We had the good fortune of connecting with Riley Lubich and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Riley, how has your perspective on work-life balance evolved over time?
Work life balance is something that has historically been pretty hard for me to manage. I have a tendency toward all or nothing thinking – if I’m not going all-in, all the time, I convince myself that what I’m doing doesn’t count, which can get pretty toxic pretty fast. I also have a history with mental health disorders, so I’m very predispositioned to burnout.
Before I made the shift to full time artist, I was a teacher pursuing a creative career on the side. I felt like I had absolutely no free time – I would wake up before the sun came up, go teach all day, then come home and make art all night. I had myself convinced that I was so busy that I didn’t have time for anything else, and if I did commit time elsewhere, I wasn’t trying hard enough to make it as a creative. I stopped spending enough time outside and started neglecting my physical health. Even setting aside time to eat a meal in the evening with my partner became a source of emotional turmoil. I was taking this person who was already very prone to depression and anxiety, taking away all of her positive coping mechanisms, and putting an INSANE amount of pressure on her. But it had to be okay because it was all in the name of realizing my dreams, right? It was completely unsustainable, and I consider myself very fortunate that I never had to find out what would have happened if I had kept rolling that way.
What changed for me is what happened to a lot of people – the pandemic hit and I no longer had a job. I think it’s kind of cool how so many of us experienced this forced, collective work-life-balance awakening. In my case, the pendulum took a huge swing. I stopped teaching and took a long break from art. I started focusing more on taking care of myself physically and mentally, then I moved to Moab, UT, which is where everything changed. I spent almost all of my time in my beloved desert with my dogs, hiking or on the river, and after a long time, once I had finally started feeling like myself again, I started picking up some art projects on the side. When it became clear that it was time to start looking for work, I knew that I didn’t want to go back to teaching and I had started making a little bit of money selling my work, so I decided to be an artist.
As a creative, your work inspires your life, but your life also inspires your work – it’s a lot harder to delineate between the two. You would think this would lead to a really poor work life balance, but my experience has been the opposite. My work is my passion and I’ve devoted my life to it, but I can’t do that work effectively without feeling inspired, and I get my inspiration from my life experiences, so the two things have sort of forcibly evened out. I spend a lot of time in my studio creating, but I also spend probably an equal amount of time outside with my dogs, on the river, under the stars, and smelling flowers, all things that leave me feeling both inspired and mentally/emotionally/physically taken care of.
I think what I’ve learned is that balance is not a state of being – it’s more about finding homeostasis. I don’t block out specific amounts of time for certain things, but I work until I’m feeling uninspired, then I take a nap or I go for a hike and come back to work when I’m feeling recharged. Sometimes I spend all of my time working, like when I have an event or a product launch coming up, but then I’ll take an entire week off and spend it in a canyon with my friends. But then again, I’ve never really been a 40 hour work week kind of person. The way that our society is structured, this kind of balance is a privilege that’s really only afforded to me by working for myself, but I’m okay with that. I can take my time, listen to my body, work when I feel inspired, and stop before I burn out, and I think on a basic level, that’s what we can be striving for.
Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I’m primarily a landscape and botanical painter, but one of the things I’m most proud of recently has been my ability to follow my interest and take my background in those things into other types of media that catch my attention. This year I’ve taken up textile art, block printing, and bookmaking, and I’ve incorporated all of those things into my regular art practice. I tend to get bored really easily, so it’s important that I’m able to switch things up and try new pursuits from time to time.
I came to where I am professionally in a way that was neither very hard nor very easy, which feels very true to myself, but I covered a lot of that journey previously in my talk about work life balance. What I touched on lightly, my history with mental illness, plays a much bigger part in my story. I’ve struggled with my mental health for as long as I can remember, a struggle which a lot of creatives have in common. For much of my life, I have struggled so deeply that it was nearly impossible for me to hold a full time job or run on any kind of schedule that wasn’t my own. What I’ve learned though, from a lot of experience and a lot of therapy, is that it’s okay to not fit inside of the box that society has built for us. Not everyone is programed to the 40 hour work week, and just because it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean you’re broken. Instead of trying to force myself to fit into a lifestyle that wasn’t suited for me, breaking myself in the process, I had to find a way to live that allowed me to thrive as I am, and now that I’ve accepted that I find that it’s a lot easier to love myself.
One of the things I love about landscape painting is its ability to take you to a time and a place. In a sort of backwards way, this is why I don’t care much for realism – I’m much more concerned with conveying how a place felt than getting the colors right or the scale exact. I love it when people look at my paintings and say, “I know that place! I went there last year! Thats exactly what it felt like to be there.” Moments like that are what I feel most proud of as an artist.
Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Moab is pretty small and not exactly known for it’s happenings, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to do! The first thing we would do is hit the river. There’s a section of the Colorado called the Moab Daily that has a good assortment of fairly mellow rapids and makes for a lovely, splashy day of floating in the water, and the scenery is out of this world. There are of course also Arches and Canyonlands National Parks just outside of town, but there are plenty of places outside the parks to explore right in the vicinity of Moab. We would spend lots of time laying in the sun like lizards, looking at flowers, and learning about biological soil crusts, then we would have dinner at 98 Center, and end the day by driving just ten minutes outside of town to look at The Milky Way.
Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d like to give a shout out to the art community here in Moab. I wouldn’t be where I am in my career without their support and encouragement. What’s been especially helpful is being able to see people that I know in real life succeeding at the thing that I want to do. It makes it feel tangible and gives me the confidence I need to keep trying to live this dream. Specifically my friends Molly (@coyotecrafted) and Pine Bones (@pine.bones) for lighting my creative fire on a daily basis. I also want to thank Rebecca, the owner of our local gallery, Moab Made, for not only taking a chance on me and making me believe in myself, but creating a space in our tiny town that makes a community like this possible. And always, my wonderful partner Ben, for feeding me and taking me for walks and always encouraging me to chase my dreams.
Website: rileylubichart.com
Instagram: @rileyluu
Facebook: Riley Lubich Art
Other: You can also find my work locally at Moab Made and Back of Beyond Books
Image Credits
Laura Borichevsky, Molly McGovern