Looking for What's Real: Alyssa Stevens' Emotional Abstractions

By @JustinWetch

Alyssa Stevens always loved art, but for most of her childhood she thought she was terrible at it. School measured ability by realism, still lifes and accurate proportions, and that wasn't how her brain worked.

She grew up in the same town as Dr. Seuss and spent her childhood visiting his museum, absorbing his whimsical language without realizing how deeply it would shape her later. In high school she hated sports with a passion she couldn't explain, so she joined the after-school art program instead. Those open-ended sessions changed everything. She started making abstract faces connected by lines, strange compositions that felt true even if they didn't make sense.

"I realized art didn't have to make sense to anyone else," Alyssa says. "It could be a way for me to connect to myself and my emotions."

As a kid she made comics about anthropomorphic egg yolks. Her mother asked where this was coming from. She didn't know. She just thought it was funny.

She went to a business college because it seemed responsible, majoring in marketing as the most creative option available. She spent most of her classes doodling in notebooks, unable to focus. After graduation in 2020, she landed a job at a major advertising agency as a data analyst, which was the complete opposite of anything she wanted to do with her life.

The job was chaos. Within a month they had her pulling data for huge client pitches with no support. They tried to teach her to code in less than a week. She worked until two or three in the morning, made mistakes, got in trouble.

"I hated how fake corporate life felt," Alyssa says. "Everyone had this facade on. I was like, can you just speak like a normal human being?"

Despite this, she expresses gratitude for the situation despite the challenges.

After six months she told her manager she couldn't continue. They moved her to a different team, which helped with the hours, but the deeper problem remained. She felt like she was suffocating in a world where nothing was real.

While drowning in corporate life, Alyssa made art on the side. Over the course of a year she created roughly 100 digital pieces, working through loneliness and loss and mental health struggles that had followed her since childhood. She didn't know if anyone would ever see them. She just knew that making them was the only thing that made her feel better.

"I felt so alone," she says. "Art was an important form of meditation and therapy. It helped me connect with myself and release really heavy emotions."

The collection would become Interconnected Planes, and it remains one of her favorite bodies of work because of when she made it. The pieces carry the frustration of being stuck somewhere she didn't belong, the sadness she couldn't name, the tension between the life pushed on her and the life she actually wanted. She was turning pain into something she found beautiful, not knowing yet that anyone else would care.

She tried small experiments to escape. An Etsy shop that sold one or two digital prints. A physical painting listed on eBay that somehow sold to a stranger, giving her a tiny spark of hope.

Then she learned about on-chain art. She bought a book about blockchain technology and took notes like she was studying for an exam. She posted Interconnected Planes on OpenSea. For a month nothing happened. Then it sold out.

"I made enough that I didn't need to work this job right now," Alyssa says. "And I just kind of quit. It was very spur-of-the-moment. It was always my goal to leave corporate America, so as soon as I got the chance, I took it."

A year later, she saw a friend subletting his room in New York for a month. She packed a single suitcase and took a three-and-a-half-hour train ride with no long-term plan. That first month became the best time of her life. She found a community, got a shared studio space, and for the first time felt like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

The tension that runs through Alyssa's work is the tension she's lived. She calls it the conflict between feeling "factory-manufactured" and wanting to be free, messy, colorful, imperfect, true. Her style reflects this: bright and chaotic on the surface, with an underlying sadness in the faces she draws, characters that seem trapped and reaching for something at the same time.

A lot of her recent work feels circus-like. The circus represents feeling like an outsider who doesn't know her place, but it's also a space where misfits are accepted, where you can love yourself even if you don't fit anywhere else. Another recurring motif is mouths, teeth, tongues, representing the system trying to chew you up and reform you.

"My art is a way for me to untangle all of that," Alyssa says. "To try to figure out who I am, and not let myself be formed and shaped into whatever I'm expected to be."

Her process is intuitive, almost automatic. She doesn't sketch or plan. Teardrops started appearing in her work before she consciously decided to put them there. She often doesn't understand what a piece means until long after she's finished it.

There's a grocery store Alyssa visits in her mind at least once a week. It's a place she went to with her grandmother as a child, and in her imagination it's always dim, empty, quiet. She's always in the freezer aisle, and there's something about opening that door that feels like a portal to somewhere she can't quite name.

Other places hold the same charge: closets in her grandparents' basement, random doors that seem significant for reasons she doesn't fully understand. Her Yellow Slide collection reimagines these childhood spaces as liminal, in-between worlds, neither fully real nor fully dream. One piece is called "cherry coke exploding in the freezer aisle."

She thinks about Dr. Seuss again, how his impossible titles and invented words shaped her sense of what language could do. "Oh, the Places You'll Go" still inspires her. She's drawn to things that feel childlike because they cut through the noise and remind her of what actually matters.

"The most child-like things feel the most inspiring to me," she says. "They go back to core principles that seem so obvious, yet tend to get lost along the journey of life."

When @alyssastevens_ talks about what she wishes people understood about her art, she returns to a single word: mirror. She's not making work to be beautiful or to show off skill. She's making what feels true to herself so it can reflect something back to whoever's looking.

"When people don't connect with my art," she says, "maybe it's trying to tell them something about themselves."

Supporters who've mattered: @StakeETH, a recent collector. @Jeni_Pepen, one of her earliest collectors from Interconnected Planes who's stayed supportive over the years. @sasakotwo, her biggest support system and mentor. And @Blondie23LMD, patron of the residency that led to her first solo show in Marfa, Texas.

Artists inspiring her lately:@BHAREBOY, for figures that feel personal and universal at once. @properpablo2, who describes his art as the visual language of pain. And @_r0yart, whose work feels like an intimate journal entry.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Alyssa recommends @egodead,@summergwagner, and @omentejovem..