Canvas Rebel | Meet Leanna Firestone

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Leanna Firestone. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Leanna , thanks for joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

To be a working creative is to have your personhood inherently intertwined with your work. At a regular job, when you go home from work, you can leave it behind, or at the very least- being bad at your job doesn’t make you feel like you are a bad person. But making art is a response to being alive and your experience of life, and to have your livelihood be tied up in that can make it hard to define a boundary between you and what you make, and even harder to separate the criticism of your art from the criticism of self. I’ve been an artist full-time for about 4 years, but I still have dreams that I’m working back at the smoothie place I worked at through college. In them, everything is simple. Although I love making art, and I feel very fulfilled by it, I sometimes do long for the earlier times before I got everything I wanted. I wish for it weekly (especially when a song I’m writing isn’t coming together in the right way) but there’s a reason I never throw in the towel on being an artist and go back. Even though I find it incredibly taxing and emotionally exhausting to produce art for everyone to perceive, there’s nothing I am as passionate about as music, and there’s nothing like it that has connected me as deeply to myself and my community as it has.