Interview with Allison Freund

It was unbearably hot in Kansas City. The Midwest sun ruthlessly shone down on me as I walked from the street up to Allison’s apartment. She lives in a block of charming buildings in midtown, complete with beautiful moldings, wooden floors, & long windows. This is accompanied by patchy air conditioning & crumbling bathrooms that are constructed out of closets; an endearing charm.

I met Allison at a collective artist group that a mutual friend had started & was immediately drawn to her presence in both her character & artwork. She specializes in custom paperwares that are made with styled paper, paint, & florals. A look into her work is much like stepping through the looking glass into a world of feminine color & flowing whimsical structure.

Allison greeted me at the door with sunshine itself pouring out of her, both welcoming & genuinely bubbly. As a relatively cynical & closeted person, her warm was refreshing. As we sat down on her sofa, a three-legged rescue cat, Tulip, burrowed into our legs. As we talked, her words brought more than solidarity to mind. Her responses were full of familiarity & a deep mutual understanding of the process behind art. 

AA: I recently found out that you have a full time job that doesn’t overlap with what you do personally as an artist. How do you balance your time?

AF: “I definitely try & have them feed into each other as best as I can. I think of it as being creative & using the skills & passions that God has given to me. I’ve definitely been blessed to find a job that pays me to be creative. The process for what I do at my full time job is very organized & planned out with scheduling. I’m really trying to soak up everything there & take pieces & structure that I like & put it into what I do personally. I want to always enjoy what I do when I come home at the end of the day, & luckily I still do! It’s definitely an outlet to my full time job, & it makes me feel recharged & re-energized to soak up what inspires me.”

AA: Where do you think your desire/need to be inspired comes from?

AF: “You know, I think it was something that I was born with, but it was also something that I developed & learned in habit from my mom. From a young age, I would always be looking at her victorian magazines that had decorating & gardening. She was always so good at organizing her research & inspiration, & I wanted to do that the way she did. She had all of these fashion & illustration books that I would fake flip through, because I wanted to be with her in the moment, but one day I started really looking at it & ripping out pages. I always thought when I was little that talented & creative thinkers were born with those ideas & that people were lucky to come up with the ideas that they did. But I’ve realized that, no, we have to derive what we see & take in, & fill ourselves up with that inspiration in order to make it up on our own.”

AA: What was your process in going from appreciating your mom’s creativity to making it your own – being in the audience of creating to the very act?

AF: “My very first inspiration was the movie The Little Mermaid. I don’t remember what age I was, but I was really young & had seen it a million times & always loved it. I began to realize that I wasn’t interested in the story at all, the songs or even the characters, it was the colors & the underwater coral & fish, how beautiful all the colors came together & organic shapes & marine life blended. So I wanted to make my own underwater…backdrop {laughing}, it was the ugliest thing you’ll ever see! It’s still in my parent’s basement. It was this big hunk of styrofoam that I painted blue & I got a bunch of plants outside & pasted them on there. I loved how the movie did a really great job at showing how the light goes into the water & reflects on to the life & makes everything a little sparkly. It looked so beautiful the way the light breaks off & disperses into the water, & it was the first time that I had taken something I loved & wanted to make my own interpretation of it. I took aluminum foil & broke it into pieces & mosaic-ed it onto the styrofoam. My mom was so excited that I was doing that, & it stuck with me all throughout school, the mindset of taking something that I’m attracted to & making my own interpretation of it."

AA: How did your growth as an individual take shape in school - as a creative?

AF: "I really struggled with making my own identity & look my first two years of college. I was in the illustration program & a big part of illustration as a degree is choosing, in the beginning, between a commercial illustrator, doing whatever a company wants, or making a look & style that people come to you for. It didn’t really develop for me until about the halfway point of school. I was really drawn to cut paper & the 3 dimensional quality of it, how that looked. I still loved painting & typography, & even though that was a little discouraged {to use on illustration} I always tried to break the rules. I loved hand lettering & how that communicated along with an image. I stared merging all of those things together, & it didn’t come together completely until my senior year. On one of my bigger projects I dreamed up & created a kind of ‘fake company’ that I actually wanted to do: a paper company. It would do wedding invitations, greeting cards, custom stationary, because I loved things being customized, the individual stories behind it. It ended up being a dream that I was really excited to do - beyond school."

AA: We’ve talked a lot about dreaming tying into inspiration before – what’s been your experience in dreaming up ideas?

AF: “In first grade, my teacher called my parents to come to parent-teacher conferences. She told my parents that I had a problem daydreaming in class, because I would sit there at my desk & daydream too much. & my mom got mad at her & said that it was completely fine for me to be daydreaming. & I am so thankful for that, that she never stopped me from dreaming. It’s usually looked at as a negative thing, that’s why the teacher was so concerned. But it’s really not. Sometimes I do have to remind myself to focus, but when are we going to come up with our creative ideas if we are not dreaming, out of focus? It's wonderful.”

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See more at: Allison Freund