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
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.
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