Roots, folk and bluegrass musician Wil Maring is not content with making art or music. She must do both, or life will not be complete. As a visual artist, teacher, and road warrior gigger, Maring said she’s been doing all this for a long time but has absolutely no interest in slowing down.
“I’m still playing out, still writing, still teaching, still doing art,” Maring said. “At a time when many people my age are thinking of retiring, I feel like I am just getting started. Artists and musicians don’t retire. Not ‘til they go blind or deaf.”
What Maring said is straight-up truth. Making a life in the arts isn’t always a choice; it’s an inevitability. For Maring, that unavoidable path began when she was exposed to a life of art and ideas as a child. Her father was an anthropologist and a classically trained pianist, and her mother had a “massive” record collection.
An early music memory is of hearing something on the radio that “sounded ‘stringy’...mandolin and guitar, or 12-string guitar sounds, all interwoven in beautiful textures and melodies,” she reminisced. “I lay on the carpet and pressed my ear to the big speaker of the console radio and just fell into those sounds and fell in love. I guess it was then I knew that I wanted to learn to create those sounds.”
She said at first, it was difficult to get bookings when she started since her music “cannot be classified as either folk or bluegrass.”
“I am glad that now those two music genres seem to have become a bit wider in their horizons, but back when I released my first recordings, I was ‘too folky’ for bluegrass and ‘too bluegrass’ for folk…It was hard to find a musical family to belong to in those times.”
“But now things are very different, and I am so happy to see that most promoters and fans are becoming more open-minded and inclusive of everyone.”
Maring said that after playing “a decade in Europe, and a couple of years in Japan, and then almost 20 years of playing in the U.S.,” the pandemic brought change. For many of those performances, Maring had appeared with Robert Bowlin, a notable guitarist and fiddler. However, the focus had to change a bit for both musicians due to how the lingering effects of COVID-19 have shaped the industry.
“Robert has put more attention to his violin and guitar shop and in-house recording studio, and I have been focusing on establishing myself as a visual artist,” Maring said. “That was my college degree and a part-time job in college. I am still writing songs all the time…I’ve done it all my life. It’s just something I do to amuse myself, or maybe it’s cathartic, a kind of therapy, and it’s not something I could easily just quit doing…I always bring [while touring] at least watercolor painting materials and sometimes acrylics or oils so that if I have some time off while traveling, I can do some visual art, too.”
She said the popularity of digital recording has caused a “disappearance” of sales of physical formats, so “almost every touring artist I know has had to become creative in finding other things to sell at the merch table.” Her table highlights her artwork.
“There are very many successful musical artists who are also visual artists,” she explained. “Creativity is creativity, and the two go hand in hand. Maybe it all comes out of the same part of the brain. For me, I see an image or a situation in my mind, and I can either describe it in words and melody or in colors and shapes.”
She said people often comment that her paintings “look like how my music sounds.”
“But then, they can’t really describe how,” she admitted. “I can’t either.”
“It’s so strange how it used to be that I’d go out and play music for a career and do art for fun in my spare time. Now, I do mostly art as a career, and play music for fun, though still at a professional level.”
Soon, Maring will appear in Gainesville, Florida’s special concert called “Hogtown Opry” on May 18. She will also teach at the Desert Nights Summer Camp (Kingston, New Mexico) in August, where she will teach songwriting with Chris Sanders, Steve Smith, and Robert Bowlin.
“There is also a nice festival there in September called Pickamania, which we play at every year with Peter McLaughlin and Chris Brashear and other talented guest artists.”
Maring said both she and Robert Bowlin have quite a bit of unrecorded music, but “the funding for ambitious projects will need to be raised.”
“I think that’s a problem many musicians face,” she said. The digital revolution has resulted in most people streaming music for free or nearly free; thus, the money to produce future music is not coming in. Streaming is killing the recording of new music.”
Despite this, she said musicians will always “continue to create, whether we are paid for it or not,” further explaining that “Just as artists will paint, whether anyone buys their work or not…I hope that anyone reading this will make an effort to support independent artists as much as possible—whether musicians or visual artists—by purchasing their creations directly from the creator.”
Comments