GAS Members Interview Artist and Poet, Karla Van Vliet

GAS:  What medium/media do you work in and why did you choose those?

Karla: Over the last several years I have moved away from a painting technique I called scored painting; a process where I scored into a gessoed surface and then applied thin layers of acrylic paint to fill in the scoring and create an etching-type look. I started using ink on paper, scoring into wet paper with an inked tool. The ink created a strong line along the scoring but also held a softened color field on the paper where it had been wet. This intrigued me and I started to experiment more and more with inks. As I brought asemic writing into my work it made sense to me to work with ink, pen and ink, as inks relate to writing historically. 

This past summer I started making my own inks using flowers from my gardens. I really loved working with the natural elements, making color from petals. This led me to earth pigments. My newest paintings are made with these natural earth pigments. I mix them with an acrylic medium to create paint. I then paint on cut paper. I mount these pieces to a heavy watercolor paper or to a cradled board. 

I love the groundedness of these materials. As well, I was starting to work on a series of paintings inspired by water, the river, and the stones of the river. It felt right to use earth pigments for this series. In this series I am only using three pigments, indigo, earth green, and earth red.

GAS:  Can you speak on being a woman in the art world? 

Karla: I really don’t think about myself as a woman in the art world. I think of myself as an artist in the art world. What comes to mind when I read this question is an implication of a hardship, 

that there is an implied difficulty about being a woman in the art world, and I guess if you look at the percentages of women in museums and galleries there is some argument for that. 

However, what I’ve had to overcome in the art world, more than being a woman, is having grown up poor and the poverty mentality that resides in that experience. Another hardship is being an artist living in a rural area where there are fewer opportunities for showing work (unless there’s a cow in your painting) or of being exposed to the work of others. The internet has helped, somewhat with this, and I am grateful for all the many artists who share their work on fb and Instagram. 

On the other hand, I believe being a woman has been an incredible asset in the creation of my artwork. I feel there is a kind of inner strength that comes from negotiating the world as a female being. And a kind of permission, given more often to females, to follow one’s feelings, intuition, and to make art from those places within the self. 

This is a huge topic which can be seen from so many viewpoints. I feel I’ve just skimmed the surface in this response, but I will leave it here. 

GAS:  How did the pandemic impact the artist community you’re part of?

Karla: At the beginning of the pandemic I felt a lot of guilt; although I knew so many people where suffering terribly, I felt blessed in many ways. For one, Vermont was fairly insulated from the worst of the Covid consequences. Yes, I watched the news every day and was horrified by the stories of body bags piling up, yet here there were only rumors of someone from town or a nearby town being sick. No one I knew. It was over a year before someone I knew, a second cousin, got sick and died. 

Secondly, I am very much of a homebody, and an introvert, so having to stay at home relieved me of the stress of being out among the people. And I had time to paint, and paint, and paint. 

As I noted above, I live in a rural area, already my “in person” artist community was small. Most of us brought our studios back into our homes. Shows in the few nearby galleries were canceled and the strings that held us together frayed and many broke. 

But much of my artist community was already online, and that community grew as I immersed myself in the study of asemic writing. I reached out to my publisher with a book proposal on asemic writing which was given the go ahead, and soon after another publisher, one I had connected with through my online art community, reached out to me asking to publish a work of my poems and asemic writings. In 2021 I had two books published, astonishingly. I also decided to start my own online gallery to bring my own art and the artwork of those I admired into the world, a community much wider than my hometown. 

GAS:  How has your work changed in the last five years?

Karla: In some ways my artwork hasn’t changed in that it comes from the same place. Listening to and following the call, my intuition, my curiosity, my fear / uncertainty, no matter how uncomfortable that is, pushing the envelope. 

In materials I moved from acrylic paint to ink and have now circled back to pigment in acrylic medium. 

But it was about five years ago I had a dream of asemic writing over a moon. This image over and over. I am a dream analyst and I pay attention to my dreams and have since I was in my early twenties. This led me to delve into asemics to see what was there for me. Asemics is a kind of writing-like mark, the gesture of writing, that is defined simply as “open semantic”. There is a lot of discussion on the how to define asemics which I find very interesting, and the movement is in flux around this issue. I was drawn to asemics because I am also a poet. I found myself, due to the political situation in the US and my response to it, without words. Asemics allowed my hand to be in the practice of writing when I didn’t have words. I often think of it as what is rising from within to be expressed. I feel it adds a layered element to my works that deepens the work. 

GAS: Do you feel a kind of osmosis of water, fire, air, earth that you work with in your art?

Karla: Yes, my work is definitely inspired by nature, the elements of water, fire, air, and earth, the beautiful landscape of Vermont, the river, mountains, rocks, flowers, weather! All these elements inspire me by color, shape, sound, and sensation.

In my poetry I’ve often said that I use the descriptions of the exterior landscape to describe my internal landscape. As a seventh-generation Vermonter I feel this landscape is in my blood and so in my language, be that in word or image. 

GAS:  Are you formerly trained or self-taught?  

Karla: I did study art in college, briefly, but my formal training is in poetry. The philosophy of the school I went to was learning by doing. It resonated with me then and still does. I tend to jump into whatever I am doing... I rarely read directions all the way through, if at all. 

I’ve taken art classes, in college, in person, online, does this make me formally trained? I read books about art, I watch videos, I talk with other artists, does this make me formally trained? I also sit at my art table and work, try things out, follow what I’m called to experiment with, how to express myself, beyond what I’ve seen anyone else do, does that make me self-taught?

I live outside academia, I live in a rural area, I don’t belong to a formal group of artists, I do my own thing, does that mean I am a primitive, or outsider artist? I would love to see more exploration of these questions on a broad base. I am curious what others think about this subject. 

GAS: We haven’t seen any of your poetry on GAS but I’ve read you’re also an accomplished poet. Could you tell us something about your journey as a poet and present one or two of your favorite original poems?

Karla: I turned to poetry in a particularly difficult time in my early twenties. At the library I found books by Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. There I found both a language to speak in and permission to speak. I thought of poetry as a way I could say what needed to be said but “slant” like a code. This started a long journey towards self-realization and expression. I had given up art and poetry gave me a creative release. 

I finished my BA degree and then my MFA in Poetry. And poetry has been a large part of my life. Right now art occupies a larger space in my life than poetry but I strongly believe they are really two ways of expressing the same inner call. And that they both support and honor each other, like music together they make the song of my creative expression, and that song is the better for both melodies coexisting. 

GAS:  Please tell us about your recent books and awards.

Karla:  Global Excellence award, Poet & Artist of the Year, Bacopa Literary Review’s Visual Poetry Award, Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize finalist,

Nominated for a Forward Prize, three-times a Pushcart Prize (three times), and a Best of the Net Prize

She Speaks Tongues, poems, asemic writing, Anhinga Press, 2021

 

Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writing

Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit

The River From My Mouth

From the Book of Remembrance

first published in Orbis Quarterly Literary International Journal

Tell Me How 

The valley is a bowl of snow clouds
and the hawk is screeching in my own
chest’s hollow, the whole forest of me
taut with listening. Is the hawk not messenger
I ask you? And pray her words, caught on wind
in the wild storm, will hold some answer. 

Take a breath, I say to myself,
don’t go messing with this heartbeat
already erratic and outside your body
like the crows’ flapping wings pestering
the hawk to move along, tree to tree,
across state lines, and lines of conduct,
this hawk that wants to settle in the branches
and hunker down. 

You, there. The miles between us counted
in the thousands, like those wild pigeons now
extinct in their flocked migrations from coast
to mountain range. And yet here, I turn in my sleep
to your whispered voice calling my name.
   Tell me how this could be. 

GAS Featured Artist: Karla Van Vliet by Sylvia Van Nooten

Karla Van Vliet’s newest book Fluency: A Collection of Asemic Writings has just been released from Shanti Arts. She Speaks in Tongues, a collection of poems and asemic writings which is forthcoming from Anhinga Press, Fall 2021.

Karla is the author of From the Book of Remembrance and The River From My Mouth, collections of poetry and paintings, published by Shanti Arts, and a poem length chapbook, Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit, published by Folded Word. She is an Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize finalist, and a three-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Poet Lore, The Tishman Review, Green Mountains Review, Crannog Magazine and others.

Karla’s paintings have been featured in Women Asemic Writers, UTSANGA.IT, Still Point Art Quarterly, Stone Voices Magazine, Champlain’s Lake Rediscovered, and Gate Posts with No Gate: The Leg Paint Project. She is a member of WAAVe Global (Women Asemic Artists & Visual Poets) and Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate.

Karla is a co-founder and editor of deLuge Journal. She is an Integrative Dreamwork analyst, artist and administrator of the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf, Middlebury College. Karla lives in Vermont, USA.  www.vanvlietarts.comwww.vanvlietgallery.com  Instagram: karlavanvliet

Karla Van Vliet’s work contains poetry within its movement and flow.  At first the pieces struck me as lovely and simple, but this is deceptive as they are deeply moving vignettes of emotion with the layers of words over clarifying color creating a conversation.  With Karla, asemic language becomes a truly unique expression of a self that expands to allow others to experience her voice. 

1)What is behind your artistic vision?  (Why do you do art?)

 

My first art was dance, I started to move in gesture before I could speak, before I had that skill. But I moved to what moved me, my father playing Mozart on the piano, or shady grove on the banjo. I came late to language. Yet I had so much in me to express. I thought I was a strange and awkward person due to trauma, and in a way that may be true, but I’ve come to believe that I was born an artist, someone who sees the world in a unique way. I’m just coming to terms with that now, although I have lived a full life of following my artistic path. First a dancer, then a painter, then a poet and now both writer and painter. I once lamented to my daughter that I was sorry I didn’t have the funds to buy her all the things she desired (we had been out school shopping), that perhaps I should have taken a job at the bank instead of being an artist. Then she spoke truth to me. “Mom”, she said, “but you have to paint, it’s who you are. If there was no more paper in all the world, I would give you my wall to paint on.” She was right, of course. 

 

I’m not sure all artists work to express some truth in themselves, to discover that truth. Perhaps they do. But I do. When I started writing poems, I wrote to express in code (poems are perfect for this) what I could not say straight. When I paint, I believe I’m tapping into what wants to be expressed before it has come into words, or what is there that wants expressing without words. I started asemic work when I had a dream of asemic script over the moon. I have had this dream image over and over, the dream insisting on the image. I hadn’t really been aware of asemic writing before that dream. I am a dreamwork analyst and have worked with my own dreams since 1991. I have built my life on the truth and the path that comes from dreams and I understood it was an imperative that I paint that image. All of my asemic work has followed from that dream.

 

I often define asemic work as the gesture of writing, that it kept my hand in the practice of writing when I had no words. I’m thinking now that I have been emphasizing the wrong word, writing, but it is gesture that is at the heart of it. Gesture, writing, painting, dancing, I was born to create gesture in expression of what moves me. 

2) How does being an artist help you communicate with the world? 

 

And does that gesture help me to communicate with the world? I’m not sure it does. I’m not sure I care if it does. Of course, I want people to like what I put out there.  I love it when people are touched by my images and words. But would I stop if they were not? I think I could not stop. First and foremost, my work is a communication with myself. Perhaps that is selfish. Perhaps it sounds like I only care for myself. But I care deeply for people in the world, I would give you the shirt off my back in an instant if you needed it. I listen to people’s feelings and experiences with compassion and non-judgement, and strangers often tell me their deepest secrets and traumas. But does my art help me to communicate with the world? Looked at in another way, perhaps it does. Perhaps it shares who I am, or an aspect of who I am, that otherwise would not be shared. I am a private person but I have never locked up my poems or paintings in the drawer of my desk. I have spread them far and wide. People have called me brave for doing so. I’ve never seen it that way. It seems the safest way to share myself with the world. A blessing for that.

3) Have you built or joined a community of artists around the world? How did you do this?

 

I live in a very rural area of the world. Given that, I know a lot of artists, Vermont is full of artists, musicians and writers. But it is also limited in many ways, no large cities, few galleries, or museums and none really that are cutting edge. The community of artists that I have connected with through the asemic groups and other artist and writing groups on fb have been a godsend. I am inspired by the work I see every day, encouraged by the response to my own work but also to the work of others. Encouraged that there are so many out there interested in art and writing, pouring themselves into their own work, sharing their work, connecting and supporting each other. It’s brilliant. Like an artistic diaspora come home.