Every Monday, a new artist will be profiled for your reading pleasure. This week, we're talking to a mixed media artist who is making a mark in Iowa.
Thank you for accepting my request to be interviewed for the Mixed Media Arts topic at Suite101.com! I've been a long time fan of your work and am constantly revisiting your site, http://www.moderngypsy.com and reading your blog. Okay, I have my coffee, let's chat!
Suite101: Before we get into the nitty-gritty of your work and events, could you tell us a little about your background? Where were you born and brought up? Were you raised in a family of artists?
moderngypsy.com: Not really. Actually, I had kind of the Anti-Art growing up. I was always the kid trying to make god's-eyes (remember those?) out of yarn and Q-Tips(tm), and sell them to the neighbors and this HORRIFIED my mother. Even if it *was* kind of a portent of my life to come.
My paternal grandmother was more of what you'd call "crafty" these days. She sewed and crocheted and needlepointed and was an avid gardener. She and my grandfather travelled a lot, to boot. (She was Irish gypsy by birth, so there was a lot of wanderlust in her blood.) She had a big, powerful effect on me growing up, and if she hadn't passed away when I was twelve, I think my later work would have taken a very different direction. (That, and she'd have whipped my tail for some of the shenanigans I pulled as a teenager, but that's another story.)
Suite101: When did you know that art and creativity would encompass so much of your life? What forms of media do you (or have you) worked in?
moderngypsy.com: Well, creativity's always been a part of my life. I was always a writer, and most of my creative wandering went in that direction until I was about 28 (in early 1999).
My father was diagnosed with lung cancer and died that year, and while I was in the small town where he and my mother lived, I found a copy of "Somerset Studio" with a collage of Claudine Hellmuth's on the cover, and, as cheesy as it was, life was never the same again.
I've gone through bouts of papermaking, bookbinding, altered books, art journalling, lots and lots of acrylic paint and collage art....if it's out there, I've probably tried it at some point. After all, you never really know what it is that's going to spark the next evolution of your personal work. So I've stayed open to a lot of things that otherwise, I might have dismissed as not relevant to what I was doing at the time.
Art really took over my life in the winter of 1999/2000 when I thought I'd take the love of writing and the love of spiritual art and put them together in a zine format. IN(ner) QUESTION was published for just about five years, and literally took over my life. If I wasn't writing about art, I was making it to include in the magazines, or getting about seven zillion papercuts trying to collate and staple five thousand magazines by hand, by myself.
Someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, I'd like to pick up where that left off, but life's been a little uncooperative in that arena lately. :)
Suite101: What's going on in your career now? How do you line up your events?
moderngypsy.com: Oh, man. That's a hard one.
I burned out pretty hard in 2004. I'd been in a car accident about a year earlier, where a drunk driver tried to literally scalp me with a rear-view mirror, and one of the side-effects of the brain injury was that words didn't come to me as quickly as they did before. Where it took me fifteen minutes to write or make something to express an idea before the accident, it took me HOURS afterward. And the effort of maintaining the same level of activity just fried the little threads of a life I kept holding onto in those months.
In the subsequent year and a half, I really fell away from any real Art, capital-A. I still kept art journals, since those were important to me as a way to remember things, and I made a few pieces here and there. I got married in 2005, to a circus sideshow performer (firebreather, sword-swallower...all that jazz), and his performance schedule cut into the small bits of time I'd been using to Make Things, and really, the Art Thing was starting to look a little bleak.
In the past six months or so, I've been slowly being drawn back into it, after taking a long foray into mixed-media and textile-type arts. (Spinning artfibers, knitting strange things, making journal quilts, that kind of thing.) It really is like I'm dipping my toes back into a nearly-unknown pond, though -- the communities online that were really important to me back in 2000 just aren't there anymore, so I'm forging new ties with entirely new people, and re-learning a lot of the things that I knew before.
I've been planning, for a while now, to get back into publishing, since that's where my first love's always been. I do a lot with podcasting and advancing the whole creativity movement with technology. And I've been away from it for about six months, but I started a fun little site called ArtScouts that's geared toward people who want to have some fun with creative explorations -- we had some trouble with the back-end coding on the site, but it's back up now, and should be updated regularly again very soon.
Suite101: Where can people buy your work? Do you sell prominently online or is your work available in other venues, as well? What is your favorite way to reach your customers?
modergypsy.com: Recently, I haven't been selling a lot. I did a lot of stuff with EBSQ (ebsqart.com) around the time of the accident, and sold quite a bit on eBay before they decided to shaft everyone with listing fees, and these days, I sell over at Etsy, though that's primarily fibery stuff, and not my personal artwork. Yet.
I do sell locally every so often, too. I've had some coffee-shop shows and the like, and those actually went over very well. Someday, I'll have the time to pound the pavement for another one of those. :)
My customers usually find me. And I know that flies in the face of most marketing wisdom. But I find that when you're involved online, in mailing lists and on Flickr or you have an interesting blog, people DO really find YOU. Build it, and they will come. That kind of thing. The good thing about that is that a lot of customers end up as friends that way, too -- and friends? Totally more loyal to you as an artist, as well. AND you get really cool friends out of the deal, to boot.
Suite101: What can your audience expect from you in the future? Do you have plans for a book?
moderngypsy.com: Well, sort of.
I suppose that didn't answer much of a question, did it?
There are actually plans for quite a few books. I need to republish the two big ones I already did: one on altered books, and one on keeping an art journal. They need updating and re-formatting, which is what's taking so long.
I did a whole lot of online classes in the heydays pre-accident, and I've got all of THAT information, too. Which I keep saying are going to be books someday.
I've also got back issues, both of the magazine and a monthly newsletter that I'd like to get compiled and out there, and there's a book half-finished on my old hard drive, all about getting creative 52 weeks out of the year, called "Sparks!". That's the one I really want to do first, in fact.
My problem, as you can probably gather from that little listing o' doom, isn't so much finding ideas, it's finding *time* and *energy*. And still managing to get the dishes done. That's a big one.
Suite101: Thank you for taking the time to talk to us!
moderngypsy.com: Thank you for having me. Hope I didn't ramble to the point all of this is unusable. I tend to get a little...uh...wordy sometimes. I think I'm making up for lost time. :)
Now log off and go make something!
