Tag: art

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interview with the artist: josie koznarek

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.

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what studying music taught me about writing

Many of you know that I studied music at one point in my life. This is, perhaps, a reduction, because for a decade and a half a music-focused life was the pinnacle of all my hopes and dreams.

The short story is that after realizing how much I had wrapped my identity up in my musical abilities and dreams, I understood that I needed to take a break from it for the care of my soul and sanity. After a year or two adrift and desperately seeking to fit somewhere, God saw fit to urge me back into writing. As time passed, He gave me the grace of writing as a vocation.

There are moments now that I look back and think, what was the purpose of all of those years of education, work, and experiences?

On my best days, I know (mostly because, mind you, I’ve heard people say it A FREAKING LOT) that “nothing is a waste,” that “God works in mysterious ways and for our good,” and that if nothing else: “it built character.” Cliches aside, I’m at rest with this particular season in the same way you might be at rest on a dragon’s back. It’s uncomfortable and scaly, I’m clinging for dear life and it might bite me in the butt. But at least I’m warm and I can see pretty far on a clear day. Are there other ways to live with the past?

Apparently nothing but the sheer momentum of a selfish decade striving after dreams could have created enough force to propel me into His arms. If I hadn’t invested all of that blood, sweat, and tears into something, it wouldn’t have hurt sufficiently when the dream died. I wouldn’t have realized my desperate need.

But all of that doesn’t mean I haven’t applied some things in my current vocation from my focused time in the practice room, classroom, and concert hall. So in the interest of looking for light, here are a few things music taught me about writing:

Consistency in Practice

In any discipline, the fight to actually do it is the real war. Doing something a lot is the only way to actually get better, the only way to fulfill the heart burning within, to coax the young song or story out of yourself. You show up, and the story, like the song, will eventually get used to your presence and show itself. Don’t give up on the process – in it, you will find life.

Rhythm and Tone

Words have rhythmic and tonal qualities, just like musical phrases. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get close to mastering these qualities, but pushing and pulling through phrases by Chopin and hammering out the erratic driving forces of Prokofiev have given me a deep respect for them. I don’t rely on this enough, but I’ve taken to reading what I write out loud for the sole purpose of hearing how it sounds off the page. For poetry, this is essential. For fiction or non-fiction, it is also essential. I don’t know a better way of testing the flow of your language, except maybe asking someone else to read it out loud.

Voicing

My private professor in college was a master at both discerning inner melodies in relation to top-level melodies, and layering them intricately – and not just in the counterpoint of such masters as Bach. This sort of layering provides complexity and integrity to any piece of music, from the structural strength of a bass line to a mid-range turn in the alto line. As I began to listen to these more carefully, I also began to appreciate the simple nature of most inner melodies. It didn’t matter that it was only three notes. What mattered is that it played well with other melodies, making the sum greater than its parts.

Writing needs counterpoint and harmony as well. The architecture of a great story requires the basso profundo notes of plot, soaring tenor lines of theme radiating out as supports, and the interweaving of melodies between characters as each takes the fore. The concern is balance, strength, heart – and masterful layering of all of these melodies is what makes a story rich enough to resonate in our hearts far beyond its reading.

And one layer beyond this, even, is the fact that simple earthy things, those things that we might decry for their lack of nuance or complexity, for their apparent “crudity” – these are the through-lines that the rest of the story can rely upon. All art is, after all, some sort of communication of human experience, with all of its ups and downs. We can talk about the differences between high and low art until we’re Picasso’d in the face. But until we learn to let the transcendent walk within the pedestrian, we are missing something essential about the incarnational life found in Christ.

Attention to Detail

So you’ve finally mastered the notes of a piece? Now the real work begins.

My professor didn’t just bring intense care to voicing. He also brought it to artistry in phrasing, dynamics, articulation, and a million other tiny details. Caring for these details can be instinctual, but more often than not they must be rigorously gone over and over until the piece is so well-loved that it communicates.

Compare this to the editing process. A first draft is just that – a first draft. It’s raw material, like a lump of clay, or the scribbles of a long-dead composer. In order to breathe life into the tune, beauty and purpose to the clay, you have to work with it. This can be, if you let it, an act of love that transforms the raw material into something true and beautiful. But don’t forget that loving someone is hard, and circuitous, and it takes time and blood and sacrifice. It will change you as you change it. You will grow as it grows.

I know this and I still have to steel myself every time I edit the crap out of something. But that is my duty: to love my feeble words, by the grace of God, into something that sings. And while studying music didn’t teach me how to edit a first, second, or twentieth draft, it definitely taught me to stay the course.

Creating Is Mysterious, and That’s OK

Whatever I bring to the table, there is something I cannot hope to control about what happens in the end result. Perhaps its a crapfest (more likely if I shirked my duty), perhaps it soars way beyond what I thought was possible (more likely if I paid my dues). Either way, the very fact that notes played at a certain speed and velocity can evoke any feeling in a listener is astounding. May we forever wonder at it!

The same is true of writing, as in any artistic discipline.

Our purpose as creators is to steward the work, to care while it is in our keeping, to give it over and over again to our Creator freely, to submit to His guiding and the needs of the work. This is a holistic process; it takes sleeping and eating well, attending to my soul and my body and my spirit. But in the end – the Spirit is the wind that fills it, and carries it to ears and eyes and hearts and souls.

Friends, what a gift it is to create! How can we not give thanks in the midst of such a process? It is right and good that we do. May God except our humble efforts and transform them as He sees fit.

P. S. But wait, there’s more…

This Friday, February 7th at 9 PM EST, I’ll be hosting the second episode of Behind the Broken Season LIVE on Facebook. This is your new favorite live show, wherein you get the nitty-gritty details of how I came about writing the poetry in my new book, SOLACE: POEMS FOR THE BROKEN SEASON (hint: mostly lots of coffee). I’ll be reading some poetry to you, answering questions, and enjoying talking about creative work and life in general. Would love to “see” you there!

If you want to nab yourself a copy of SOLACE prior to Friday’s shindig, you can get an ebook here, or a snazzy hardback version here or here.

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hutchmoot 2019 | you’re not crazy, nor are you alone

I didn’t want to go to Hutchmoot.

When my wife told me that she’d bought me tickets because, wise as she is, she knew I wouldn’t do it on my own, I immediately thought: 

“Oh crap. Now I have to go.”

For those of you who may not know, Hutchmoot is the annual gathering of the community of (and surrounding) the Rabbit Room. It’s a weekend celebrating story, song, food, art, community, and Jesus. Sounds kind of wonderful, right? And I knew this before I went to it, because of how vocal the whole Rabbit Room Chinwag Facebook group was about it.

But even though I knew all this, I had a lot of reasons for why it wasn’t a good idea for me to go, ranging from the very real “Linnea will be three weeks out from her due date,” to the also very real social anxiety, to thinking that I didn’t belong with such an accomplished, artistic group of people. I am an introvert, and I hate crowds. I might have been just a little nervous that all of these enthusiastic people I’d met on a Facebook group were actually a super-secret cult that performed sacrifices of Hutchnewbs on an altar of Tolkien novels to Andrew Peterson.

Thankfully, my wife’s good sense (and years of training in snagging Door County campsites) paid off, and she convinced me to drive the eight hours to Nashville and attend.

That first night was crazy. I was tired from the drive and experiencing Hutchgaze, in which you stare creepily at a person trying to determine if they look like their profile picture before greeting them sheepishly by both first and last names. But I was in line for only a few moments before I got a big hug from Bailey Berry McGee and the greeting that would become the mantra of the weekend: “We’re so glad you’re here!”

I could go on and on about the highlights: John Cal’s songs and stories that made me look at the simple act of eating together in a whole new light, the craftsmanship in every creative work, the free-flowing Ethiopian Guji, the Poetry Pub championing each other and the oft-overlooked poetic value of cheese, the total welcome of every face, a list a mile long of things I can’t wait to read and listen to, and the session notes that I will continue to pore over.

(I wasn’t planning to gush. I was going to hold it together a little better. But as I think back over the weekend, gushing seems to be in order.)

Let me narrow it down a little, for all of our sakes…

When I first came in, I was cycling through anxiety, envy, and discouragement. I was coming out of a dry creative season. I had experienced some pretty deep disappointment recently and was muscling my way through it the best I could. In general, I was exhausted and wondering if this writing thing was even worth all of the effort.

What struck me most about Hutchmoot was that so many of my fellow attendees (at least the ones that God opened up conversations with this year) seemed to be in similar spots, or a little down the road in either direction from where I was. Many have dreams of doing more creative work and maybe even getting paid for it someday, and many are feeling like that might never happen. Many are in the thick of some grief, loss, or discouragement. Many are grappling with what to do next, or how to best steward the creative passion within them. We all are people who need a hug, a song, a snack, and the assurance that we aren’t striving alone or in vain. And we’re also all people who are willing to freely give those things to each other.

Maybe it’s an artistic personality thing, or maybe it’s just the nature of the landscape when it comes to creative work — but the sense of companionship and commiseration was truly a balm to my soul. It was remarkable just to sit across the table from someone I’d met yesterday and think: “you too?” It was something I didn’t realize I needed as much as I did, to know that I’m truly not crazy, nor alone.

And if you’re a creative who is struggling right now, you don’t need to go to Hutchmoot to know this. You’re not crazy. You’re not alone.

Of course, we all went back to our homes and communities bearing within us this knowledge, a kind of ember to keep us warm on the way. Hutchmoot, for all of its wonderful immediate welcome, is not a place to make a home. As Andrew Peterson said on the first night: it’s a wayside inn. It’s Rivendell, a homely place – but not the final Home, or even the earthly home I am called to inhabit. It’s a place where I caught a vision for homely-place-making in my own community, so that as I drove those eight long hours back to Middlebury, IN my mind was blazing with ideas.

It was as if Hutchmoot held up a mirror in which I could see myself more clearly: a beloved, broken child of God who likes to create stuff. And then it gave me a swift kick in the ass and said, “Now that you remember who you are and Whose you are, go do what He tells you to do where you are. Here are some tools you can use, and some people who will walk alongside you.”

And thankfully, those people didn’t sacrifice me to Andrew Peterson.

Speaking of creative community…

I’ve been running a campaign on Indiegogo to create a new hardback poetry book with original art. With the help of dozens of friends and family, we’ve reached 85% of our funding, with only seven days to go! If that sounds interesting to you, we’d love your help to boost us over the top! Go here for more info, and thanks for considering!!