Canvas to the Imagination

Prepare yourselves because I am about to gush excessively and you may get some on you. (Enthusiasm that is).

I feel invigorated, inspired, and excited after visiting the 2012 Sketchbook Project travelling show. It was here in Vancouver for only two days with limited hours at W2 Media Cafe. I made a point to visit both days and see as many sketchbooks as I could, which worked out to about twenty-five or so of the thousands of sketchbooks people have access to during the tour. It’s the work I saw within that small sampling of books that has me so excited, as well as the concept of such a large-scale collaborative project becoming a lending library full of art.

I really admire the set up of the travelling show. Each visitor is required to sign up for a library card before they can access the collection. Then away you go, selecting sketchbooks based upon theme, location, or random draw. The librarian pulls two books at a time for each patron to pour over, and it can be a mixed bag of amazing to so-so work depending upon the skill of each artist.

I took photos of some of my favourites, which you can see here. It was fascinating to see all the different ways people used the exact same little sketchbook. I am definitely inspired to get to work on the 2013 Sketchbook Project, even though it’s not due until the end of the year.

Valerie Arntzen, Vancouver BC, Canada

Kelly Leigh Miller, Louisville KY, USA

Emily Horton, Tyler TX, USA

Rachel Ramm, Dublin OH, USA

Rolando Del Real, Granda Hills CA, USA

Melia Ramirez & Sandra G, Valle des las Palmas, Mexico

Brenna Darroch, Fairfax VA, USA

Andie Wolf, Toronto ON, Canada

Lucy Howard, Bicester, Oxfordshire, UK

If you’re unfamiliar with the Sketchbook Project, it’s a collaborative art project organized by Arthouse Co-op, a group based in Brooklyn, NY. People from all over the world sign up to receive a plain brown 5″ x 7″ book and what they can do within those pages is completely open. The final works are contributed back to the Brooklyn Art Library where they become part of the collection, which people can access both online and in person.

I’ve mentioned it previously because I took part in the Limited Edition project earlier this year. The 2013 Sketchbook Project is now open, and I highly recommend you take part. It’s been a HUGE source of inspiration for much of the work I’ve been doing so far this year.

I had the pleasure of viewing the work of Sarah Gee in person for the first time at the Monument(al) group Show last year – a beautifully curated exhibition also featuring work by Jessica Bell and Aaron Moran. Sarah’s work is bold, colourful, and plays with intricate shape and form to create her compositions. I was smitten with her work, and I think you will be too.

Tell us about yourself:
I’m a bit of a loner, and like to go my own way. I’m largely self-taught, which means I’d rather explore on my own and make mistakes than be taught the right way to do anything. I’ve had a lot of physical hardship in my life, and it’s made me quite self-contained and self-sufficient – I think I would do quite well in a post apocalyptic world. I’d be the one making a water filtration system out of scavenged pantyhose and sewing machine parts.

How long have you been an artist and how did you become one?
I’ve been doing this hard-edged geometrical collage work for about three years. Before that, I did a lot of waiting around for something good to happen, trying to keep my head above water. I’ve been a bookseller, I’ve done manual paste-up for a newspaper, designed textiles, worked in a chocolate factory. For a long time I made photo-realist figurative textile pieces that were quite popular with people but for me were just a placeholder until the right thing came along. And now it has.

Do you work full time or part time as an artist? If part-time, what do you do to support yourself?
I am able to work full time as an artist only because I have a wonderful and supportive husband with a steady paycheque. Otherwise I couldn’t do it at all. Vancouver is a tough city to be in the arts. Government funding is at an all-time low, and galleries, theatres and artist-run centers are closing down. Mostly, when people aren’t slaving away at their desks trying to make a down payment on a condo, they’re snowboarding at Whistler. Yes, there are curators and amazing galleries and people who love the arts, but it feels very subculture to me, very marginal. I hope that will change in a few years.

What are some of your favourite materials to work with?
I work almost exclusively with archival, cotton-based paper. I love Clairefontaine Maya paper, a richly colour-saturated heavy cardstock with absolutely no texture to it. Because my collages often have large glued elements, I need a heavy weight, maybe 140 to 300lb., in order not to have warping. I’m also madly in love with my Plexiglas templates, which I had fabricated for me. They’re so simple and so beautiful.

Tell us a bit about the process you go through to create your work:
My work is precise and detailed, which means I do a lot of preparation, taking careful measurements, dry fitting, making sure things will come out the way I intend them to. It’s a lot like composing music, the individual notes mean little until they combine into a melody. Mostly I don’t know until the end if I’ve made something good, or a complete disaster. One of the things I’ve struggled with is learning to waste paper through experimentation or at least fearless creating. I’ve been in extreme poverty a couple of times in my life and I can feel the echo of it every time I make a tiny mistake that ruins a piece of matte board I just spent eight dollars on.

Where do you find inspiration for your work, and what keeps you motivated?
I’m not really a worldly person or a particularly referential artist. For example, I don’t look at a sunset or snowy mountain and feel it has a place in my inspiration file. I don’t travel or take reference photographs. I don’t even sketch all that often. Instead I’m seeking to create balance and harmony through geometrical arrangements, arrive at some kind of inner resolution. So I guess both the inspiration and motivation comes from self-determination. That sounds really, really boring, I know.

Tell us about other artists who have inspired you:
I’m inspired by the hard-edged painters who came to prominence in the sixties and seventies, Frank Stella, Tadasky, Josef Albers, Frank Hammersley, Miguel Angel Vidal, as well as our own Vancouver artists like Michael Morris and Gary Lee-Nova. I also like anything obsessive, when you get the sense, when looking at a piece of art, that the person who made it was inventing deeply private formulas, ways of seeing, in order to make sense of the world. When I see “Outsider” artists working in complete isolation, like the astonishing Archilles Rizzoli, Henry Darger or James Hampton, making beautiful things despite a life of deprivation and no schooling, I’m so moved by that.

Where can people find you both online and offline:
People can find my website at sarahgeeart.com I have a gallery and a blog called Studio Life there.

They can also follow me on Twitter @SarahGeeArt

The artist interview series continues this week with my good friend, Kirsti Wakelin. She is a talented graphic designer, an illustrator of numerous children’s books, and is highly skilled at drawing and painting.

Read on for more about Kirsti and her work.

Tell us about yourself:
I am a designer and illustrator. I dabble in a few different disciplines – a product of the times I guess, and my desire to constantly try new things. I studied graphic design and illustration and have worked as both for the past 14 years. My work within those fields is pretty diverse as well.

How long have you been an artist and how did you become one?
I have always been artistically inclined. My grandmother is a painter, so my artistic inclinations were nurtured and supported from the beginning. I drew constantly as a kid. And I had (and still have) a keen interest in nature and animals so that was my primary subject matter–usually animals chasing down and eating other animals. Lots of foxes and wolves, and terrified and bloodied deer. I liked to keep it real.

Even with that set-up, I didn’t set out for a career in the arts, however. I didn’t actually know there were options for arts-based careers other than being a painter–which is weird and a little dull on my part because I had no end of access to illustrated books. But I was aware that being a painter wasn’t the easiest living, so I focused my attention on sciences in high school, intending to go to vet school or into forensic entomology. Science, death and insects were a killer combination for me at the time. But first year college found me recovering from academic burnout, and I accidentally walked past the studio arts room when I went in to pick my courses, and that proved to be irresistible. After a year of mucking around with general arts classes, I was accepted into the Graphic Design and Illustration Program at Capilano College (now IDEA at Capilano University), not even knowing what graphic design was.

Do you work full time or part time as an artist? If part-time, what do you do to support yourself?
Depends on what you define as an artist. I don’t identify as being an artist. Or at least, I’m uncomfortable with the term on some level, in relation to myself. Not to say illustration isn’t art – actually, I’m not going to open up the art vs illustration debate. But I don’t feel that doing it makes me an artist. And I don’t really think the work I’m doing qualifies yet. Also, I think it’s that the work I’ve been doing most recently is client-driven–while the decisions I make are my own, they are influenced to different extent by outside forces–so I think I’m reserving the term artist for (hopefully) when I’m able to make work that is purely driven by my own whim, and feels legitimate enough (to myself) to be defined that way. I’m fully aware that I probably contradicted my earlier statement. Also, I might change my mind about the whole thing next week, or next month, or next time we talk. I don’t actually care much about the solidity of definitions, I just go by what feels right at the time.

Short, uncomplicated answer: I support myself with design and illustration work. And I support my picture book illustration work with my design work and my more commercial illustration. I paint when I have the time (rarely). I do sell pieces sometimes, but never intentionally. I rarely, if ever, exhibit. I’d like to change the selling part. But first I need more time to make the work…and I’m working on that.

What are some of your favorite materials to work with?
I love a 3B pencil and a non-precious sketchbook. I adore paint. Watercolour and I have a love hate relationship. I go back to it constantly even though I find my inability to work well in it incredibly demoralising. When I travel, I try to do as many on location paintings as I can. And I dream of having the (financially comfortable) time to get back into a nice, big oil painting so I can putter endlessly. A have at least two series in mind I’d like to take a crack at.

Right now, I’m really enjoying digital work as well–though with a real connection to traditional mediums; I don’t like digital-looking digital stuff, I just don’t feel a connection to it. I’m working on a picture book that I’m colouring in Photoshop. It’s opening up all sorts of possibilities that are closed to me through the nature of certain mediums, and my inabilities to bend them to my will. And it’s taught me a lot about colour in a very short time. At the same time, it’s making me want to get back into using paint again. Even though it’s digital, there are still happy accidents. And I find that pretty delightful.

Tell us a bit about the process you go through to create your work:
Rumination. Research. Procrastination. First Stab. Creative dismay. More rumination (could be mistaken for procrastination). Diving in for real. A series of creative crisis. Breakthrough. A lot hours in the studio. A lot of missed weekends and sunny days. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Conclusion. Sometimes, celebration.

Where do you find inspiration for your work, and what keeps you motivated?
There are very few things I look at without thinking about how I’d go about drawing it, or mixing that colour, where that reflected light is coming from, or trying to commit the image to memory for later use. I’m motivated by the frustrations I have with my inability to draw and paint how I want to, which is also the same thing I’ve found paralysing in the past – though, I think now that I’m older, I’m over that. I’m now totally ok with knowing I still have about 850 crappy paintings or drawings to make before I turn out something good. I’m motivated by ticking time. I feel like I’m getting to the party kind of late, and I need to catch up. I’m also motivated by knowing that this is it, this is the only thing I’m half good at, so I better put my head down and keep going. Commit.

Other than art, what are you particularly excited about right now?
I’m writing part of this from Kaua’i, so in the immediate picture, I’m pretty excited about waking up in the morning (hopefully to some dry weather) and taking my morning coffee down to the beach as I have done for the past week, to watch the humpback whales, and, if I’m lucky, see the large pod of spinner dolphins that have been feeding just off the beach near the place I’m staying. I’m also super excited to get back into the water and do some snorkelling. I’m a bit obsessed with the snorkelling – it’s been pretty poor weather here (thunder, lightening, 80km winds, torrential downpours, flash flood warnings, highway closures, road wash-outs, palm fronds falling like missiles) so it’s not super warm but I’ll stay out in the water watching fish until I’m shaking with cold. They’re just so incredibly beautiful and varied and mesmerising. Everywhere you look, there’s something different.

In the big picture, I’m pretty excited to see the light at the end of the tunnel of a very long project that has consumed my life for the last few years. I’m excited about getting my evenings and weekends back. Having the time to get outside in the sun and explore my city again. To have free time. Catch up with friends and family. Get active. Putter in the garden. Do a bit of travelling. Purge my closet, clean my studio. Rethink work and what I’ve been working at.

Where can people find you both online and offline:
A general collection of work is at kirstiwakelin.com
My book illustration is here: mysecretelephant.com