Baker Artist Portfolios

Ivy Rose is an ambitious surrealist artist born and raised in Baltimore, MD. She holds bachelor's degrees in Studio Art and Anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
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I have experienced a lot of intense trauma in my life and believed that strength to be my identity for a long time. When I initially started to get back into painting in 2020 after a 3 year hiatus, my intention was to heal that trauma once and for all. But, as I faced those dark parts and started to truly heal them, I felt lost: my identity had been so shaped from being a survivor that I didn’t know who I was anymore outside of that.

So, I started to create more vast surrealist pieces as a way to truly get to know who I was and what kind of person I wanted to be. I realized that for me, the most liberating feeling was making art that feels like it honors my inner child. Surrealism is important to me because it introduces this idea of adult play and imagination. I feel as though I get to experience true childlike innocence for the first time in my life.

I spent so much of my youth wondering why I was so much weirder than everyone around me. Plagued with anxiety and a lack of sense of place, I still held my head high and embraced my authenticity in the face of normality and adversity. However, I felt out of place. I loved being different but it also hurt so deeply being different and isolated.

It wasn’t until I was about to graduate from college in 2016 in which I was diagnosed with ADHD. This initial diagnosis helped me understand that I saw and processed the world differently.

Without proper education, I still felt a little lost in the diagnosis. I was medicated which helped me focus and feel capable but I still didn’t know why I acted the way that I did.

During the pandemic, I discovered my autism diagnosis and was introduced to a vast world of neurodivergent activists online. For the first time in my life, I felt truly seen, understood, and action oriented. I was able to see that, especially in women, autism and ADHD go undiagnosed because of patriarchal understanding of women's ability to mask.

At first, the diagnosis was overwhelming. There was so much to learn, so many habits to identify, routines to put into place, etc. I also experienced this weird sense of grief for all the years that I missed out on support and understanding. After the initial shock, I was finally able to see my neurodivergence as a superpower.

Part of having autism is having an intrinsic sense of justice. Pair that with my radical feminist views and I had a new thing to fight for: helping other women and nonbinary people to understand and find neurodivergent diagnosis and community.

My process of creating art is how I advocate for the neurodivergent community. As a prolific creator, this happens because I have a lot of hyperactivity. My brain is always going a million miles a minute and my body is always moving. So when I create art, this allows me to focus and hold still. Bright colors allow me to communicate intense emotions and connect to my queer identity. This has been incredibly liberating for me.

I often refer to my brain as a bowl of spaghetti: every thought is a noodle that gets wrapped around other thought noodles and so on. It's hard to see each individual thought when you can only see the whole bowl. However, when I create, I get to focus on one noodle. For a neurotypical brain, there isn't a need for all those acrobatics.

As a society, we do not discuss the immense privilege that neurotypical people have. In fact, I often find myself explaining what the word “neurodivergent” means to people all the time! This is a huge problem: if we don’t even have the vocabulary to identify people that process information differently than us, then we close the door for much needed support for those people.

My hope as a surrealist artist is to give neurotypical people insight into what a neurodivergent person's brain looks like. I also hope to give neurodivergent people visibility and the space to understand their diagnosis, or lack thereof.

Creating artwork is a gateway to having a voice when one may not have the words to do so. Between a lack of education in this country and the constant division, visual arts are the way toward unity. Art, much like math and music, is a universal language. Creating art allows brains to show up as they are and it is the only place in which we as a species are allowed to do that. As I continue to create, I want to expand access to art therapy and encourage others to embrace art as a healing mechanism.

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Ivy Rose Art is about harnessing your inner authenticity and embracing art as a way of healing. My tagline is, “heal your heart, look at art!” As a business I have a full clothing line, facilitate “Paint and Sip” classes, create commissions, make prints and stickers, handcraft jewelry, provide art lessons, and live paint. I love helping others find their inner artist and find joy in capturing love through painting wedding portraits. I am very passionate about the liquor industry and have even worked to create labels for beers!
@artistivyrose
https://artistivyrose.etsy.com