Meet This Artist: Mixed-Media Artist Paget Marion Blythe

The Chatham Arts Council is investing in artists through our Meet This Artist series, introducing you to Chatham County artists each year in a big way. So, take a look. Meet your very inspiring neighbor.

Guest writer Dolly R. Sickles penned this very special Meet This Artist interview. Dolly is creative writer, graphic artist, photographer, PR and marketing guru, grantwriter, and social advocate. She was one of Chatham’s 2026 Artist Support Grant recipients and is here interviewing one her fellow grantees! 

Our Meet This Artist feature is made possible with support from the team at VRC, Ltd.

Paget Marion Blythe has lived all over the place. She’s a self-taught artist who likes to doodle when she thinks. She’s full of both whimsy and rage and thrives in the intersection of the two. She’s intelligent and accomplished, unconventional and witty. She’s curious and believes everybody’s got their own creative spirit. She’s thriving in her career as a mixed-media collage artist, and she’s one of Chatham Arts Council’s 2026 Artist Support Grant recipients.

• FULL OF WHIMSY & RAGE
• Paget and her friend and creative collaborator, Ash Lorusso, just wrapped their successful exhibition, Full of Whimsy & Rage, at the NC Arts Incubator’s PAF Gallery in Siler City. It ran from May 1 – June 10. Paget’s artist support grant supported the purchase of supplies, materials, and frames, and the marketing for the show.“I have to credit my friend Ashley for that title,” says Paget. “It’s a reaction to the times we’re in and being women artists—specifically women abstract artists—and this milieu we find ourselves in. In the challenges we face individually carving out time as artists and mothers, and also the larger political level of what’s going on in our world.” 
• Paget doesn’t think whimsy and rage are necessarily inseparable. “I think you can’t have one without the other, and create from an authentic place,” she says. “Those emotions are really fundamental to what it means to be a human. I mean, kids wouldn’t even name it whimsy, but it’s something you’re born with, as a child: curiosity about the world. And as you grow, there are more things to have rage about, but you can’t function in the world just full of rage. So you have to have an interplay between the two.”“I’ve seen calls for emerging artists, and there’s often an age stipulation. I totally think people can come into their own at any time of their lives—especially women. There’s a young British artist from the 80s and 90s, Tracy Emin, who’s still creating. She had an interview and had a tragic thing happen to her. She said, essentially, that men have one big explosion of creativity and women just keep creating more and more and more things. Her art’s neither here nor there for me, though I kind of like it, but I like her as a woman artist, and her ability to state things that are on her mind.”

  

• INTERSECTIONS
• “The community aspect of the Incubator space reminds me of Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I grew up,” she says. “I love how it’s rough around the edges.” Her studio space is in the basement, along with a handful of other local artists who take advantage of the shared access to tools, technology, and public gallery space. “I would call myself a mixed media artist,” she says, “but I also incorporate collage elements. I feel like, at my core, I’m a collage artist because I love repurposing things and scrounging and creating something new that wasn’t there before from pieces of ephemera or papers.”She’s tending larger nowadays, focusing on larger pieces for her mixed media acrylic work. “I have some pieces in the last show that are, like, 36”x36”, and I’m hoping I can do more 36”x48”. I’ve rearranged my studio so I can stand back a lot further from what I’m working on.” A different perspective, after all, lets her see things more clearly.Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Paget likes to say she “came of age in the Ozarks.” She grew up in the ‘college town’ part of the Ozarks, in Fayetteville, where she was exposed to artists and art galleries through high school. “I wanted to go to art school,” she says. “I was accepted at art school but was discouraged because it wasn’t a lucrative career. English was what was encouraged, because I was a good writer.” That’s what her degrees are in: English and comparative literature. “I enjoyed earning those degrees, and the humanities education I got during my undergrad at UNC feels like it informs my art in a way that if I had gone to art school, I wouldn’t have had the perspective and knowledge that I do when I’m creating.”“Comparative literature is literally comparing completely disparate things, which connects to my collage. It’s definitely all related.”

  

• CREATING SPACEToday Paget lives in Chatham County with her 10-year-old daughter, Zenobia, who’s named after her Texas grandmother, and her 7-year-old son Gladden, who’s named after his great-grandfather. Zenobia likes to draw and Gladden likes 3D sculpture kinds of things (with hot glue). It’s in their blood.“There’s something that happens when you hit a certain age. I’m raising my kids, and they’ve fed my creativity in many ways that I wouldn’t have expected, but it’s helped me become more of myself.” When her kids were younger, Paget focused primarily on digital collage, not just because of their greater reliance on her parenting, but also because she was constrained to her iPad with no studio space. Today, she sells both paintings and prints through her website, and in galleries and exhibitions.“I have been an artist my whole life, and I’ve always loved making art. I teach collage workshops and when I give background information, I tell people I started making collages when I was a teenager around 15 or 16, back in the 90s, making mixtapes and little covers. But I don’t have formal training.”She draws influence from the artists she admires, like Judy Chicago, Marina Abramovich, and Esteban Vicente—all artists who are known for being thought provoking and conceptual. And she counts among her influences Art Nouveau (Mucha), Arts and Crafts (William Morris), DADA (Duchamp), Pop Art (Warhol), Folk, and Outsider Art movements. These are all evident in her spectacular eye for detail and presence. Paget’s work is both nostalgic and forward thinking, with rich colors and harmonious narratives.A lot of Paget’s process and methodology is experimentation. “I go into my studio knowing it’s totally fine if I don’t succeed at what I’m doing,” she says, “but … maybe it will. I’m just very curious, and sometimes I even go with the feeling that I’m going to make this as ugly as possible to see what happens. I don’t feel like I’m necessarily in control of what I’m doing as much as translating something else. I know that sounds like woo-woo a little bit, but when I’m really in the zone, that’s what it feels like.”“In Siler City, there’s a lot of things that inspire me because it’s a quiet little town. I drive past this little shack, it looked like, but obviously it was a business. I found out that a woman who used to work in the textile industry had collected all of these different fabrics and trims, and I finally stopped by there and met her, and went through her horde of stuff. That sort of feeds my creativity and also my connection with other people. Like thrifting and antiquing, and side-of-the-roading. It’s all part of my personality.”With a goal of continually learning new things because she’s “never going to arrive,” Paget leans into her natural curiosity. It’s a big part of what drives her art. “I think beginning, and returning, and making art at any time in our lives can only lead to positive growth. So my advice is to listen to your intuition, make art for yourself, and share your work with others.”In addition to her work in the studio, Paget works in testing and administration at Woods Charter School. She also teaches art camps and workshops there after school and in the summer.

  

• IT ALL COMES BACK TO WRITING“You have to write a lot as an artist, to explain your art, and to apply for grants and open calls and explain exactly what you’re up to. That’s not easy, and I’m thankful for my background in writing and literature and training that makes it less intimidating for me. A lot of times you’ll read artist’s statements and wonder what it’s really saying, even though it sounds really eloquent. You can explain your art in any way you want, and nobody can dispute it.”At one time, Paget thought she might be a photographer. “That’s the cool thing about being an artist. You have to have this confidence that’s maybe not even based in fact, like you just have to fake it until you make it.”The comparison comes easily for her, though, because her formal degrees are in English and Comparative Literature. She left her artistic community in the Ozarks after high school for the cornfields of Illinois, and didn’t like it, so she headed to Arizona for the first half of her undergrad work and ended up in Chapel Hill at UNC to finish it out. “After that I went to grad school in Athens, Georgia,” Paget says, “and that was a lot of fun. It was a great place to be creative.” Plus, there was always the chance you’d see Michael Stipe walking down the street.“Initially I thought I might want to be a literature professor, but after two years in my master’s program, I decided that wasn’t what I wanted. I needed a break.” From there she headed to France, where she taught English alongside folks from as far away as Ireland and Jamaica. Since she had a master’s degree, she taught in their teacher schools to people in their 20s who would be teaching primary kids. “It was a great experience.”And after about nine months, Paget headed back to the states and San Francisco where she had friends; that’s where she spent most of her 20s. She was there for ten years before moving back to the Chapel Hill area—and she’s been her ever since.

  

• THE BUSINESS OF ART“I like being a creative businessperson, and how it helps me grow in my community and learn about new artists,” says Paget. “I feel lucky when I meet other creative people that also have the uncompetitive vibe. Most of us are not competitive. We respect that we’re all doing different things and want to support each other. Like, if one of us gets some focus, we uplift each other. We all kind of take care of each other, in general.”You forget that artists are, in essence, small business owners. There’s the art created, of course, but there’s also the bills and studio space and marketing—most artists do that themselves. “It’s more natural to make art, because I’m not a naturally inclined spreadsheet person,” she says. “But I am a naturally inclined connection person. I feel like that’s what makes a business ultimately successful, is that ability to collaborate with other artists and businesses. To be authentic and find your audience that resonates with what you’re doing. That part of the business I enjoy and is more natural for me than building a website. It’s still fun, but it’s tedious in a way that I don’t enjoy. I wish I could just make it all happen without having to stare at the screen and click buttons.”INTROSPECTIVELY SPEAKINGWhen she’s not making art, Paget likes to hang with her kids, cats, and friends. She enjoys time outside, often near water. “I love getting lost in Chatham County backroads and exploring the countryside, small towns, and forgotten roadside places.”It’s what drives her, this curiosity. Her perfect day in Chatham County is time outside, making art, exploring vintage and record shops, reading with her cats, and daydreaming in her hammock. She also puts a great deal of importance on creative spaces. She says, “Access to creative spaces is vital for communities and for our individual health. We need to support the establishment and growth of more creative spaces in Chatham County for all different kinds of people in different stages of life.”And if that happens to play out in studio space in Pittsboro somewhere like Chatham Mills or The Plant, then huzzah! 

  

• WHAT’S NEXT
• Exciting things are on the horizon for this busy, working artist. She’ll be the featured solo artist for the month of August at NC Craft Gallery in Carrboro, and she’ll soon begin selling prints at Deco Raleigh. 
• Paget and Ash Lorusso are curating an upcoming exhibit that will run from the end of September through the end of November. The show is through the Durham Arts Guild in the Truist Gallery. There’s an open call for ‘Holding Space in the Art of Care,’ and “we’re asking folks who are caregivers in some capacity in their daily lives to share their art and focus on what it means to hold space for others and still allow yourself to practice creativity.”She says, “There are so many caregivers you can think of, whether it be educators, healthcare workers, people who are taking care of elderly parents, parents of young kids. Caring for someone is a creative act in its own way, but if you’re an artist, how do they feed each other.”

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