Austin Art Talk

"Anytime I am stuck in life, I will usually do a project on it. Trying to understand, and just to try and move through it. It really helps me move through something. All of my work is basically things I am trying to figure out and move through in my own life"

This interview is with Suzanne Koett, who’s ongoing photo project captured on film, PANDEMIC, is a series of portraits of quarantined families and individuals in the places they reside. I could relate to so many of the ways that Suzanne thinks about and lives her life and what impressed me most is her very intentional dedication to self growth through her art creation. Be sure to visit her website, to see all of her various series, and the obvious, and not so obvious path she has been on for the last decade. Please enjoy this conversation with the very talented and thoughtful Suzanne Koett.

Suzanne Koett is an artist, contemporary photographer, and art educator from Austin, TX. Her work centers around the human condition and the shared collective experience. Through her art she aims to demystify life experiences and shows what it means to be alive and to bravely exist. Suzanne holds a BFA in Studio Art (concentration photography) from San Francisco State University.

PANDEMIC series on Instagram

Suzanne's blog post from Jan 2020

Suzanne's series The Study of Aloneness

Suzanne's series dedicated to her father after his passing

What is Reparenting and How to Begin

Suzanne's series To Record Only Water for Ten Days

"What great thing is going to happen today?"

"I am here for you when things go really well. I am here to help celebrate you. And I am here for you if things don't go well"

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Links:

• Suzanne Koett website

“Don’t lose your authenticity. Keep honing your skills to become a better artist. Don’t just copy what someone else is doing, go beyond it. Find what really speaks to you in your soul as an artist and start doing that.”

John P. Weiss is a former police chief and editorial cartoonist who retired early to become a full-time artist and writer. John studied landscape painting extensively with American painter Scott L. Christensen.

Using a limited palette and strong abstract designs in his representational work, John captures quiet scenes of land and nature.

Wisdom from a 26-year law enforcement career and lifetime of reading informs John's poignant short stories and insightful articles. John writes about life lessons, personal growth, and the creative arts.

John's written work appears in:

The Guardian, NBC News, Becoming Minimalist, Thrive Global, Goins Writer, Elephant Journal, and more.

Read John's full biography here.

Over 38K followers enjoy John's weekly articles, which he illustrates with his whimsical, fine-lined cartoons.

Click here and subscribe to get on John's email list. You'll receive the latest creative work. No spam, always free, privacy respected.

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Links:

• John P. Weiss Fine Art

For over 15 years the Fusebox Festival has been delivering an amazing array of curated performances and artists from all over the world and bringing them right here to Austin. Since the festival will not be able to go on as planned as a live event, the organizers had to pivot the whole event online into what they are calling the virtual edition. Join me for a conversation with Executive & Artistic Director Ron Berry and Associate Artistic Director & Curator Anna Gallagher-Ross to talk about how that played out and what we can look forward to experiencing this year.

Instagram @fuseboxfestival

Youtube

In light of the COVID-19 crisis, it is not possible to hold Fusebox Festival as we originally planned.

Our Festival isn't canceled, it's re-imagined as a virtual space where our community, both local and global, can come together to experience the work of Fusebox artists and participate in an exciting array of virtual events and activities.

Fusebox Festival 2020: Virtual Edition is a weekend-long broadcast taking place April 24-26.

Think public access TV meets international block party meets live performance! We see this as a platform to explore what it means to gather together and celebrate adventurous art, online.

This Virtual Edition will feature:

Please mark your calendars for April 24 – 26, follow us on social media, and we will be in touch soon with our artist lineup and schedule. Thanks to you, our Fusebox Family, we are able to bring our artists and community together in a much needed time for celebration. We appreciate your support!

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• Festival | fusebox-festival

Becca Borrelli is an illustrator, teacher, story teller, and part of The Lemon House where she has her art studio, which will also be hosting an upcoming Process Over Product Art Series. Becca also just launched her own podcast Secret Sauce, and I highly recommend you check it out. We talk about her journey as an artist, teacher, and small business owner, and talk a lot about how sensitivity can be reframed into a strength instead of a weakness.

Becca Borrelli is an admirer of doodling, and art teaching. Since graduating with a MA in Art Education from The University of Texas, she has been working as an art teacher at The Contemporary Art School in Austin, and establishing an illustration business.

She is inspired by the invisible connections between all things, and her work aims to be a playful, bright, and hopeful interpretation of the world's whimsical and magical sides. She has fallen in love with her hometown in Austin, TX where she spends free time exploring the town with her husband and their super-pups Layla and Rose.

Welcome to Secret Sauce, a podcast about the secret ingredients in life and work, hosted by Becca Borrelli. Secret Sauce explores artistry as a helpful framework for inspiring meaning and understanding in our everyday lives.

The Lemon House is a working studio for three Austin based artists: Katherine of Bliss Kid Yoga, Allie of Stampworthy Goods, and Rebecca of Rebecca Borrelli Illustrations.

We are of the mind that just because you are a solo entrepreneur does not mean that you can’t have the same community of co-workers you would in an office. We work along side each other in our studio, but also open our studio for open house shopping events, potlucks for makers, and other community events.

1713 E 12th Street

Instagram: @lemonhouseatx

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Links:

• Borrelli Illustrations

This is a quick update to talk about how things will proceed with the podcast after adjusting to the pandemic.

Upcoming guests:

Becca Borrelli/Illustrator & Teacher

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Support this podcast.

Links:

• Eye Like Design - A Creative and Web Agency in Austin, TX
• Scott David Gordon is creating Podcasts and Art! | Patreon
• Austin Art Talk - Support
• Borrelli Illustrations
• Fusebox | fusebox-festival
• SKM Art Advising Expertise, Guidance, Acquisition
• Suzanne Koett

"I think art for me has always been about giving someone an image that they can get absorbed into, and that takes them to a place that is sort of hyper-real. You know it’s not reality but you also can’t quite pin down what it is or where it came from. I see that in the tintype process as well. It’s quite arresting as a modern person to be photographed in a tintype because it puts you in this other world where you know it’s you and you know it’s modern photograph. But you’ve never seen anything like it and it breaks you out of that pattern of being so well versed at looking at imagery."

Studio located behind Justine's Brasserie

Hours - Thursday - Sunday, 6pm until 11pm

Photography

Adrian is a photographic artist based in Austin, Texas. Born in the UK, Adrian received his Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication before moving to the US in 2007 to pursue photography.

In 2013 Adrian founded Lumiere Tintype, the world's only traveling tintype portrait studio. Lumiere serves as an attempt to make honest, timeless portraiture that helps people to reconnect with the lost alchemy of a handmade photograph. In the past six years Adrian has shot over eleven thousand tintype portraits, images that he hopes will be cherished for generations to come.

Outside of Lumiere, Adrian’s photographic work plays with the idea that our notions of photography are beginning to detach from the rules of perspective. As digital technologies continue to reshape our understanding of what a photograph can be, we are discovering immersive new ways to become transfixed by the power of an image.

For example, in Adrian’s cathedral of light, we see that a photograph can be elusive and ephemeral - impossible to capture or ‘fix’. It can exist only as a luminous play of light and color across ground glass - we meditate upon the image in the same way that we watch time pass.

A photograph can also exist without a single, fixed viewpoint. Inspired by Chinese scroll paintings, Adrian built the Aleph - a projected photographic landscape that can never be viewed in it’s entirety, only in sections. Each viewer charts a different course as they explore the image plane, leading to very different interpretations and memories of the same work.

Adrian’s latest endeavor - the daydream society, explores the aperspectival realm of stereo photography - a technique that uses the viewer’s own visual cortex to blend two fixed perspectives into one fully dimensional image. These fascinating, three dimensional (four if you include the duration of exposure!) images can only exist in the imagination of the person viewing them - in the material world they are merely two flat photographs, sitting alongside each other on a two dimensional plane.

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Links:

• Adrian Whipp Photography

"I think it’s ok to be in a space of feeling lost at points in your life. That’s actually a great place to be."

The Story Of My Work

I was 28 when I realized I wanted to become a painter. Until then and to this day, I had never studied art nor had any formal training. I’d always had the “gift” and recall my kindergarten teacher showing my mother my drawings and expressing how advanced they were for my age. But art was not a realistic occupation as I’d been indoctrinated into the “tragic artist” mythology, that to become one was to lead a sad and ultimately unfortunate life. So quite by accident, at 28, I attended a life drawing class and within the first 30 seconds of the first drawing, in the most supernatural way, I was was transformed. It would be another seven years before I had my first gallery show. Between then I poured over books of the techniques of the old masters and immersed myself in tens of thousands of images, slowly developing a rich visual vocabulary. I became enamored with the painters Titian, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, among others and with the romantic landscapes of Claude Lorrain, J.M.W. Turner, and Caspar David Friedrich. It was the majestic beauty and drama in these artist’s paintings and the long tradition of disciplined study and technique that attracted and inspired me. It would become the holy grail of what I would hope to find in my own work. And so my early paintings were infused with the dramatic play of light on human bodies and landscapes.

I achieved a degree of success with this early work which in 1998, allowed me to quit my full-time job as a graphic designer at Dell Computer and focus entirely on painting. Though I continued to work in the traditional style of layered glazing in oils, I was already feeling a pull away from convention and a desire to explore painting’s greater possibilities. Where it had been a hunger for tradition and discipline that established my foundation, I was now compelled by a meditative thoughtfulness in being present and a desire to release myself into the uncertain world of abstract and conceptual painting. This began a ten year transition away from one style and method and into the new. However, my interest in form and beauty never wavered. Even the method of applying layered glazes continued to instruct my new work, though from a very unique and self invented process. My new paintings are spontaneous and abandoned Meditations, appearing as quiet spaces or joyful dances on the canvas. My Constructs are architectural explorations of color and surface, simultaneously both painting and sculptural relief. Fundamentally, despite their dissimilar surfaces and the contrast to my earlier romantic period, this new work remains true to my commitment to beauty and form.

Spectrum

New Work by Roi James

JANUARY 18th - FEBRUARY 22nd, 2020

Davis Gallery

Davis Gallery is proud to announce Spectrum, Roi James' first solo exhibit in Austin in nearly a decade. In this new collection, James presents works ranging from brilliant, undulating polychrome constructs, to delicate oil paintings contemplating the expanses of the open sea. Over the course of his career, James has boldly shifted his artistic vision, reinventing himself many times over and enjoying consistent success along the way. His mastery of several mediums and styles has attracted national attention and local fame. Spectrum, represents his latest triumphs, and delivers a complete series of diverse, significant work. This exhibit will be on view from January 18th through February 22nd, 2020.

The last two years

https://roijames.com/

[email protected]

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Links:

• Contemporary Abstract Expressionism: The Art of Roi James

“You don’t just believe in yourself, You behave in a way that you can believe in yourself, trust yourself. You have to show up. You have to show up everyday in the studio. You have to put in your time to make this unreal thing real.”

In the 1970’s and early 80’s, Schlinke danced with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and the Joe Goode Performance Group, both based in San Francisco. At that time, the San Francisco art and dance scene were strongly influenced by new concepts flowing from artists such as Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, many of whom emerged from the hot house for avant-garde work at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Much of Schlinke's approach to painting is founded on the experiences that she absorbed as a dancer in those decades. Before moving to San Francisco, she received a B.A. and M.A. in dance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently a resident of Austin, she grew up in Dallas, Texas.

Since relocating to Austin, Texas from San Francisco in 1994, Schlinke has exhibited her work at numerous venues including the Robert McClain Gallery in Houston, The Dallas Contemporary and the MAC, Women & Their Work, Texas State University in San Marcos, D Berman Gallery in Austin, D. M. Allison Gallery in Houston, the Dougherty Art Center in Austin, and Northern-Southern Gallery also in Austin. Before returning to Texas, she exhibited with the Braunstein-Quay Gallery in San Francisco.

Show Run: January 11 - February 15, 2020

Gallery hours Saturdays Only:

or for appointment, contact:

Resonating work

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• NAOMI SCHLINKE

"You know what, all that matters is that you find a way, however you have to do it, to just keep making your shit. Whatever that is. Just don’t stop. Any creative person. It’s so easy not to. Just find a way. Just don’t stop. You have to give yourself that opportunity. It’s a lot easier now than ever. So by whatever means you have please take advantage of it and go make your stuff, because you’re not getting younger."

Rohitash Rao’s art is a reflection of our culture. His work reflects our over-consuming society, often made on the very things that we throw away. His work is a conceptual (and often funny) take on the way we live.

Rohitash Rao is an award-winning art director, animator and director. He has co-created and illustrated 7 children’s books published by Harper Collins, made an animated TV pilot for 20th Century Fox and has had 12 solo shows as a fine-artist. He currently works as an assistant professor at the Stan Richards School of Advertising at the University of Texas in Austin.

Upcoming group exhibition

I Picked You A Flower

Vault Stone Shop

Confidence

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• Rohitash Rao paints on trash

"I have a huge interest in empathy and compassion and humanizing people. That’s been a big part of my work and my life."

Recspec Gallery

Opening Reception Saturday, January 25th – 5-9pm

Works on paper about the places for which the heart yearns by printmaker and artist Annalise Gratovich.

Annalise creates her finely crafted prints by hand from start to finish, carving wood, etching metal, dyeing paper, and using manual printing presses to create multiple originals. Each piece is printed on the finest archival papers using oil based inks and hand dyed papers she produces in her studio. Annalise operates as a self publisher out of Austin, Texas and travels frequently across the country as a visiting artist and speaker and to publish prints with highly esteemed print shops.

Annalise begins each of her pieces with a drawing and a love for technical and artistic experimentation. She meticulously carves wood blocks with hand tools or carefully scribes into wax on the surface of a copper plate that is then dipped into an acid bath. Once these matrices are complete, sometimes after months of carving or a dozen dips in the acid bath, she begins her color development. Starting from color swatches she dips and tests in her studio, she dyes in bulk sheets of thin yet strong mulberry paper in a wide variety of colors and patterns. These sheets of dyed paper are then carefully cut out and applied to the wet ink on each woodcut or etching during the printing process, at which time the ink, papers, and pressure all combine to create the prints you see here.

Annalise Gratovich was awarded the title of Creative Ambassador of Visual Arts in 2019 by the City of Austin and exhibits extensively nationally and internationally, most recently in Buggenhagen, Germany, New York, NY, Dawson City, Youkon, San Antonio, TX and Austin, TX. She was most recently a guest artist and lecturer at Egress Press, Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, and a guest artist and juror at New Leaf Editions in Vancouver, B.C. Her most recent publications were produced by Mixed Grit in Denver, Colorado, at Egress Press in Pennsylvania, Evil Prints in St. Louis, Missouri, and Cannonball Press, Brooklyn, New York. She has work in numerous private and public collections, the most recent acquisition going to the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of PrintAustin, a month-long, city-wide printmaking event for which she has helped organize exhibitions and special events, curate the PrintAustin Invitational, and has participated in artist and curator talks, and panel discussions.

Annalise’s ongoing and largest series to date, Carrying Things From Home, is comprised of eight 3x5.5 foot hand-dyed chine collé woodcuts.

PRINTAUSTIN

January 15th - February 15th, 2020

PrintAustin’s mission to the Austin art community and galleries is to share our enthusiasm for printmaking by helping galleries curate, exhibit, and promote works on paper and to engage a wider audience through in-house artist talks, signings, panels, printmaking demonstrations, and print-focused art happenings.

With several professional print shops, nationally recognized university printmaking programs, internationally acclaimed print collections, and a thriving printmaking community, Austin is a hub for printmaking in Texas. The PrintAustin team is working with organizations and individuals throughout the Austin visual arts community to showcase fine art prints during this annual event, January 15-February 15.

Intro music generously provided by Stan Killian

Support this podcast.

Links:

• Annalise Gratovich website