Art From Your Core: How to Develop Artistic Voice (Ep. 435)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. This show is produced by the Art of Education University, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

As I mentioned at the top of the show last week, September is National Literacy Month, and we are celebrating that here at AOEU. Last week we heard from Peter Reynolds, and this week I have author as well as artist and professor, Kate Kretz. Kate has a book that I absolutely loved, and we’ll talk about it here in just a moment, both what it is, why I love it, but first, I want to tell you about a couple things we have happening on the AOEU website this month. Great article from Kristina Brown on visual literacy. Great article from Kyle Wood on teaching with comic books. There are also some other things about writing artist statements, about bringing literature into the classroom, and so much more, and those can all be impressive supplements to today’s conversation, which is going to be about artistic voice with Kate Kretz.

Kate’s book is called Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice. As I said, I love this book, not only the topic, but how the book is laid out and organized as well. First, the topic, visual voice. We talk all the time about ideation and bringing in student voice, and why students need their voice to come through in their art and why it is so important. But we rarely talk about how, how can we guide our students toward developing that voice? How do we guide them with ideation and brainstorming and development and creativity? Well, secondly, Kate lays this out in the book in a very smart way. Each chapter has quotes or stories or anecdotes followed by information, followed by questions and exercises that challenge anyone reading it to think about themselves and their art. And the result is a book that helps artists develop a unique, creative voice, one that is self-sustaining, one that can grow along with them.

The book is accessible to students, but honestly, it’s one that can be good for anyone. I received my copy and I’ve been working my way through the artistic exercises every week since I have gotten it. And all of that is to say that I think Art From Your Core is a wonderful book, one that will resonate with teachers and artists, and teaching artists, and I cannot wait to talk to Kate about all of this. I want to ask her about everything that I just mentioned here and a lot more too. And Kate has also agreed to do a short reading at the end of the podcast, so stick around after the interview if you would like to hear a chapter from the book. Let me bring on Kate Kretz.

Kate Kretz is joining me now. Kate, how are you?

Great, actually. Beautiful day.

Yeah, super excited to have you joining us today, and so welcome to the show. And I guess to begin with, I would love for you to just tell our audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your career.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I was, let’s see, trained as a painter a billion years ago, but now, as of maybe 20 years ago, I also do a lot of fiber-based work. And I the past decade, my work has become very challenging, confrontational, and political. I’m an associate professor of art. I started my career as a BFA director at Florida International University in Miami, and I was there for 10 years. After a few moves, now I’m teaching at Montgomery College in Maryland, which is one of the most diverse community colleges in the country, and I’m currently adjuncting there and spending time in my studio and working on books.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, and I wanted to have you on to talk about your book. It’s called Art From Your Core, which I loved, by the way. I talked about it in the introduction to the episode, so people already know how much I love it. But I guess, can you give us, from your perspective, just a summary of the book? And I think more importantly, can you talk about why you wanted to write it? What was the impetus or the inspiration that made you put everything together for this book?

Mm-hmm. Well, when I was at FIU, we used to do these massive two-day critiques of every art major, and we called it spring review, and so everybody got 10 or 15 minutes and they got feedback from all the faculty. And I became worried about some of our lost students, the ones who had cliche ideas or no idea at all. And oftentimes if they’re lost, a professor may suggest something, and then they go down that road and it’s not really their road, so it doesn’t really work. I sort of fantasized in a very humorous way about creating a boot camp, and we would write a little script for our student if they’re struggling, and they would have to go to boot camp, and we would purge them of their tired ideas about what art is, and then encourage them to mine their own lives for original subject matter. And so, I eventually took it seriously and developed a university class, then a workshop, and then was encouraged to turn it into a book.

Now, I set out to create a system complete with exercises to help artists at all phases of their lives. There are questions that I ask myself all the time, and the goal was to find the work that each individual was born to make. The process is loosely based on therapy. You question where you got those ideas that are not working for you, and you develop new ones that fit you better.

There’s three sections, and the first section of the book is called The Obstacles, where we examine all the things that can block our true voice. So, we look at early influences regarding art, like what was in your parents’ dining room, and what kind of feedback you got as a child, approval culture in social media, money, our cynical cultural landscape, and the lack of silence in our lives, and in some cases the lack of meaning in our lives. I also address neurodiversity and mental illness, which I feel is not discussed enough in art schools and art circles.

Then the middle section is Build the Core, and it’s a very intense series of exercises to dig down deep inside of yourself and locate potential sources to serve as a kind of personalized foundation. And then finally, we intensify the work by learning different ways to access the subconscious, talking about bravery in art making, and most importantly, I think, the cultivation of a lifelong cycle of research and creation melded together.

I think that’s a really interesting process. I love how you put everything together. I love the exercises, because I think there’s so much there, and I’ve been working my way through it since you sent me a copy, and I love all of those exercises. I think they’re all really valuable.

Oh, thank you, thank you.

But I think more than anything, just looking at it from an art teacher perspective, one thing that resonated with me and it resonated immediately, it’s part of the introduction, the first paragraph, it was just your idea that we talk all the time about personal voice, about student voice, but we rarely spend the time to actually teach how to express it. We’re very good at paying it lip service, but we don’t necessarily help our kids follow through and discover that voice. So, I would love for you to talk about that idea, and maybe the how, but definitely the why you think that the cultivation of visual voice is so important.

Well, in colleges, in many cases, we’ve broken down disciplines, where the painters never used to meet the sculptors. Now there’s a lot of cross-fertilization, and in some cases, they don’t even have to declare a major, but the visual voice follows you. So, when students are learning skills, it’s pretty easy to teach them. You can just show them, right?

Right. Yeah, yeah.

But every artist is unique in terms of their motivations, their inspiration process, what their desired outcomes are, and that makes it a lot harder to teach than skills or techniques, because everybody’s going to have a different answer. And so, that’s where a lot of these questions in the Build the Core section come from. I’ve been reading artist biographies for 40 years, and I’ve talked to a lot of artists, and I’ve helped a lot of students through their struggles, and so I know where people get stuck, and also where their inspiration comes from. I mean, I think it’s really important to understand that every artist is sort of coming from a different angle when they’re doing their work.

I also think that even if you never become a professional artist, we can all benefit from knowing ourselves better, and living a more deep and meaningful life. And so, I think of art and life as being really integrated, and so that’s sort of the point of view of the book. I also view it as a sort of art as religion sort of thing, because I think that it has a lot of the elements of religion, and it helps people in the same way as religion might.

And so, this book addresses some things that people don’t want to hear necessarily, such as how electronic devices and the 24/7 noise, both auditory and visual, destroys creativity. And I’m not a Luddite by any means, but in one of my chapters, it’s really research-heavy in describing what our brains are doing when we’re connected to all these devices. So, I really think it’s not just about art, it’s about expanding the possibility of how you exist in the world through art.

Yeah, I really like that, and I’d like to dive in a little bit more, but before we get there, can we circle back to the idea of just kind of helping kids develop that visual voice, helping our students develop that? Because you mentioned teaching skills is easy, you just show them, but where do you stand on the idea of skill development versus exploring subject matter? How can we do both? How can we, as educators, balance those two needs?

I’ve heard a lot of people sort of say it’s either this or that, and I just don’t believe that’s true. For example, I have students do work about an obsession, or a portrait of their hero, and you’d be really surprised at … I thought they were all going to be pop stars and stuff, and no, it’s my grandmother, it’s my second grade teacher, whatever. And it allows for dialogue, and it allows for them to talk more about themselves, and start to feel like art can be connected to their life. I’m trying to think of some other examples, like a found still life in their living space that tells us something about them, because I know that sometimes when people make work, it’s your hands or materials that guide you.

But I think just trying to bring in as early as possible that art is also about ideas, and art has sort of separated somehow from the humanities, but when it was originally taught, it was a part of the humanities, and so that really drove home the fact that it’s about ideas. And so, I tend to have them read a little bit, even in a studio or a class, or write about things that are important to them, because I just feel like even if they don’t go on to be artists, that self-discovery is going to help them in all areas of their life. They’re essentially using art to develop a sense of self and hone their core values, et cetera.

Yeah, I think that’s really a good point. I think that’s something that we need to keep in mind. As we’re helping kids discover this, as I’m trying to put this toward my next question, because I think your thoughts kind of lead us in there, because one thing that you and I talked about before this interview is just the idea of the research and the creation cycle. And if we have a better idea, if students have a better idea, of what they are curious about, what they want to explore in their art, then that really sort of pushes that cycle. So, can you talk about how artists can get into that, that cycle of exploration and research and development and artistic output, and just what the benefits are and how we can help our students get into that process?

Well, I find that a lot of students have strange beliefs, such as that professional artists just get a singular great idea, a flash of brilliance, when most artists are actually creating from a sustained, sometimes lifelong investigation into their areas of interest, and that they use that to hone their vision. I think that research makes the art deeper, more layered, and also gives the artist confidence when speaking about their work, because they’re able to talk about it, not just in terms of what they drew, but maybe, “Oh, I discovered that when scientists are talking about wildlife, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” I really encourage them to sort of follow their own stream of consciousness when they’re doing research, where kind of going down the rabbit hole, one thing leads to another and that leads to another, and so we’re trying to, I think, teach them how to be curious as well.

Yes.

And to understand that there are other ways of looking at their subject matter, and if they start to pick the brains of different kinds of people about whatever their subject matter is, that they’re going to gain a great deal of understanding, and often it leads to the next project, etc. And so I talk in great detail about what that process is. I think I call it following the threads, or finding the threads.

I feel like a lot of artists develop an interest early on, and that’s what they’re doing. They’re sort of following a thread all the way through their lives, and they may go off on tangents for a while. But I feel that the research part is vital because I think the most important thing is it’s connecting art to their lives, and it helps create some meaning and some understanding about the fact that there are more than one way … there’s more than one way to look at anything. And when you hear artists talk about their work, when you go to a lecture or read a biography, you’d be surprised at how many of them are interested in weather, or animals, or frequencies of sound, or all these really obscure things.

Yeah, yes, it could be anything out there, yes, yes.

And I always say, “Artists can be geeks,” you know? You get them started talking on the things they’re interested in, and they’re like scientists in many ways.

Yeah, for sure, and I think, again, that exploration and experimentation and discovery is a huge part of it. And I guess I wanted to ask you one more time too about the artistic exercise. I know we’ve mentioned them a couple times, but I think that’s a good follow-up to everything that we just talked about, about finding that interest and diving in, exploring that a little bit more.

Oh, okay.

At the end of every single chapter in the book, you have the artistic exercises. Some of them are writing, some are just thinking or thought-provoking, others are artistic explorations or media explorations, and it just runs a whole gamut of exploration. But can you tell us a little bit more? You mentioned you’ve been doing this forever, but can you tell us about the exercises, how you’ve used them, how you’ve come up with all of them, and I guess, more than anything, just how they can benefit artists?

Well, I developed the questions and exercises based on, again, artist biographies, I’m very into those, and lectures, panels that I’ve attended, and over 40 years of talking to other artists about art. I’m one of those people who, in grad school, was always asking hypothetical questions about, where is your line regarding this?

And I guess at some point, during the writing of this book, I decided that I wanted to write the book that I wish someone had handed me at the beginning of my career, because I think it’s really important that the questions, as well as the chapters, are very holistic. They provide a lot of crossover into other areas of life. And I also feel that teaching for, what, 40, 30, 30-something years, I think that every hurdle I’ve ever guided my students through is addressed in these chapters. I mean, I really spent so much time almost doing a checklist of all the students that I’ve had in my life, and saying, “Well, what do they have problems with in this area, and how can this be difficult for them?” And so, the questions are to sort of pick at those things a little bit and get them thinking about these questions at kind of an early stage, so that it’s …

I mean, I’m going to be frank. A lot of this book is, excuse me, is trying to help young artists through different things that I’ve struggled with my entire life, or that my students have struggled with. And I’ve been sort of pushing, for example, at our college to have an art school orientation that addresses mental health, because a lot of my students either are neurodiverse or they struggle with mental health, and I wanted to say to them, “Here’s the counselor and here’s other things that you can think about.” And so I put a whole chapter in on that, and I think that students are always relieved when I tell them that this is a very common thing. It’s sort of a companion gift and struggle together. And so, I’m the kind of person who wants to talk about the things that nobody else wants to talk about, and so I was just thinking to myself, “What do young art students need?” And that’s kind of where all the questions came from.

No, that’s great, and I love it. And I think beyond just what art students need, I think it’s something that all artists need. I’ve just found personally, for me, it’s been great to go through some of those exercises when I don’t know where to go next or if I’m feeling tired of what I want to create. And just it gets you thinking about so many ideas and exploring so many things you have no choice but to [inaudible 00:26:05] creating, and so I think that’s a very good thing.

And then I guess finally, to kind of wrap things up, I love to ask all of my guests for advice that they want to pass on to listeners. And so, I would love to ask you, just what would you want to share with all of the art teachers who are listening? Any words of wisdom from your 40 years of teaching, or anything about helping students or about teachers in their own personal artistic practice? Anything else that you would want to share?

Well, I think both for artists and art students, I spent some time in the book talking about how the, quote, unquote, “art world” has developed over time. And what’s happened is the professionalization of art as a career and the emphasis on branding and fame and money has people looking at art in a way that is not really helpful to them. I have freshmen art students that come up to me and say, “I need to develop my brand right away,” and one of my favorite quotes from the book is, “It’s like trying to design a book cover for a book that has not yet been written.” And so, they’re putting the cart before the horse … yeah, the cart before the horse. And so I talk a lot about the art life in the book, in quotes, “the art life.”

Yeah.

And I think of it as a way of living and a way of looking at the world, and art can be inexorably intertwined with your life, and lead to a more, for lack of a better word, magical existence, looking for metaphors in everything around you. And so, I think that is kind of the big takeaway from the book, but also my greatest piece of advice. When you look at quote, unquote, “the art world,” you are essentially putting yourself in a dysfunctional relationship, because you’re looking outside yourself for approval. And so, if you start to look at it instead about cultivating the art life and something that’s going to be lifelong, that you’re going to look at the world through the eyes of an artist, even if you’re not a professional artist, that it can lead to a very rich life.

Yeah, I think that’s great advice, and a great way to look at things, so thank you. And then just one last question before we go. If people are interested in reading Art From Your Core, if they want to get this book, where can they find it, or where can they order your book?

You can get it from … It’s published by Intellect Press, which is London-based, but University of Chicago Press is distributing it in the US. I think they even do examination copies, but you can also get it online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. If you email me, I can give you … I’ll send you a signed bookplate and a little merch sticker from [inaudible 00:30:08]

That’s very fun. I was just going to say, I was lucky enough to get one of those, so I was very happy with those, so very cool. All right. Well, thank you, Kate. I appreciate you taking some time to chat with me to talk all about your book, and I think it’s something that’ll be really helpful for our teachers, so thank you.

Sure. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Thank you to Kate, not only for writing such an incredible book, but for also taking the time to discuss it with me here today. I will link in the show notes so you can easily find the book if you want it, but I will also share some related AOEU resources if you want to dive deeper into the topic of artistic voice.

We are going to do something to close the show that we have not done before. Kate is going to be doing a reading from a chapter of her book, so if you’re interested, please stick around. It will give you a great idea of what this book is all about. I will close things out and then turn it over to her for a chapter From Art From Your Core.

Art Ed Radio is produced by The Art of Education University with audio engineering from Michael Crocker. Thank you as always for listening. We have a pretty exciting announcement coming next week, one that we teased a bit ago, so please make sure you tune in for next week’s episode. It’s going to be a fun one. Here to close the show is Kate with a special reading of a chapter from Art From Your Core.

This is a little bit from chapter 12, which is called Mine Your Life.

“‘The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it,’ and that’s a James Baldwin quote, one of my favorite writers. In the early 1990s, I was attending graduate school at the University of Georgia. I already had a few undergraduate courses under my teaching belt when my chair contacted me about an opportunity in Atlanta, about an hour’s drive away. An artist named Eleanor Hand had started a program called Timeless Seeds. She secured space at a center city community space, and was offering art classes to teenagers. It was a brilliant program, exposed students to two weeks each of drawing, photography, painting, and sculpture, then conclude with an exhibition. Everyone in the neighborhood would be invited and the work would be offered for sale. The students would receive the proceeds, validating their efforts and encouraging them to continue.

“I was solicited to teach drawing. Due to my lack of experience with high school students, and their own unfamiliarity with art class structure, it was one of the most challenging teaching environments I had ever faced. Each day, the first students would arrive and turn on the boom box. By the time I got there, a party was going on, with everyone cutting loose after a long day stuck in their school seats. All the singing, dancing, and talking made it a struggle to quiet the classroom and get them focused enough to draw. When I taught and provided demonstrations, they were always peppered with requests to keep the noise down and focus.

“After the first two days, I was convinced I could do better, and devised a new approach. I borrowed a slide projector from the UGA Art Department, loaded it up, and drove to Atlanta. I entered the room, turned off the music and lights, and switched on the projector. I started showing my work, telling students the backstory of familial dysfunctionality that inspired each piece, no holds barred. I went on to share the work of other artists who use their practice to process the challenges of their own lives. I talked about art’s capacity to absorb these feelings that eat away at your insides, and extricate them from your body to create an object that can often comfort others in similar situations. I assured them that they possess the power to do the exact same thing.

“For the first time, that small community center room was silent. I ditched the planned lecture on light, shadows, and value, and challenged them to make work about their own fears, worries, and secrets. The drawings were astonishing. It was one of those extraordinary chill-inducing teaching moments that I will never forget. I bore witness to a collective mental shift in the minds of my students. Art was no longer some elite world and set of obscure objects far outside their own experience. Instead, it became a vehicle that had the potential to save their lives, a vehicle that they were entitled to, as much as any other great artist who had gone before them. Their voice mattered and could become part of the artistic discourse of the ages.

“Because I caught them off guard, the students cracked open for a few hours and made magic that day. There were no filters, no teenage self-conscious attempts to be cool. They learned a new secret language that was both empowering and terrifying in its potential. I am convinced that some of them drew things that they had never said out loud before. Incredible transformation can happen when we reach down to create from our soul without filters. Work fueled by raw truth allows us to step away from all the facade-building that our culture encourages, and like peeling an onion, it is a lifelong process of going deeper and showing more of ourselves.

“Painter Lisa Yuskavage tells a wonderful story about how her first solo show was successful, but she was not happy with it. As a result, she took a year off from painting. After looking at a lot of other people’s authentic art that moved her, her own work changed dramatically. Reconsidering her inaugural exhibition, she concluded that, quote, ‘It was like a show for a person that I was pretending to be, not my real self. I was trying to ape something that I was supposed to be doing. I come from a working class family. I kind of have a potty mouth. I have a lot of crazy energies that I didn’t know you could put into art. I thought art was for classy people, and I was going to try to be one of those people. That’s when I put on my painting beret, my little pinky went up, and I was a fake. I was a fraud, and I didn’t know how to do it any other way.’

“What Yuskavage learned in her time off, from looking at artists like Mike Kelley and Jeff Koons, is that the best artists are entirely themselves without holding back. They embrace all their messy, embarrassing thoughts, fantasies, and life experiences, then dial up those qualities in their work to shine their authenticity out on the world.

“How can we be sure that we are being genuine and true in our studio practice? Even if your work reflects who you are, is there a way to go deeper? In this chapter, you will begin the process of mining your life. We’ve stripped away various obstacles to finding true voice. Now you will work on the discovery and articulation of a new core that comes from your particular thoughts, feelings, and experiences. You will exhume formative memories that have left an imprint on your psyche.

“The aim is not necessarily for you to create confessional art or even art about your life. Rather, by jogging your memory about significant moments in your history, you will discover valuable creative nuggets that belong to you and no one else. These nuggets will provide potential starting points for building your stockpile, establishing your core, and developing new bodies of work. Even if your work is abstract, the impulses driving you to create that work, as well as the decisions you have made in process, come from conscious and unconscious influences that you have encountered. These memories play a significant role in the formation of your artistic decisions, interests, and sense of aesthetics.

“This excavation process will be deep and wide, like having several hundred diggers working on a rich archaeological site. Some of the things you unearth will have immediate resonance. Others might mean nothing to you right now. You may not even recognize them as threads you want to follow, but if you record and keep your answers, you may find that some of the thoughts and memories you dredged up will align perfectly with your creative self, if not now, later as your work evolves.

“Art objects are not just gifts for the viewer. They can hold profound, even mystical, revelations for the maker. When actualizing work that comes from your core, one of the greatest sources of pleasure is the recording of your art life journey with the serendipitous connections, the seminal players, and meaningful symbols that return again and again. Art is an unconscious language that knows more about you than you know about yourself.

“Artist biographies reveal how their creations were influenced by life events, ranging from the seemingly inconsequential details to cataclysmic psychic shifts. From devouring these stories, I have learned that inspiration can come from almost any part of your identity, knowledge, and experiences. As a result, I have spent the last 20 years building up the questionnaire that follows.

“Sometimes the connection between art and personal narrative is profound, such as Joel-Peter Witkin’s story of witnessing a horrific accident as a child. The decapitated head he saw haunts his often morbid still life photography. Mark Bradford’s early work was made from the end papers used for perms in his mother’s hair salon. Louise Bourgeois was influenced both formally and conceptually by her family history. She built many decades worth of work around a personal narrative involving her father, who took her nanny as his mistress. Later in life, Bourgeois turned to fiber as a medium, reflecting the occupation of her parents, who restored tapestries for a living.

“James Rosenquist’s early job as a billboard painter provided the formal style for his room-sized gallery paintings. Composer Duke Ellington worked at an ice cream counter as a soda jerk, and his first song was supposedly set to the rhythm he established as he jerked ice cream sodas at The Poodle Dog. Andy Warhol was a commercial illustrator, creating pop culture himself before he began his pop culture commentary work. Damien Hirst worked at a mortuary, then became famous for pieces that suspended dead animals in formaldehyde.

“For almost a decade, I myself made functional and decorative objects for my home as a break from my serious fine artwork. My hands always needed to be making, so I created pillows for my couch, deconstructed and rebuilt furniture, and did upholstery in between my art projects. I was poor, but wanted to surround myself with beautiful, one-of-a-kind objects. Eventually, the curators who came to see paintings got sidetracked by the sewn artists … or objects around my home, included them in exhibitions, and I moved in the direction of fiber. Several bodies of work originating from those side projects have now won grants and been widely exhibited.

“You, your work, and your life are always inexorably intertwined. If you move to Arizona, your palette might shift to reflect the new qualities of life. The clay that you purchase will feel different. When my studio shrunk from a thousand square foot room to a folding table, I switched from 6′ by 8′ oil paintings to 2″ by 3″ hair embroideries. Now it is your turn to discover which parts of your life will provide deep wells from which you can draw to feed your life’s work.”