Exploring the creative seasons of Maddy Barreto
Working away from the public eye, Barreto creates whimsical artwork that captures her lighthearted spirit.
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By day, Barreto is a nanny, which not only helps fund her growing art career but also adds a lighthearted vibe to much of her work. From her airy illustrations, to whimsical pipes, it’s evident she never lost her child-like wonder.
Although she has no formal art school education, Barreto gravitates to educational environments, taking advantage of learning new tricks from creative friends whenever possible. She calls illustration her “building block for all things creative,” but still strives to grow her artistic repertoire. Barreto took classes at WonderRoot this past year, watching and learning from some of her closest friends. Although her focus lies on screen printing and metalsmithing, Barreto’s booking serious hours in WonderRoot’s ceramic studio, which she also helps manage. She first started at at the DIY institution with a Intro to Ceramics class, where she says she fell in love with the medium.
For now, Barreto is taking some time away from “creating art for the sake of people buying it” to rechannel efforts into personal projects. She says it’s important to her to focus more on periods in her life she calls “creative seasons.” These seasons do not directly reflect those on the calendar, but instead symbolize certain events, emotions, and relationships in her life. For her, it is important to recognize these seasons in order to better remember these specific periods of her life. embed-1 You might not find her wares too often at the local art fair (save the recent Atlanta Zine Fest) and her Etsy shop has been on hiatus for a few months. But Barreto continues to nurture her social media presence. With an Instagram collecting close to 2,000 followers, she has been using the account as less of a self-marketing campaign, and more as a behind-the-scenes look at her creative process. The viewer is able to follow along from inspiration to finished product through these formerly private moments. Barreto’s audience spans from inside the Atlanta perimeter, to as far as Australia.
Barreto plans to continue creating art for personal satisfaction moving forward. She says she is using this time away from the public’s expectations to explore various inspirations. Among those, she is currently researching historical Egyptian texts and in the process of making an Anubuis screen to practice some new printing techniques. Another goal is to travel more and someday have the resources to make more art on a larger scale, such as illustrations on tapestries. Although Barreto may seem to be working though a creative winter — at least in the public eye — it, like all seasons, won’t last forever. In the meantime, we can look forward to the eventual thaw and with it, the reveal of something entirely new.