On chasing the high of the unknown

I’m curious about how you arrived at your style of painting?

I have a background in figurative painting and photo realism. When I first learned how to paint with oils, which was an indirect process of copying old master paintings, I was really interested in that high level of realism and refinement and naturalistic rendering. This was right before I started high school. I didn’t really have any experience with painting before that. Whenever I tried to paint, I didn’t know how to use the medium, but I drew, and I felt confident as a drawer.

Taking this [master painting] class really opened up my world. And so that led to 15 years of painting in this more traditional approach. I moved to New York for art school. As I was in college, and after college, I was searching for my voice as a painter, using those skills of working from a photographic reference and depicting that image as true as I could.

When I finished art school in 2010, representational painting wasn’t as prevalent in the art world as it is today. I was experimenting with different ways of making an image with the photograph as my primary reference. All of the photographs that I was using were snapshots of my friends and moments from my life at that time. It was autobiographical even though I may not have thought of it that way. Eventually I started to think about my relationship to my family and our history.

My mom’s side of the family is Native. I grew up around that side of the family in Portland, Oregon. We’re Klamath/Modoc and Cherokee. My mother and grandmother are enrolled in the Klamath Tribes and my brother and I are enrolled in the Cherokee Nation. Growing up in the Portland urban Indian community impacted my life and my work. I spent a lot of time with my grandma Peggy who was an artist, so I had an example of what it looked like to go to drawing classes and make paintings in a studio.

I was always drawn to figurative imagery and photography, I liked photorealistic paintings and tromp l’oeil illusionism. I think one of the things I’m attracted to is when the material of an artwork is hard to discern, either through a process or some act of labor. When I was making figurative paintings, the qualities of the printed photograph were exciting to me. Painting the shallow depth of field that a bright flash can create brings an awareness to the medium that it’s attempting to mimic.

Eventually, I started working with family photographs. As a Native family we are lucky to have access to images of our family dating back to the late nineteenth century and through those images we can see relationships and life events; relocating from one place to another. I was interested in the photographs’ relationship to memory, its ability to depict specificity and its limitations as a physical object. Looking through boxes of photographs transports you into different moments and memories but can also create new memories based on the connections we make on our own. I’m interested in the malleability of memory and narrative as a physical experience.

This entanglement with photography and thinking about the limitations of photographs and representation really excited me. And so it evolved into this practice centered around collage, where I layer prints, repeating images, and then allow the material of the paper to push back and create ruptures and inconsistencies that are then removed. It’s this process of weaving imagery, creating portals and separating the photograph from the legible image in order to create something new. That was really the goal: to use the photograph as material in order to generate something entirely different.

Kind of like deconstructing the archive and memory.

Deconstructing, transforming, and then focusing on what remains visible.

When did you realize you wanted to be an artist? How have you sustained your art practice?

I was interested in drawing. And I think my family saw that, so they encouraged it. I was in arts magnet schools. I was always in an environment where I could draw and be in art classes and learn about art. That was really the entire trajectory of my upbringing. My parents were both artists. My dad was in theater, and my mom was a dancer and now she is a potter and my grandmother made quilts and pots and paintings and drawings. My dad had this conversation with me right before I decided what to pursue in college. He was maybe encouraging me to explore something a little more practical, like graphic design. After experiencing what it’s like to be an artist, maybe he thought that I could choose a field with more stability. But I had been really excited by oil painting by that point and so I wasn’t interested in changing paths. More than anything I was interested in the handmade and wasn’t good at working at a computer.

He didn’t convince you.

No, not really. When you are making those decisions and you’re very young, you really don’t have an idea of what any of it means, what the decision to be an artist really means. I went to New York for college, and felt like I did well in an academic environment, but I had no preparation for what life outside of school was like. Professors would insinuate things about the reality of what it’s like to be an artist, but it was easy to dismiss. After college, I was met with some immediate challenges, I didn’t have a job lined up and ran out of money pretty quickly. I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe I thought I would make money from my thesis show or get a gallery or something but that was far from being a reality. Once I found some work I was able to get back on my feet, but really quickly I started to prioritize making art even when that required making sacrifices. I remember not taking full time jobs because I didn’t want to have all of my time taken away from me. And I thought, “Well, if I work five days a week, then I’m not going to be able to paint. And if I don’t paint, then I’m not going to move forward.” It’s what you have to do. There’s a little bit of blind trust in just moving forward and not stressing too much about the future. I also think that can be a double edged sword.

It’s blind faith. Perseverance. But not everyone has it in them. Not everyone has it in them to keep going towards something with no guarantee that it’s going to work out. There’s something about a person who perseveres. Maybe it’s stubbornness. Maybe it’s faith.

What does your creative process look like, specifically in the studio?

My practice is based in collage. It’s abstract. I’m layering large pieces of paper and then working with paint in an additive and subtractive process, where I’ll layer translucent, oftentimes sprayed applications of acrylic on top of pieces of paper, printouts of images at a large format scale. When I’m applying paint the palette is CMYK and I don’t mix colors ahead of time, the color mixing happens through layering on the surface. The process is additive, but every time I put a piece of paper down, the material does its own unwieldy thing, it creates bubbles and wrinkles. That leads to removing those bubbles and wrinkles by cutting and tearing into the paper. And so those tears read as mark making and drawing and painting but they confuse the space of the painting by sitting on top of the image even though the tear recedes in space, it exposes the white paper pulp that’s underneath the surface. It flattens the image a little bit, but also creates these woven marks that move throughout and across the borders and edges of the prints.

I was interested in this process. One of the things that this process does is—rather than the painting being bound by an image that I’m representing— the image becomes material, and the painting comes together through a mix of intentional and unintentional decisions, responding to color, shape, and composition and then having the material process push back. There is a lot of risk and a lot of unknown. I think what is exciting to me is the idea of arriving at something that I can’t anticipate, finding a painting, or finding an image, or a quality of imagery, that I can’t visualize ahead of time.

I’ve definitely made things harder on myself in some ways. The more I do it, the more I have a better sense of what to expect and how to trust that things will come together.

Your process kind of mirrors the life of an artist, right? Trusting the journey. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You’ve committed yourself to keep making the work. You’re experiencing that day after day in the studio…

It’s hard because you’re chasing a feeling that is undefined. I want to make something that works, but it’s never exactly how I imagined it. Even when I’m imagining, it’s not definitive. It’s a hard thing to land on, but when things do get resolved, it’s really fulfilling because there’s this sense of accomplishment.

Why do you think art school and MFA programs are important?

I loved being in an MFA program. I thought it was amazing, especially because I had been out of school for several years by that point. And so, I really valued the time and focus. I was in a program that was three years long. You’re able to slow down your life for a little while and really focus so that you can test and develop ideas with help from really smart people. I think there are a lot of pros and cons to MFA programs. Sometimes it can be really expensive. Sometimes you don’t know if you’ll connect with the people that you want to work with, but I think if you can find the right fit, it’s fantastic. It’s a luxury. A lot of my cohort was a little bit older, and we all just loved going to the chiropractor and having free health care, and being able to go to the gym and all of the perks that come with being an enrolled student at a university.

What about undergrad? Do you think that there’s still value in going to art school?

I do. I went to a private art school and it was really expensive, and I took on a ton of debt to do it, and I probably should have gone to a state school and just made it work. Despite all that, I think a traditional art school is such a cool experience, because it really develops your skills around craft and concept and you can focus on art with full immersion. When I’ve taught at universities, it’s hard because they’re getting a different art education, and they’re being pulled in a lot of different directions. They can’t really focus on just making a drawing for eight hours at a time because they have all of these other obligations. That can also be valuable, it’s just different.

I’m curious about what inspires you?

I spend a lot of time looking at art. The fact that my partner, Annie, is also an artist helps. Our whole world is centered around art. We’ve worked for artists for a long time. We make art in our studios when we’re not working. We have a big community of friends and we go to their openings. We see shows at museums. We travel to see art. Usually, that’s our vacation.

There’s this excitement when you find things that feel fresh or you see something in person that you wanted to see, or you’ve been looking at in reproduction. It can really open things up in your own practice. Usually, other artist’s work is not going to overlap very much, but when it does, that’s really impactful.

Annie and I like a lot of different types of art. Sometimes we wonder if we should be more narrow in our focus because it can be challenging when you’re making decisions in your own studio, and you are pulling from all of these different things that you’re excited about or interested in.

We love to go to watch old movies, and we try to watch movies at home. We love going to the Academy Theater, their programming is so good. We used to go to Vidiots when we lived in Highland Park. We recently saw Fantastic Planet on 35 millimeter. One of our favorite aspects of that movie is the art. It’s hand drawn and it feels very painterly and very much made by a person.

I know you’re an artist assistant as your day job. How do you manage to assist other artists and make your own art? Does your day job ever get in the way of your own creativity?

The skills that I have from my old way of working are the skills that I use for my day job. And so I still practice painting realistically, and I feel like I’m probably a better painter now than I was when I made that kind of work, because I do it so often. I think being able to exercise a skill and continue to develop the skill as your method of employment is pretty nice. I get to paint all day with my headphones on and be in my own world.

You learn a lot working with artists. You learn a lot about the art world, and you learn about how people do it creatively and practically, how people make it work.

How do you handle competition and rejection? Especially in the competitive ever-changing artworld.

Getting rejected is always disappointing. But when you realize how many times everyone goes through the same thing, it can be illuminating. The thing that is in my control is my own work. I want to share it with people. And I want to feel seen and appreciated in that way, but ultimately, I just want to make the best work that I can.

Is making the work more important than external validation?

There’s so many different ways of being an artist. The older I get, and the more exposure I have, I realize what artists’ lives are actually like. There can be moments of attention and success. But then there’s everything else. How do you sustain that? How do you create a sustainable practice that isn’t dependent on anything else? That’s really what I think you have to do. Some artists are really fortunate to have financial support or success throughout their careers but I don’t think that’s very common. Making the work has to be the point, the thing that is fulfilling or validating.

How do you create sustainable art practice?

It’s taken a really long time to find a balance. Finding a job that gives you time and energy to spend in your studio is important. Also, for years, Annie and I lived in a studio apartment together, and it gave us the freedom to work three days a week. It was a really small living space, but we each had our own studios. We had a lot of time to make our own work and it wasn’t stressful financially.

What else are you working on?

Over the last couple years, my brother and I have been working on a film together where we’ve interviewed our grandfather about his experience going to prison for resisting the Vietnam draft. It’s a story that we grew up knowing but never got the full picture of what it was like, what he felt and what led him to make his decision. We’re finishing the edit now and I’m really excited to see the final cut.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Connect with other people that are interested in what you’re doing, and try to be in dialogue with them, and then give yourself time to to work or think and prioritize your creative process and output.

Also, set aside specific time to work on your art—even if you don’t want to—you can’t really wait for inspiration to come. You just have to set aside time and make the work and make moves. A lot of my time in the studio is spent thinking and waiting to make a decision. I enter into this loop, constantly. But I realized that when I actually make a mark, or do an action, that gives me something to respond to.

How do you know you’re on to something?

You have to spend time looking at things. Sometimes in my own work, mistakes can be the thing that I’m looking for or waiting for. That’s really what started the paintings that I’ve been making for the past several years. The tears and shapes that are cut out of collage, are a result of something that felt like a mistake or an imperfection but turned out to be a new direction.