whole. I moved to San Diego to live where the weather is perfect. I wanted to be around people who are transplants also trying to make it in this large, expensive city. I moved here to experience a life that would fuel my artistic practice.

So despite opening this question with a hate for risk, risk can open up beautiful opportunities. In just this last year, I had no idea where my art could take me. I wouldn’t have met incredible like-minded people, and I wouldn’t have displayed my art in public spaces. The amount of growth I accomplished in just a year of taking a risk on myself is the fuel to making your passions a reality.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I want the world to know that there should be more love, appreciation, and passion for art whether it’s painting, music, or filmmaking. We’re living in a time where content comes and goes, but we often overlook the time and dedication that goes into a person’s craft. It’s an amazing talent that I think gets lost in all the noise that is social media.

There’s no hiding from the fact that I really, really like flowers. As a kid, I’ve always had an affinity towards nature from looking at books with vintage illustrations and specimen drawings. I also love looking at how Monet and Van Gogh depicted their flowers, and how 17th-century Dutch artists painted flowers to reflect the culture and economy of their time. Flowers can convey deeper meaning. They can just exist as they are and be beautiful. They are my favorite muse.

I often find myself creating with oils, photography, and digital illustration. I move and cycle through mediums to inform how I create. Photography helps me practice composition. I use composition practice to compose my oil paintings. The process of layering oil inspires how I approach watercolor painting. Then, traditional art informs my approach to digital art. Much like the cycle of flowers, I feel like my creativity blooms through experimenting with different mediums.

Lately, my favorite medium and subject have been these watercolor flower eyes. I’m still piecing together what they could mean or where they come from. I just think they’re excitingly weird and beautiful, but I have theories to my obsession. One could come from this idea that we can be captivated by beauty, but because its nature is fleeting, we stop and stare to appreciate beauty until it’s gone. The eyes in the flowers are just staring back as if to give the onlooker the same treatment. Additionally, it could stem from my fixation with eyes and being aware of where attention visually goes. Attention is so valuable these days that I often ask myself and others, what visually captivates us that we cannot peel our eyes away? What excites us to say, “Oh my gosh! That looks so cool!” Looking at the brilliance of color in flowers makes me feel that way without hesitation.

I’m still working on myself professionally. I am an artist and have been for a decade now, but I’m still navigating art as a business. I think this is the hardest thing I am trying to overcome, but the most exciting. I think many art school graduates have a hard time getting through this part of being an art, which is making a living from our work and being able to sustain it. The biggest challenge I’ve overcome is just putting work out into the universe. I’ve done that through pop-up events, selling in stores, and posting to social media. I’ve struggled through the consistency of making art because I no longer have the feedback that art school provided. Publicly displaying work is vulnerable, but work can’t be created in a vacuum. In 2024, I’ve done a lot of pop-up events from makers markets to having a table set up at breweries. Being able to talk to random people about my art practice has given me so much confidence in making work that I believe in. It’s not easy because I think many artists identify as introverts, but discussing art with others has been the most informative to my success thus far.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned about being a working artist is just trusting the process. It’s cheesy, whether it’s in making or building an audience to support your work, little steps forward in the process is worth challenging and seeing through.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I love the neighborhood I live in. It’s been a dream of mine to live in Normal Heights since I went to college at San Diego State University. It’s no La Jolla or Little Italy, but it sits perfectly in the middle of San Diego and has the quaint charm I love about my hometown in Northern California. Normal Heights is sweet, walkable, and has many small businesses that are never short of interesting people.

If my best friend were here for a week, I would want them to have a whole snapshot of why I love San Diego so much, starting with the neighborhood that makes me excited to get out of the house. In the mornings, we’d go to different coffee shops from Bica for their Portuguese egg tarts and perfectly crafted lattes to Dark Horse Coffee for their signature honey-cinnamon latte, The Champ. I also can’t forget to mention Maya Moon for their cacao drinks and calming space for anyone to gather good energy. For lunch, I’d take us to Madi on Adams Ave for their colorful aesthetic and crowd-pleasing brunch menu. Maybe one of the days, we grab some takeout Mediterranean from the Sahara Market to take to a local grassy park with dogs to watch. Lastly, for dinner, I’d grab a beer and pizza at the iconic Blind Lady Ale House across the street from my apartment for something casual. On another night, we’d go enjoy a whimsical take on classic American-Chinese food at Fortunate Sons and end the evening with the nationally recognized gelato shop, An’s Dry Cleaning. They take you on a flavor tour that keeps you coming back despite the incredibly long line.

All of these places have unique approaches to hospitality and food. I think that’s another element that fuels me as an artist. “Good food, good mood” is what I always tell myself even on days where I lack creativity and motivation. Food is necessary but enjoying it in visually inspiring places with good company and conversation makes it even better. It always fuels my creative spirit. It’s why I often find myself working in these places, whether it’s drawing or getting administrative work done for my business.

It’s incredibly peaceful spending time in these places just to share a moment with a friend and get glimpses of other people’s lives. The motions of life and conversations inspire a lot of my work. All I want to convey is beauty in fleeting moments. Right now, that’s conveyed through my love of flowers, expressing emotions and sentiments for the little moments of joy and shared experience.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I would not be who I am today without the wisdom from conversations with my friends and family. I also wouldn’t be here without the random conversations I’ve had with people in general. I’m a firm believer that the power of conversation can open up your mind to accomplishing more.

Following my divorce, I needed a lot of love and a lot of talk therapy. That period of my life was painful and I would not have survived if I grieved alone. The power of conversation in its genuine, unfiltered form is the reason for my success. Talk therapy has been the biggest contributor to the work that I do. My favorite way of learning more is being able to just talk to someone, even if it’s a stranger you might never see again. In those exchanges, I often learn a lot about myself. I love having deep and meaningful conversations.

I dedicate this story to my family, who still love me despite having difficult conversations that could be left unsaid. I dedicate this to my good friends, who explore vague ideas, what-ifs, and dreams in conversations over food and drinks. I dedicate this to the strangers who have confided in me, another stranger, to have a shared experience that reminds us that we’re all just humans trying to make sense of the world. I also dedicate this to strangers turned friends. Without striking up a conversation at a monthly design meetup (Creative Mornings) with Richard Richard Richards, aka RicPics, I wouldn’t be here rambling about art and conversation.

Website: https://chelseymagaoay.com

Instagram: @rosecoloredchels.art

Image Credits
All image credits belong to Chelsey Magaoay