Today we’d like to introduce you to Abigail St. Claire.
Abigail, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started out getting involved with graphic design in high school while I was taking a lot of studio art courses. I began to do the layout and design for the school magazine and it came very intuitively to me as I was heavily involved with other facets of art like drawing and photography. Once I was in my second year of university in the Autumn of 2016, I decided to start studying design instead of marketing as I had originally intended. This was mostly born out of a few big career moves I had preceding the start of my second year. The first of which was an independent print publication, The City Dossier, that I had co-founded and designed in St. Louis where I had spent my first year of university back in the Spring of 2016. Because of my work with The City Dossier, I got hired at Flowers for Dreams when I moved back to Chicago in the Summer of 2016. At F4D, I was responsible for creating the social media content as well as creating the first edition of their wedding and lifestyle publication. It’s wild for me to look back on that period of my life because I was 19 and a full-time student, yet I was tasked with the full responsibility of creating a publication for a company. At that same time, I was working on a side project that was centered around highlighting creative women in Chicago. By April 2017, I was no longer at Flowers for Dreams or apart of the side project, and instead took the following summer to lay low and do floral design at Sprout Home before I left to study in Paris in Autumn 2017.
When I arrived home from Paris at the beginning of this year, I had drawn a portrait of myself and posted on my Instagram story. To my delight and surprise, it kinda blew up. In a few days, I had about 50 portrait commissions. By the end of January, I had done about 100. Because of the wide reach of those portraits, I had the opportunity to create them at events for the likes of Twitter and Man Repeller out in New York. Overall, I’ve created more than 200 portraits in the span of 6 months. I very much fell into the role of an illustrator and it took me until very recently to actually consider myself one. It has been a pleasant surprise that people want to pay me to draw — it is an ideal job and I’m very, very excited to do more of it.
My university years have been very unexpected and non-linear in terms of my career. Throughout this all, I’ve been juggling other design and illustration freelance projects and internships. Funny enough, this is the “short” version of my so-called story. And I even still have a year of university left before I graduate and become a real person! But I’ve been lucky to wear many different hats over the past few years and been involved with many different creative endeavors. I hope that the trajectory of my career continues in this way because I love doing all sorts of different projects.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Absolutely, not. Probably the worst of my career struggles was last April when I was suddenly and unfairly pushed out of the side project I had co-founded. To put it honestly, it was fairly traumatic and scarring and took me a lot of time to recover from it.
I also heavily struggle with my presence on Instagram because I really do hate to contribute to the notion of a perfect or idealized lifestyle. While I genuinely love to share photos that I take and find to be beautiful, I don’t want people to think that I have some extraordinary, intangible life. My life is fairly normal. I work A LOT. I have an esoteric sense of humor and have a deep admiration for comedy. I dislike being pedestalized due to my Instagram “influence” because I’m just a human and my presence on the internet doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone.
I think the danger in Instagram is that there is a perception that what is seen is the full picture — which is fairly platitudinous but still very true. And in my case, I would say that my life is about 75% hard work and 25% what you see in photographs. This has been especially true of this past year. From January-June, I was taking 20 credit hours at school, had a 20 hr/week internship, and had freelance work on top of that, but also took eight trips. I was pretty much working all hours of the day apart from commuting and making meals. Whenever I would see family or friends whom I hadn’t seen in awhile, they would always ask “do you even go to class?” I’m sure that people look at my published life and assume that I have this amazing, jet-setting lifestyle, but that’s not the full picture. A lot of my travels are very circumstantial and are because of something work-related, or because I found a cheap ticket to visit a friend in another city.
It has been a pretty intense period of my life — albeit so so fun and so so exciting — but taught me a lot about time management, especially when I was traveling on the weekends and had to do extra work during the week. That’s not to say that I’m not incredibly lucky to be in the position to do that, because I am and fully recognize that. I’m usually thinking about how I can deconstruct and challenge the form of social media but also know that I benefit from my position on it. Instagram is my most passive form of creativity even though it’s probably what I’m known for most. That being said, I try to leverage it in ways that I or others can genuinely benefit from by staying light-hearted and vulnerable with my presence to cut through a lot of the vapid bullshit that is the norm. And, sure, I contribute to that too, but overall, I try to stay conscious about not being completely curated all of the time. It’s unhealthy and unrealistic. I’m human. I go to therapy. I have a lot of social anxiety and can be fairly awkward. I have a playlist of strange, funny, and sometimes disturbing youtube videos that I make my friends watch. At the end of the day, I’m just trying to laugh, be honest, and make pretty things
Illustrator and Graphic Designer – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Since I wear many different hats, I’m not sure if I’m known for one specific thing. I think as of now, it would be for my illustrated portraits since they’ve made the rounds on Instagram. I also do a lot of maps and city guides that have gained traction, too. But there are definitely people who know me mainly for my design work on The City Dossier or my mural at Gather Home and Lifestyle or just from Instagram!
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Oh, boy. So many, thankfully! I was incredibly proud of the mural that I created at Gather Home and Lifestyle since it is my favorite Chicago shop and still love seeing photos of it on Instagram. It is very rewarding to have something you created permanently in the world for others to interact with.
But I would say that I am mainly proud of the fact that I’m entirely self-made. Everything I’ve done so far has been in part due to my own drive and hard work. Since there is this negative narrative surrounding careers in the arts, I’m truly proud of the career I have been able to build for myself all while attending university. I just turned 21 and it is difficult for me to articulate how crazy it is to me that I have been able to do so much work this far. I have been incredibly lucky to come across people who trust me and my work, as well as a solid group of people who truly support me.
Contact Info:
- Website: abigailstclaire.com
- Email: amstclaire@gmail.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/astclaire
Image Credit:
Stephanie Bassos
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