Josie Koznarek is a fine artist and designer based in Chicago, IL, working primarily in ink paintings. She’s also a long-time friend of mine.
Through the years we’ve crossed artistic paths here and there, often talking about further collaboration. This year we were able to do just that, with a little book of poetry you may have heard about called SOLACE. Josie not only created four original art pieces for the book, she designed and formatted the book itself, and put up with all of my questions and flights of fancy along the way.
She’s an incredible artist and an incredible person, and she recently took the time to talk with me about her creative process, inspiration, and bliss.
What was the impetus for you to start creating art?
A person’s habits are often intrinsic; you’ve more than likely had the same tendencies and been doing the same actions over and over again since before you had memories. Most adults sleep in the same position they slept in when they were babies. My mom tells stories of my creating an immense amount of art from an early age. I’ve just kept that habit going.
How have your artistic style and priorities evolved over time?
My style may change, but my voice remains the same. I would argue that it has been the same since I was little. My constant priority is to somehow manage to connect my fluctuating style to my intrinsic voice.
As a child and as an adult artist, you find people and projects whose style resonates with your voice. You look up to them, and often imitate them, in ways as formal as robustly studying art history to simply drawing fanart for an anime you like. You let your practice and influences guide you, continually playing a game of Marco Polo with yourself until you (hopefully) find the connections through which your voice can flow freely, however that may look.
Can you walk us through a typical (or atypical) process of creating a piece? What’s your favorite part of the process?
Sometimes I just take 15-20 minutes out of my day to let the brush move as it will and it’s as simple as that. A recent painting of an orchid I made happened that way, and it looks great.
With more complex work, however, I’ll usually take a few more steps to ensure that it turns out the way I want it to. Since my work is usually based on flowing, bold strokes of ink, if I mess up and the piece looks bad, I have to start over. There’s no covering up a misplaced line without ruining the texture of the paper. For pieces such as the ones I created for SOLACE, I start by refining a thumbnail of the piece to test various compositions. When I find one I like, I’ll practice that composition on smaller pieces of paper so I know where the brush is going to go. This usually takes a couple of hours.
Once I’m happy with how the tests went, I’ll dip my brush into ink and place each major line exactly where they need to go, allowing smaller lines such as textures and shadows to manifest as I work. The pieces I made for Solace took about 6 hours each using this process.
My favorite part of the process is falling into the process. If I enter a flow state, I can work and have no idea how long I’m working for and it is bliss. This does not always happen, however, which can be quite gruesome to witness. My husband once came home to find me painting and angry-crying over a watercolor painting of lily pads that was taking too long. It was not a good time. The painting turned out great, though.
You created four original art pieces for the book. What inspired this particular character that we’re encountering in each season?
The artsy-fartsy answer, and the one that’s more true to how it actually happened, is that the character felt like they belonged there, so I put them there.
If I were to reflect on that decision to try and rationalize exactly why I put that character there, I would say that physical embodiments of emotional/spiritual realities permeate my work. An early series of mine called “Cool Girl” reflected on societal acceptance through various portrayals of “cool” women. Large twin pieces I recently completed portray the sun and the moon as sisters sharing two different natural reactions to pain.
This particular character I painted here, in my mind, is both the reader and someone else entirely. The character is the reader in the way they interact with the seasons; a little mournfully, and simultaneously drowning in and clinging to the flow of things. The character is also the spirit of these woods, as the character not only repeats but the location does as well. The four paintings take place in the same forest over the course of the four seasons. Weather and temperature change drastically, and the forest is very remote and lonely, but this is the way of things. There is beauty in it and a groundedness to it that make the forest spirit almost seem to glide from season to season with an effortlessness that only emerges through centuries of knowledge. Knowledge that we humans can find in the art and the poetry we have been creating and preserving and sharing with one another since the beginning of time.
You’ve done a number of live art pieces, and that just blows my mind. What does it take for you to execute those in real time?
I am a fundamentally lazy artist; the quicker I can get a piece done, the happier I am. Plus, it might not seem like it reading these very serious descriptions of my own work, but in real life I am very much a ham, and hamming it up is something I’m very comfortable doing. My two character flaws of laziness and attention-whoring interplay with each other in just the right way to make my work-flow perfectly adaptable to live art. This means that I can stand in front of a crowd painting long, dynamic, impressive ink lines and end up with a beautiful completed piece in less than 2 hours. It’s not something most people can do, but for some reason I’m accidentally naturally suited to that environment.
What’s the most difficult thing about being an artist?
Being your own business. Making art isn’t just making art (although it would be great if it was). There are emails to send, galleries to attend, phone calls to make, invoices to write, checkbooks to balance, and entire websites to update. This would be less difficult if there was a manager above me telling me what to do and when to do it, but that’s on me too. Naturally it’s difficult to be perfect at all of that. So there’s a lot of guilt there, too, even though wearing all of those hats is a superhuman ordeal that no one should have to put themselves through. And yet here I am torturing myself!
What’s your favorite thing about being an artist?
As of last year, I’m finally making artwork that I’m fully satisfied with. In the past, I couldn’t bear to hang my own work in my house, because I’d always look at it and see the ways I could grow or improve. I still have that eye, and you need that eye in order to be a good artist, but now I actually like the art I make. It feels like a literal lifetime of working and pushing and refining is finally coming to fruition, and it makes me so happy.
Another more simple answer to this question is that just making things is bliss. The beauty of the process and the satisfaction of completion spreads to a lot more in my life than just art, but it certainly manifests itself the most in my personal practice.
One thing we’ve often talked about together is the difficulty of making art or writing (or any art form, really) into a financially-viable vocation. How do you care for your sanity in the midst of that reality? Asking for a friend…
A key concept/mantra I repeat over and over to myself is sort of similar to what I was talking about earlier; that when you go to an office job, they hire janitors to come in literally every day to make sure your space is clean and nice so you can keep working well. When you work from home, you literally have to be your own janitor. Which by itself is a full-time job that companies pay full-time wages for. And that’s far from the only role you have to fill for yourself… you’re your own secretary, web designer, social media manager, content creator, and financial advisor, all of which in most places are full-time jobs with full-time wages and vacation days and sick days and benefits.
All that to say, be gentle with yourself. Log your work hours, and keep the boundary of 8 hours of work a day with an extremely strong hand. Take a lunch break every day. You always need it. When you have to work overtime, balance that out with an equal amount of rest and recovery. Rome was not built in a day, and Rome was also not built by working 10 hour days to the point where you can’t even work anymore because of extreme burnout. I say this from experience.
What’s a common misconception about your work?
I think the number one question that I get is, “How long did this take you?” It always feels like a trap, because I know the answer they’re expecting from me is, “OHHH my gosh this took me eleven-hundred HOURS you don’t even KNOW the work I put into this.” But the reality of my work is that most of my more popular pieces, from concept to completion, didn’t even take a half hour.
Fast work is just as impressive as work that took 20+ hours. The amount of practice and refinement that I’ve had to put in in order to place such sure, deliberate brush strokes took years to perfect. In certain ways fast work is much harder than slow work, like oil painting or sculpting. If you mess up an oil painting, you can cover up the problem area or slowly work it into your composition. Unless something goes horribly wrong, you can always even out a mistake in a clay, wire, or stone sculpture. But with minimal ink painting, the line is the line and that’s it. There’s no going back or erasing or pushing it around to make it work. If you mess up, you have to start over on a new piece of paper or discard the idea altogether. The time spent on my pieces does not equal skill, it’s the thousands of hours of practice behind the scenes that make my skill what it is.
What advice would you give to creators?
Go and have fun.
Who were you as a 5 year old? Do you remember? It might not feel like it, but that’s still who you are. Go out and play. Write what you want. Sing what you want. Draw what you want. Maturity is not the rejection of that person. It’s placing that person on your shoulders, embracing that person, and speaking as that person with a new, strong foundation that can only come through time and experience.
Go out and play. I’ll come join you.
You can see more of Josie’s artwork at her website, or follow her on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Check out our collaborative work on SOLACE: POEMS FOR THE BROKEN SEASON, and be sure to join me for Behind the Broken Season (Ep. 3) live on my Facebook page on Feb. 28, 9 PM CST.