Featured Friday: Meet Thea Fiore-Bloom, PHD

Happy Friday! Today, I am so excited to feature another creative on the blog - Thea Fiore-Bloom, PHD. Thea is an artist and writer who combines her love of art and literature to create book nook art pieces that tell beautiful stories. She is also owner and writer of the blog, The Charmed Studio, where she helps other artists write, create, and sell better by being themselves. Let’s get to know Thea!

Thanks for joining me, Thea! Let’s start off by getting to know more about you. Tell us a little bit about your background and your work.

I write a blog for heart-centered artists called The Charmed Studio. And I host The Charmed Studio Podcast to help creatives feel better, write better and sell better---by being themselves.

I'm also an assemblage artist, journalist, writing coach for creatives, and children's literacy volunteer.

"Cobalt Blue" by Thea Fiore-Bloom
Assemblage created in a vintage cigar box containing found objects and silver, moonstone, mirror, photos, and glass chunks.
4" x 5" x 9"
Photo by Scott Chanson

Can you tell us how you discovered your love for art?

The first memory I have of being bowled over by art, of loving it, was standing in front of Picasso's huge painting "Guernica" the Museum of Modern Art in NYC when I was like eight years old. So odd looking back at that because there I was, this little kid enraptured by this intricate line drawing of... the horrors of war. I came home and drew a detailed version of the painting in colored ballpoint pens on a piece of paper. I just remember I felt really alive and lined up inside seeing the painting and trying to recreate it. That was one of the first times I recall being wholly focused yet at peace like that. Focused yet at peace, in the same way, I would be when I was out beyond the stone wall near where I grew up looking for shed snake skins or feathers in the woods.

"Essence of Butterfly" by Thea Fiore-Bloom

Assemblage created in a vintage cigar box containing found objects, resin-filled apothecary jar with found butterfly wing, vintage sewing thread, ammonite button.

What is something you want your viewer to know about your work?

My book nook shelf inserts are a love child born from the unlikely union of Cabinets of Curiosity from the 1600s, classy historical dollhouse interiors, and junk-based assemblage art.

To populate the tiny worlds inside my cigar box dioramas I loot through my collections of miniature curios and odd natural history-related artifacts.

I tend to assemble strange combinations of objects. For example, I might take a found Monarch butterfly wing and suspend it in clear resin inside an antique apothecary jar next to some old jelly-bean-colored car fuses I had lying around that I love. I make these box dioramas to explore what provokes wonder within me.

But more importantly, I make my boxes in hopes of reminding the viewer of the mystery of her own mind, and the magic of her own memories. 

I see art-making as this gift box we all get to open. It's a message in a bottle sent from our soul to our mundane, day-to-day self. 

But it took me until the second half of my life to take the message out of the damn bottle and actually read it. The message said, "You get to be an artist too, just like the people you admire. Go be brave and try it"  It takes some of us longer than others to receive the message from our bottle or act on it. But it's never too late to uncork your bottle.

"Behind the Stone Wall" by Thea Fiore-Bloom

Assemblage created in a vintage cigar box containing found objects: toy car, gilded twigs, moss mirror, cork, photos.

In your work, you create beautiful, magical, and mysterious worlds inside book nook shelf inserts. Each world is unique and tells a different story. Can you walk us through your process of how you create these worlds and stories and what inspires them?

Thanks, Sarah for your kind words about my art. I'm a book lover and a writer so words form the invisible foundation for my assemblages and book nooks. I start with a myth, personal memory, or nighttime dream. I then journal or free-write on the elements of that particular myth, memory, or dream for pages and pages. These pages are often annotated with little illustrations. A day or two later I go back and circle words that stand out and seem important. I also take a highlighter and highlight specific objects I've mentioned in my writing. Sometimes I'll take out butcher paper and tape a few feet of it to the floor and make a mind map/collage of how these words and objects all may be connected. It's a wild mess of arrows and images if I'm on a roll.

Then I let go of all the words and images and start gathering small objects that feel like they belong to the story or had a significant place in the mindmap. I start working them around, repositioning them, juxtaposing them with different elements to find the right placement for them inside an old cigar box or other cool container.

Then I start to paint, sand, repaint, glue, unglue, curse, and usually run off to an obscure antique shop. I love to find just the right thing I'm missing like vintage, jade green, lucite dice or a miniature tin chicken coop from a long-lost dollhouse.

These kinds of odd touches hopefully make the whole thing sing the song I originally heard wanting to be sung when I was writing about the yet unborn box earlier.

I put functioning LED chandeliers or other lights into some of my book nook assemblages and often love to place small mirrors, tiny old model cars, and all manner of odd stuff in if it fits in the web of the story the box was born from.

What is the most exciting thing about the process of creation?

All of it thrills me. The only thing I don't like is the final stages of packing and shipping the art when it sells, I get so nervous bits and bobs will detach. Or that the buyer will see it close up and think it's too strange, but fortunately that seems to be just irrational fear now. Artists have lots of fears we don't say out loud right? They usually center around approval issues. I'm trying to get better on that front.

"Bullet Hole Road" by Thea Fiore-Bloom

Assemblage created in a vintage cigar box containing found objects and resin-filled apothecary jar, vintage papers.

You are also the writer for the blog “The Charmed Studio” (which is wonderful and so insightful). Can you tell us a little bit more about the blog and who the “heart-centered” artist is?

Wow, good question. The heart-centered artist is someone just like you or me Sarah. A sensitive creative who loves being immersed in the process of bringing these wondrous things dancing inside our hearts and souls into physical being out in the world. Yes, as heart-centered artists and/or writers we might like to sell our work but selling is not what got us to jump up and join the dance of art in the first place. We create art or write about imaginative strange worlds first and foremost not to be famous- but because it connects us up with a force greater than ourselves.

How did you find your unique “why” and how do you stay grounded in it?

Being me, I stumbled on to my why awkwardly and accidentally while looking desperately for something else. I was stressed and nuts and trying to finish my doctoral thesis in mythology before my clock ran out. But I was stuck figuring out what exactly my thesis argument in my final chapters was. I knew it had to do with these seven famous artist's house museums I visited across the world. And it had something to do with the genius way these artists and writers like Frida Kahlo, Sigmund Freud or Georgia O'Keeffe employed these odd personal objects in their houses to help them foster peak creativity.

So as a Hail Mary pass I started making the assemblage boxes with my own significant ephemera to answer the thematic questions of my academic work that stumped me. In that act I totally backed my way into art-making ( the container of my why.) And I did so by fooling myself into believing that I was just creating this strange stuff to solve a logical writing problem- not to be an artist or anything.

I stay grounded in my why by living it, investigating it further and further, rolling in the mud with it so to speak. I'm currently turning my thesis into a book for artists. And as we speak I am stuck again, indecisive as to answering the question of how best to serve the reader in the final chapters of the book.

So your wonderful question reminds me I will only find the answer to my writing problem if I get back in the studio and make new work which will give me the answer, albeit not in words but in objects and images. I can then translate that answer into words later. Thanks for reminding me what I need to do to steer around my current writing obstacle.

We both share the belief that it is important for us, as artists and creatives, to look inward for inspiration and guidance. How has looking inward impacted and influenced your own work?

If I look inward for inspiration and follow the process I described earlier for how I create a piece of art, the art contains this palpable energy and spirit and often works and usually sells and I'm sad to see the piece go. However, when I don't look inward and I make a piece based on what I think buyers will want (an outward focus) the art inevitably has ZERO soul, doesn't work, and never sells. It becomes a big 'ole dust magnet.

"Bullet Hole Road" by Thea Fiore-Bloom

Assemblage created in a vintage cigar box containing found objects and resin-filled apothecary jar, vintage papers.

It can take a lot of energy to express ourselves fully and authentically as artists. How do you recognize when you need a pause and what do you do to re-energize yourself?

Another great question Sarah. How do I recognize when I need a pause? Honestly, I don't. My boyfriend is the one who has gotten me to "back away from the vehicle" before it blows on several occasions.

I've tried to set a weekly schedule and attempt to take at least one whole day off a week but I usually cheat and sneak in blog-related work.

When you run your own business you can convince yourself there is always more to do. And it's a lie. I try to remind myself now that my physical and emotional well-being, and that of those I love- not the popularity of the blog or podcast- should be my first priority.

What has been one of the most valuable lessons you have learned through your work and career as an artist?

The need for approval and authentic creative exploration- don't play nice together. I believe people respond strongly to our piece (in ineffable ways that physics hasn't cottoned on to yet) if that piece was created when we were connected up to something bigger than ourselves and following our soul's/ muses' instructions.

Website: The Charmed Studio

Etsy: CurioBookNooks

*Featured Friday is a series to introduce, support, and highlight other small and/or emerging artists, makers, designers, and creatives. Know someone who you think should be featured? You can nominate them here!