Right now, we are really loving the bold, colorful paintings of Atlanta-based artist Michelle Armas.  When we stumbled upon her work, we couldn’t help but share! Read below to learn a little more about Michelle and what inspires her colorful creations.  You can also find Michelle and other things we love in our What We’re Into section.

1. Where do you get all of your ideas from?

Photos mostly, or things I see that I snap photos of to save for color inspiration. I was just at Ochre in New York, and they had these blue plates sitting on top of an antiqued glass table with pink flowers in a vase on it. I loved the colors all together, and I took a photo to use as inspiration later on.

2. When you are not being creative, what are you doing?

Sending emails to clients, cleaning up my studio (I am a super neat painter), but mostly looking at design blogs, hanging with my husband or cooking.

3. What’s on your reading list this Summer?

I want to re-read the last Harry Potter before the last movie comes out.

4. We LOVE vintage. What is your all-time favorite “vintage” item? Why?

Scarves! They have such cool patterns on them, plus isn’t it romantic to wear a vintage scarf? I mean, a woman 50 years ago wore this around town (the things the scarf has seen!) and it smelled like her, and people associated it with her, so romantic. It feels like you get a little bit of that when you wear it. I like to buy cool scarves when I am traveling, then save them and wear them to special events like a weekend out of town, or an anniversary stay-cation; then gift them to friends with a card telling about how I wore it and the new memories it has. Way cooler than just gifting a scarf you found somewhere.

5. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? The worst?

Best advice: You decide how to react to the world, and you choose to be happy to matter what. I am not sure how I got that advice the first time, I got it many many times over the years, and it finally sunk in!

Worst advice: All those track coaches in school who made me think that if I was too tired to run, or swim or whatever, that I was a weakling! I still get mad when I think back to that. I love to exercise, and I love to work hard, but too much work makes you sick, and makes you miserable. I worked in a high stress branding firm in New York, and it was all “work all night!” “make the client happy no matter what”…but you know what? I want to get home before 11pm at night and not get a divorce thankyouverymuch. Life is so much better when you set your own priorities!

6. Name an item in your closet you can’t live without.

Dude, my friend just introduced me to Helmut Lang for Theory dresses. Go now, buy them now. Jersey + drapey + soft = hizzle yizzle

7. Who or what is your greatest source of inspiration?

Other artists, any kind: I was just at the Neue Gallery in New York and I cried. I was looking at a Klimt and my face just crumpled (the security guard was really trying not to laugh at me, I could tell), it was so stunning I felt like my heart was hurting and I couldn’t control myself. That was certainly a first.

images via Michelle Armas