An Introduction

Hi, I'm Siobhan, I'm an artist, illustrator and graphic designer and a couple years ago I made a bad pun about my own emotional state and committed to it so hard that it became my business name, which is how The Baroque Heart came to exist.

The logo that kicked it off.

I have years of experience being a creative in some capacity, degree and all attached. I have always dipped into a dynamic lifestyle that has brought me a lot of unusual (if priceless) life experiences, but the inverse of this has brought a career that has often times felt fragmented. Then, my life went into free-fall during the peak of the pandemic, and a lot of chaos dominated my life for a long while. I do want to clarify that the idea of The Baroque Heart was meant to be a lighthearted attempt at reframing my own hardship and pour my feelings into making things (like any artist would, I think). I had the idea that visually, I wanted to push away from the hyper-minimalist design trends that dominated the industry when I was a student, and I wanted to be able to indulge in a hobby fascination with art history, but for a while that was really it while I bounced between whatever gigs I could land.

Sometimes things need to be released.

Personal tragedies have a way of making you reassess who you are at your core. Losing jobs, housing, loved ones, friends and your direction in life will stop you in your tracks and have you wondering, when did you last feel like yourself? When were you last excited for the future? If you stepped into a life that felt like your own, what would the parameters of that life look like? I carried these questions for a long time in the process of rebuilding my business and trying to figure out what I wanted the next iteration of my portfolio to look like.

While I could develop a little more clarity around these questions, I am finally able to parse them. The most unedited version of myself I can remember was myself as a teenager who, while depressed and definitely in need of two decades of therapy and practice in emotional regulation, was downright obsessed with the process of creating. Obviously my tastes and abilities have developed, at least a little (I hope). Though I've had peaks and lows of excitement for my future, I do remember what my life felt like before I really comprehended fear and I wanted to channel that as the person I am now. Silly? Yes, but the idea of becoming someone my younger self would have idolized of has single handedly been the most motivating self-actualization I've ever embarked on.

You always end up in a dance with yourself, really.

Once I committed to what I assume is the act of healing an inner child, I sort of honed in on the most fun subject matter I could think of, and I've been physically incapable of stopping myself from creating ever since. I have always enjoyed mythology across cultures, a hot color palette and any excuse to draw alternative looking faces and characters so, I seem to have settled on demonic entities as my current go-to. I'm really quite happy with it. It's not that I can't or won't ever embark on other subject matter, but for now, it feels like the most fun exorcism a person could have.

My life path is still uncertain and I'm doing my best to merge my skills, my life experiences and my personality in an attempt to simply move on with my life in the most joyful way possible. Regardless of whatever else might be thrown my way, I'm trying to create in a way that heals myself and hopefully reaches others as well. It might not seem it at a glance, but it's about love.

I have more words to shed on all this, but if you've somehow found your way to my page and gotten all the way through this, thank you for reading and thank you for being here!

<3<3<3 Siobhan