One on One with Barry Zimmerman

Barry Zimmerman is everywhere at once. At least you might get that idea when you walk around town and try to tally up the sheer amount of his chalk drawings you see on the sidewalks, walls, streets, doors, etc. But it turns out these drawings are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Barry’s creative output. He is just as prolific a poet, musician, and philosopher.

Resonator’s Poet Clark caught up with this creative whirlwind and sat him down for a discussion about life, art, poetry, music, Norman, sports, roller skating, and numerous other tangential topics.

Like Barry himself, it’s a trip…. strap in and enjoy the ride!

Barry Zimmerman: Poet, Artist, Musician.  

Poet:  I’m here with Barry Zimmerman, doing an interview for the upcoming show. Thank you so much, Barry, for being here.  

Barry:  You bet! 

Poet:  We’ll just jump into it. Could you share a bit with us about your life and how it led you to poetry, art and music? We know a little about your background. You grew up in Idabelle, Oklahoma and played sports in school. Then moved into creative expression through written words, art and music. 

Barry:  Yeah. So, the art thing was just always there. I've been writing poems since I was a little kid. My mom used to, when we'd go on trips, my mom would give me a blank notebook and a pen and just put me in the back of the station wagon and I would just draw and write and be quiet.  

And, there's a super duper football tradition in my family for sure where two of my cousins played on The Arkansas Razorbacks in the 60s when they won the national championship. Terry Dunn and Lloyd Wade Phillips. And they were like the Selman brothers here. They were both defensive guys. And Lloyd Wade won the Allen Trophy that year when they won the national championship. And my dad was Allstate in Texas in the 50s. There's all these guys. 

It's crazy.  

I was born in the late fifties and early sixties, doctors gave ladies, pregnant ladies, a drug designed to like, not make, let them not have morning sickness. And it caused a bunch of birth defects. And I'm one of those kids. I was born in 1963 and my retinas just did not form all the way. 

They're white. And they should be pink. I see very clearly, but it's very small compared to other people.  

20 /50 is legally blind where you can't drive a car. In high school, My good eye, which is this eye, was 2, 600. Oh my gosh. And this one was like 2, 800. And I'm 60, so they have to be worse. 

I have to read books with a Mac. I didn't read a book until I was 19. Because I couldn't see the chalkboard in classes. I passed class. I went through Idabel school system, just listening, and that's how I passed classes and tests. And every day going to school, this is part of my heavy anxiety, is that every day I go to class, I didn't have homework because I couldn't do the homework because I couldn't read the thing to do the thing. 

It just became this constant every day. Just oh, you don't have it again. Thing. And then I just had one really shitty bad grade going on all the time. Usually math. I could pull together B's and C's and everything. Like English and all that stuff. Just by listening. But you can't learn algebra by reading, like by tape. You have to see somebody... how it works.  

And I actually had a friend of mine. Brian Schipp. He was a friend of mine. He was one of my really best friends through that time period. 

And he would change tests with me like halfway through and do mine. And then we would turn them in. He was so awesome. He was like the smartest dude I ever knew. He's one of those guys that, like, in third grade, was reading the fifth grade textbooks and stuff so he can finish this very quickly. 

As a matter of fact one time I did get an F in a math class And me and Brian went up to his dad's office. And it's the first time I ever saw anybody use a copy machine , like, for outlaw purposes, where he made a copy of my report card. And he said Barry , I'm going to give you a C. And nobody ever questioned it . That was awesome.  

I got caught with a bunch of bad grades, but that one was like " thank you, Brian". Just had a better day.  

But , in sixth grade, we did a play thing and I wrote that . Do you remember the Mr. Jaws 45 single? When Jaws came out, there was a 45 single that was on the radio every once in a while. It was a funny thing. It was written by a DJ. The Beastie Boys cited it as a very important thing. I loved it. I used to listen to it all the time. “This is so and so down at the beach. We're going to interview Mr. Jaws. Hey, Mr. Jaws”. And the answers to the questions would be like a chunk of a song. Like from the top 40, all the top 40, 70 songs that were going on at that time.  

So I wrote a thing. It was 1976. And we were doing a bicentennial thing. And I wrote a thing where ... historically, they would ask questions about George Washington or whatever. And then the whole, our whole class would sing the answer, which would be like some song from the radio. 

And then once I did that, I went to lunch. And I came back and everybody came over to my desk. They all had ideas. It was awesome. That was like that first moment.  

(Thinks a moment and changes direction.) 

I was class president, my senior and junior year. In junior high, I had a real big football years where I was a leading scorer, leading tackler in eighth and ninth grade. And then my eyes just made it where I couldn't, I just couldn't play. Plus it's not just my eyes. I could not understand weightlifting as like a thing to do for whatever. It just seemed like that's manual labor. And I had done manual labor, but there was nothing fun about lifting weights. But I did like to run. 

I was big. And I was into track real bad. I can remember in eighth and ninth grade where I could run until I just wanted to stop. It was one of those things where I just was, like those movies where kids are in that total athletic mode, I was totally there. I just loved it really on some level. 

I think it's like an early drug thing or an early zen thing. Early Buddha thing in a weird way. Where you get going and all you can hear is your feet, but you're not aware of moving them really after a while. It's just like that. It's just quiet at night running.  

And our thing was a circle. I'm just running around. It was a mile and like 0. 1 and we just run around it and around and it was just so awesome.  

Then like I remember…I was just thinking about this today. Other Zen Buddha things. Like where my dad was a big hunter. He liked to hunt. My dad was raised with a sharecropper's parents and they would give him two bullets. 

He'd be like eight years old. They give him two bullets and a rifle and he'd go out and if he didn't kill anything, they didn't have meat that night because they were sharecroppers. So they had all this vegetable stuff piled up. But so he started hunting as a kid. So he had time on a farm and he had a total different way of looking at animals than I did, for sure. 

Yeah. There's that thing where I've heard a theory about the generations, like where the grandfather works and that's all he does. That was my grandfather. All he did was work. He had a slumped over shoulder from pulling that thing where you have that strap around you and you do this (motions with his arms) with a horse and you plow ground. 

He did that. And he just worked. He never went on vacation, never went anywhere. He just he had a wife and he had kids and he watched pro wrestling and fished. He loved fishing. But then my dad, the next generation, would be where he worked his ass off too, but he partied and he had fun and he went on vacations. 

My dad was awesome. My dad was a real party fella, but he was also the weirdest kind of country philosopher and stuff. He was just this very interesting, fun guy, but he worked his ass off. He was always working. He didn't have, like, dreams. I think about me having dreams. He had, “how am I going to do this thing better? This store better? How are we going to do this?” 

 And then the store went under when Walmart moved in. He had a store called Poor Boy's Discount. And which was where the old skating rink was. I remember, that's one of my early memories, was my dad taking me to that skating rink. He'd say, we're gonna put a store in here. 

And I was like, alright. It was probably like 1968. Seeing kids in there skating. I was a little kid. That was the first time I was in that building. But it was like, that's a real cool memory. There's a lot of cool memories of that Poor Boys. But anyway, my dad went to work for Weyerhaeuser. 

Weyerhaeuser started. Weyerhaeuser Paper Company. That’s down and out of nowhere. And so my dad had lots of friends that were really from all over the world. All these people, engineers and all these people, moved to Idabel to work at the Weyerhaeuser.  

The plant is invalid. And it smells. Very badly. And all the people that work there, they mostly all live in Idabel. Idabel was the county seat. Where Saturday nights all the kids from all the little towns around would come to Idabel. We were cruising and on own feet a lot. That's so fun. 

But then I got a guitar and got into bands and stuff. I bought a guitar and a pen. I wanted to start writing songs. My whole thing was I was gonna be punk rock Bob Dylan. I would get as loaded as I could get and still walk over to the Deli. 

I had to walk a mile and a half from where I was living. I just moved up here with a friend of mine. I was sleeping on the I was sleeping on a air mattress that I would blow up every night and when I woke up it would be empty. I hate that you're like on the floor.  

My whole thing was, man, I come from that era of…I graduated high school in 82 and I definitely come from a time when dudes like me that wanted to be artists, wanted to be rock stars and wanted to be poets are, or had that in them already. Threw themselves into drugs as a way to, I don't know, make…there’s a lot of reasons why you would do drugs to make your art better. 

And a lot of it has to do with making your life worse or harder in a lot of ways and in an abstract way.  

But it's mainly about opening up shit. 

In the middle of one of my worst depressions ever. At Norman Music Festival, a friend of mine had heard I was having these bad…I was just bad. 

And I get where the big ideas are on me. Yeah. And he brought me some mushrooms. And I had one of those trips. Those mythic trips that you used to hear about back in the day. Yeah. It was like, I could…it felt like God's voice. Light going through me in all directions. 

It was Norman music festival. Rainbows are Free were playing and I shoved my hands in the air and I was just like, “Oh my God, I'm having that deal”. And I was just like, there's a thing about being that amazed and untroubled. It's so incredibly awesome. Especially to a dude like me that's very…that has struggles with that. 

My depression is a thing that is a low constant buzz. It comes up and goes down, but it's always there. I never have any time when it's just like completely gone. Except, when I'm super high or when I'm drawing. There’s a super highness there (when he’s drawing), but I do draw sometimes when I'm sober. 

When it is happening, when my art is happening, and I get lost in it…like when the thing, when the pencil is touching the paper and it's moving, that verb is going on, and art is a verb instead of a noun, and how inside of that, it's just action, and inside of that, it's like…I heard something the other day about if you hum, your mind can't talk to you. 

And there's something that's going on with me when I'm doing that.  

Especially when I have music. 

When I was in second grade, for some reason, my mother came home with a eight track set: two eight tracks, Beatles, 62-66. That one where they're looking down from above with the young haircuts. 

My favorite album. And all those songs came out in second grade. I listened to it one time. My mom had read the children's Bible to me and those Jesus stories and the Beatles songs are stressing the same exact thing. I put that all together when I was a kid. 

This whole thing is tied to where inside of those stories it said you shouldn't seek occupation and you should be spreading the love and peace. And I really do feel like that's what I'm doing.  

I was a janitor my whole life, but it had to do with my eyes because I couldn’t do college. I had jobs at Homeland and all I could do was sack because you gotta see to be able to run a register or to stock. 

When I go into McDonald's I can't read the menu, so I usually just get…if I get one thing (at) places I usually just get that cause I just remember that place and that thing. 

And it's just so limited, but it's I can't remember what I was talking about.  

Poet:  You were talking about the verb.  

Barry:  Oh, verb of art. Right on. How the silence of the verb…man, yeah.  

How there's a thing inside of art.  

I don't know why.  

I don't know how it happens, but like when I'm playing guitar, when I hit the E… man, there's something that happens in my brain where I can't think about another thing. 

I can’t. I get lost in it.  

It was the same thing that used to happen to me when I was a kid. I grew up in the 70s, where you didn't have a clue, man, what anybody looked like band wise. You had heard the radio, and there was radio hits, but then you would go to the store and there would be these albums in there that you had never heard of. And it would just be like, take this home. 

I've never heard this before.  

Like that Pink Floyd moment where I brought home Pink Floyd. It wasn't like, later in the 80s, 90s…where everybody of my ilk had heard Pink Floyd. And it had been exposed. I got my record player when I was 16. 

I had a friend I met and he was from California. He moved to Idabel and he brought his record collection and his drums. And that was the first time I was ever in a room with that. Just…Holy shit.  

The day I met that guy, he played “Lumpy Gravy” by Frank Zappa. You know that record? It's two tracks, side one, side two. 

It starts off. It says it's Frank Zappa. And he says “Barry, this is gonna be a dynamite show”. And then the record starts.  

And it's just, like, commercial sized bits of stuff. It's my favorite record of all time. And when I was done, I was so blown away, the guy said, “Dude, I've got two copies of this record, you can take this one with you”. 

And I still got that copy. But what that record showed me, and that was early on, was, you can do anything, in art.  

Art is an open. It’s beyond even the word. Open space. It's, anything can happen in there.  

And it is…we are trapped in our time. I would think of different things if I was a hundred years from now. If I grew up in a hundred years from now. We are of our time. 

And I'm punk rock. But I'm a Beatle Punk. There's a bunch of us Beatle Punks. We’re The Beatles and The Clash, man. What I love about those guys, all those and the punks, is the commitment to it. 

I was in my band thing, for six years. When I was doing that, I wake up every day and I'm on the clock. I’m just on the clock. It has to do with my parents. Nobody moved from the bed to the couch in my family. 

They got up, and got dressed, and they left. They ate, or they went to work, or went and did something. My dad would get up and go fishing. He didn’t get up and go into the den and watch tv. And so I got that in me. And so during the band I wrote for six years a song every day. Every day I wrote a chunk of something or a song. 

The reason it stopped is just because I stopped.  

And now it's on this thing I'm doing, which is poetry and drawing. And now I can't stop and I'm doing it every day. I’ve been doing it every day of my whole life, but this chalk stuff started when I worked at OU and 2012 is when it started on Facebook. 

I was working in the Blender Building. Cleaning chalkboards. I cleaned every single chalkboard in that building. This is a math building. 

I know which, I know every chalkboard on every floor…the first, second, third, fourth, fifth chalkboards, and the eighth, and the eleventh, and tenth. And they told me they'd find these Sidewalk chalks, and they said, “Barry, you gotta throw those away. Those professors cannot use that sidewalk chalk on those chalkboards. They’re gonna ruin them.” 

And I've gone through, there was a time at OU where there was no beef with keeping what you found. And forever when I was working at OU, I did a bunch of art like where I'm not gonna buy any art supplies. I will just use what is put in front of me, what I find. 

And that kind of was during that time period where I was like…I just have books of flyers. I would take two weeks and collect flyers and things that would be left on desk when I was cleaning the desk and stuff. There would just be schedules or like weird flyers about certain clubs or just phone numbers that have been abandoned. “Somebody take all this stuff.” 

It was, like, a story of the Blender for that two weeks. And I got it together in a thing. And when I started, I was like, “what can I do with this chalk?” And since I am on all the time, I was doing art at my house. I was doing art there. 

I just started doing art in between. Yeah, writing on the sidewalks.  

(Thinks, changing directions again.) 

The band thing broke up. I had the classic Pink Floyd thing where the band stopped playing, started playing different stuff. 

But then I went to work for the Gazette. And then I went to work for the Transcript. And I wrote for a magazine out of Los Angeles called Scratch that just reviews records. They just send me a giant stack of CDs every year, every month. And then I would write reviews of shows I was seeing in Oklahoma City and stuff. During that time period, there was a lot of great punk shows going on up there. But then that ended.  

When I was doing that, I was just (doing it) like I'm doing my poetry now and my art. I would get two or three stories a week going, and I would just basically burn myself out on things and then I'd have to go do another thing. 

That's it. And I burned myself out on that and started doing a shitty job.  

And then I just had nowhere to send my art. And I had no outlet. I was still making it. 

I would stop writing songs. When that band thing stopped, I hung my guitar up. I had played it every day for just years and years. 

And it just got dusty. It was sad. It really hurt me. I felt like I'd left. I had written a bunch of songs and felt like I let them all down. Like I made them and… 

(Trails off, lost in thought.) 

Actually right now I'm in a band again. This friend of mine, who was in high school back when I was in the band Soul Shaker and he was a high school kid that liked our band, about six months ago, he said he got a hold of me. He used to follow us around, come over, and hang around. 

He says, “Hey Barry, I'm learning a bunch of your old songs. And I want to start a band and I'll teach you your old songs”. And that's what's been going on. We've learned about five of my old songs from, like, the nineties and we're playing them right now. 

We we remain nameless because we're hard heads. We can't figure it out.  

But then (referring again to when he stopped playing guitar) I didn't have an outlet when all that fell through and I burned out and I just, oh man…all my life, I’ve had this, I don't know, dark thing going on. 

I am 100 percent open. I share all kinds of my shit, where I get in deep trouble with my mom all the time about, “Barry, what are you doing?”  

I'm like, there's a reason why I'm having to do this, and it has to do with something that's going to happen in two weeks. (Points to the gallery walls) You’re just gonna have to not look at my drawings for a week or so. 

I went through a whole period where I was just drawing like penises and vaginas all over the drawings and they weren't doing anything. They were just penises and vaginas. And oh this upset my mother so much. And my sisters too. They were just both like, “Oh, Barry, do you hate women?” 

 And I'm like, no, I was there. 

It could have just been hands and noses. 

I have to work through my life in my art. And I also have to share my art. And people come and contact me all the time and go, “Hey, what am I doing in your poems?” 

And I'm like, “Hey man, you stepped in. And if you want to stay in, you're going to be in them.”  

And if you don't want to be in my poems, then you just need to not mess with me. Because this is what I am. I am a machine of poems.  

I have written poems about that I installed a thing on top of my head where you could push my stomach and poems would come out. 

And let's fill the sky with poems. And I do love all that stuff.  

Later on I got tuned it into Bashō. Bashō was 1400s, I believe. He was in Japan. He would walk up and down Japan. And he would write haikus on rocks on the sides of rivers. He changed the whole thing of haikus. 

Haikus used to be like this fun puzzle thing. Like, all the numbers and stuff. Like seven, five, and seven syllables. Bashō said, because they were just saying, just meaningless things and just following the rule. And Bashō said, y'all are doing it wrong. Which I always loved that artist that steps forward and says to thousands of people, you are doing this wrong. 

We need to put…this needs to be about nature. His haikus were prayers. But not prayers in the sense of Christian prayers, where we're asking for something or having a negotiation.  

His prayers were to be proof of Divinity. He would be walking up and down Japan and there he is…he’s sitting, looking at a river and he writes a haiku about a river and he writes it on a rock next to the river and the next person comes along and they're like, what is this written down? 

And they said to sit down to read it and it's about the river. 

I found him through Kerouac. Through Jack Kerouac. I discovered him (Kerouac) and I just got lost in all those books and started reading all those beat writers. I was already a poet. I've been writing poems since I was a little kid and I said, Oh, I can live like this. I already was. 

Like, when you see the shadow of a bird on the ground go across and then climb a fence and disappear. It's that's like a little poem to me.  

Those were prayers, his haikus, but they weren't asking for anything. 

What they were doing was showing proof of God or divinity.  

And these guys were just like living for that, making art instead of…I don't know. I don't want to sound judgmental when I say looking for a job. Cause there's plenty of people that are career oriented and I have no judgments about that whatever. But I'm stuck in a situation where because of my eyes, I could not seek a giant occupation because I just couldn't do it. 

And so I was always doing these bucket and broom jobs. And it put me in a situation where I could totally concentrate on my art. Because you don't have to worry about those jobs. And you don't have to, even when you're doing them…they’re not jobs that require you to concentrate on them. 

You're just mopping the floor. And I would listen to…I listened to a million books and stuff. Just music and all kinds of stuff. And I was writing all the time. And I started doing drawings on chalkboards on my lunchtimes and and breaks and just drawing. It was those jobs that allow you to do that. 

 And really people ask me like what should I do? What should I do? And I'm like, fail.  

You should stop trying to do what you're doing to do and do art.  

That's the thing.  

Art is the thing, if that's what you want to do.  

But everybody doesn't have to be (doing it) every day.  

And on this thing, I'm on…I’m on fire and I've been on fire my whole life with this…there's prices.  

It's dark, man.  

And I do a lot of pondering.  

I don't want to be one of those guys that sits around talking about how smart he is because I'm not. I didn't do good in school and it was a thing. 

But in my poetry and stuff, I can really, I think, articulate in a way that people can really like…they see it on paper, even in my funny stuff, and they can feel my heavy or my insight or my puzzle device thing or whatever I'm doing.  

Poems are like…writing poems to me on some level there's lots of different ways to do it, for me even. 

But for the most part, I allow a sentence to occur to me.  

And something will occur to me and I write that down.  

And then, okay, now it's on. That's the puzzle. I start it.  

Okay, now we're here.  

What is this thing you've written? What does that do? And okay that does this.  

And then I'll start writing it all down and then start going back and add… cause I read out loud and your brain will go like…you’ll come to a line you've written and instead of saying that line, your brain will say another line that will rhyme with the one above it. 

Like it's caught it. It's caught the thing that's going on. And then you start just connecting dots and there's a point where it'll go bop and it stops.  

And you can go shop bop if you want to, and I used to do that all the time, but I don't do that anymore.  

I stopped doing that little…searching for another line you could write that would be for the people to go, “oh dude, you are so clever.”  

So, there's a lot of ego involved in this whole thing where you have to really stop trying to be a thing that is…(slows down to consider what he wants to say) 

There’s something about being an artist, in my mind, that requires me to take on the darkness. 

And to be the person that is going to do that for those that can read it and go, “Okay, wow. I relate to this”. It’s not fun (going into the darkness). 

It's interesting. And I do love it and I do hate it. 

I relate to the blind swordsman. That was a thing in Japanese culture. There's a bunch of movies from Japan during the 50’s and 60’s…the Blind Swordsman. And did you ever see Kung Fu, the TV show? 

Poet:  Yes.  

Barry:  Remember his his teacher was blind? (I nod) And that's the whole blind swordsman. A thing where he could hear him moving for him. And I think there is something to my blindness… that it did something. It did something to the way my path…the way my brain works. That’s it, it seems to be. 

So, that's that thing we were talking about earlier, where if I could drive somebody else's car for a five minutes and drive around in their head for a minute, I'd go, okay, everybody does that maybe, or everybody doesn't do that.  

There's such a complexity to all the different lives and all the different ways of thinking about every single thing that goes on and how understanding works from person to person. 

And it's that's the funny thing about my art, which is I put song lyrics or things that are going. Everything that's going on.  

If I write “Imaginary dogs love Led Zeppelin” on the sidewalk, I am listening to Led Zeppelin as I'm on the sidewalk writing that. 

I'll actually be walking along and will have a song will be on and I'll go, “Oh, I should write that.” 

And if I don't come across a place where I could write it before the song ends then I won't write it because I want it to be all to be happening.  

Absolutely as it's happening. That’s one of those things that Kerouac got me into, with poems and stuff, and this is a haiku thing, is to just eliminate cleverness from it and just say what's going on. 

Even if it's imaginary. No need to show how cute the writing can be. The writing, the words will explain it.  

I had such low self esteem. That's one of my big fights because I did so bad at school. I sometimes I felt like my writing…that I was writing in a way for praise more than writing from an honest artistic place.  

I was writing from an honest place, but it was just needy. It was a needy place. And it would like, “Oh, Barry, where'd you learn that word?” instead of being like, “Oh shit, I relate to this.”  

That's what happened when I moved over here. And I think I'll never stop (making art and poetry). 

I just can't imagine what would have to happen for me to stop.  

I do plan to when I can't walk. I'm on these streets every day. I walk to the energy building from my house that's over here. It's like a mile that way and a mile that way and I go, I'm all over the place. 

That's another thing outside of my eyes that's helping me with. They forced me to get a bunch of exercise. I am a bull. When I go to the doctor, they're just like, “Oh you're totally healthy. You're a bull.”  

It's in my DNA. I used to say that one of my great grandparents must have introduced a donkey into our DNA system because we do not get sick and we are just bulls, man. 

My dad was never sick. Yeah. He was just never sick and he was just always up. My dad could drink all night and get up and just you wouldn't even know it. You just never would know it.  

(Pauses to gather his thoughts again) 

I began to be able to publish…share my art every day. And also the chalkboard thing just took off. I started getting shirts going with that Norman Music Festival. I've had two Normal Music Festival shirts. 

It’s all going so well. I got another book together for Curtis. I am never short of material. It's not like when I was a kid, when I would just shit stuff out and think it was all pure gold because I hadn't read anything. When I was 19 I could write stuff, but it read like somebody that had never read anything. 

Then when I got my little magnifying glasses, I was just reading everything. I was just like finding the hardest shit I could find to read because I felt like I was behind. And so I'm like 20 years old, I’ve never read a book and I'm like trying to thumb through content. 

You just luck on to the writers that do things for you, which is, (what happened) with the Frank Zappa song and my friend having the record and just, “oh, here you go, have this.” 

 And then I was just like sold on that and the Beatle thing. And like when Jack Kerouac came along and I got into those books, I realized this is my country too.  

This is my world.  

I'm a person here too.  

This isn't the government’s.  

We're not defined by wars. We don't have to be.  

We can say we are, and you can act like that's the truth. 

But we're also defined by art.  

We're also defined by our kindnesses that aren't bombs. The opposite of bombs.  

We're defined by those things too.  

And those things are just equally as notable as what is in the white house.  

What some kid is drawing in Iowa is just as bad ass as what some gallery artist in LA is doing if they give a shit. That’s all it amounts to. 

That's all art is about.  

‘Cause art doesn't matter. The world would be fine without it.  

The world is not there. And to care about it and to give yourself to it, there's there's some benefits, but it's not like when I was a kid. 

In my band, there was like, there was a thing where it was like three or four conversations with girls. 

If they just saw me play one time, like where they were that comfortable with me, and then suddenly they’re talking to me.  

I can't see across the room to people. I got a five foot circle. So girls that are in that circle, I could talk to. Girls that are across the room, I don't even know they're there. 

And the guitar and my songwriting and stuff, being that guy, started making girls come to me instead of me just missing out on them. And It was where my art started being beneficial: it was benefiting me socially. Even just meeting people that were across the room.  

When you're in bands, the next thing you know, all your friends are in bands. And so suddenly you're at people's houses and going, “Hey man, what's in your record collection? Oh shit, I've never heard of this.”  

And then they have ideas. You're around something, you're immersed in artists. And that is so good to be immersed in a room of artists where it's not people that don't understand it and feel like they could judge it.  

It’s not about whether you like stuff or not. 

It's about does the person give a shit?  

I heard somebody say the other day that they don't like country music and I said you know really I like anything but it's got to make me feel something that's I don't want to feel. Something that even if it makes me feel sick that they have done something. 

I saw a Picasso painting in the city about 10 years ago and when I got in front of it, I started crying. And I don't know what was going on. It was like I just could feel the ability. It’s that's the thing with the Beatles.  

Those guys, man, they…I just got tingles. I still do. I'm never not blown away.  

If you take the records, it's nine hours of stuff. Nine hours. It's barely like a work day of this information that these four dudes did on tapes. During their 20s. And we got it forever and it's so powerful. It's just so badass. 

This gift these four dudes gave us, man. When shit sucks so bad, I do know when you put those Beatles records on, they're exactly the same every time.  

There's something about that. When you look at Picasso, they're still, and they've been done. 

They're nouns now. That's the great thing about the Beatles, thinking about when they were verbs. Thinking about that shit in the air, in those studios, yeah.  

Have you seen the movie, where, the recent movie, where it's them in the let it be sessions, and you can see Paul McCartney's in the background, and you can see, they're talking to Ringo? ( I shake my head) 

Paul's back there and you can just hear it. Like he's starting to write Long and Winding Road. And he's doing the piano thing, but he can't think of words to say. And you're just like, “Oh my God, look at him. He's thinking of…Oh my God, Paul, look at you doing it.”  

It’s wicked. I love that about art, man. 

When like people can really fucking do it.  

You can feel that thing on it. It's the care.  

But even caring isn't enough.  

There are people that can really do it. It has to do with commitment. And just having some imagination or the way your brain works or whatever. Able to articulate it onto a thing. 

I would say that's what my stuff is. So randomly about different things as far as all the different words and stuff on there. The people will look at them and think, “Oh, that's that's about this.”  

And no, that's not what I was thinking. But once it is a noun, what I think about it doesn't have anything to do with it anymore. 

It's out of my hands and it is completely a noun.  

I don't want to have an opinion about it really, other than I'm just working my ass off to try to be better than I was yesterday.  

And I can see that.  

When I get my memories on my Facebook of my older (drawings), my drawings from like last year, I can tell that I'm better now. 

Yeah.  

Because the only way you can get better is doing things.  

That's it. That's the only way.  

And I see people that, they would have liked to have been drawing every day for the last 20 years, but it's something you gotta do.  

Yep.  

(Thinks for a moment) 

I loved track when I was a kid. 

And the thing I love about it is there's no judges. The dude that breaks the tape wins.  

And that guy, as a rule, worked harder than everybody else in my mind.  

That's what I would like to think.  

(Sits quietly as he considers what he has just said) 

Poet:  I could listen all night long to what you have to say. Do you have anything you want to close with? Anything you want people to know?  

Barry:  What we're doing is, they're going to paint these things black and I'm going to chalk them. 

And then were going to have the art show on second Friday (Art Walk). And then the third Friday, we're going to have a poetry thing in here. Where this band Squeaky Burger is gonna play. I love that. And I'm gonna do a bunch of poetry. And everybody should come out and I'm very excited. 

Not to be an ego crazy person, but I'm just gonna knock this fucking room out. I am. And I'm gonna be right here. I'm gonna be right here. I love this.  

Look, (gestures to the gallery) it's so big and you can draw guys this big (holds his finger and thumb an inch apart), like, just tiny little fellas and you can feel it. It's gonna be so fun. 

Oh, it's gonna be so good. 

Make Some Noise! : A Conversation with Clare Costello

Clare Costello keeps herself busy. When she’s not behind her drum kit laying down some of the heaviest beats in town for the band Glitch (if you have yet to see them live, do yourself a favor and do so) she’s in her studio quietly obsessing over one of her beautiful abstract canvases, or with guitar in hand composing music, or in her garden summoning life from the soil…

In anticipation of Clare’s exhibition Realms, which opens July 12, Resonator’s Poet Clark sat down with her to talk about painting, music, and the metaphysics of creativity in general. The following is a transcript of their conversation. Have a read, then make sure to come see the exhibition. If you come for the opening, you’ll get to see all sides of this amazing local artists creative oevre, as she and her band will treat our audience to a free show to conclude the evening!!

I am here this morning in the peaceful outdoor studio of Clare Costello, visual artist and musician, to discuss her upcoming Resonator show “Realms”, her inspiration for creating art of all kinds, and her artistic practice as a musician and painter. 

Poet: Clare, Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me this morning. I am excited to get a first look at your work and hear about the show.

Clare: Yeah!

Poet: I think to get started, just because there are people who may not be familiar with your work, would you share a little about your background, where you are from, and then we’ll move into how you got started in visual art and music?

Clare: Yeah, so I grew up mostly in Edmond. I lived in Southern California for like a second when I was really little and then came back to Oklahoma. I moved to Norman in 2012, then have mostly been here since. I was in Oklahoma City a little bit, also in California and Colorado as I kind of traveled a little bit. I’ve been back in Norman for a few years now. 

Poet: What brought you to music and painting? 

Clare: I mean, I feel like forever I was making up songs and dances, you know, with sisters and cousins and by myself. I remember, like, jumping on the trampoline and just doing free flow, endless song, kind of all over the place lyrics, you know?

I feel like I've always kind of been doing that. Music was always happening because my mom was a piano teacher and when we were with my grandma we were always singing all the things. But I didn't start really writing songs and making music and stuff until I was probably a teenager.

Poet: When did you start to connect with visual art as well? 

Clare: So, it’s a weird one, I guess. Not really until like, 2020. That’s when I really started feeling like “I'm going to paint this thing”. I did take a painting class in high school, but I wasn't ever, like, technically proficient. Nor was I learning really technical things in that class.

I think that was at a point that most of the students in there had already taken previous classes where they learned the technical things. We definitely did art history and things, but it was more free in terms of what we were going for and our paintings. So there was that. And then, you know, I remember like doodling some weird random little things when I was younger. But nothing ever realistic or proficient. Technically proficient. And then it wasn't until early 2020 that I was, at that point, taking a big music break. Not really picking up the guitar very much. And I was just feeling like being quiet, but still being able to do creative things. 

And it was a good meditative thing to do where I could be quiet, and kind of move slow and just experiment and create something. 

So, really, I'd say 2020 is kind of when I started painting if, unless you want to count the high school class

Poet: We can count both!

Clare:  (smiles) Yeah. 

Poet: So, was it during the shelter in place or during the lockdown that you really started to paint?

Clare: (Slowly nodding) Yeah. I would say it was. (Thinking) Yeah. And I just wasn't feeling like making noise. 

But then, of course, I was painting.(Points to two vibrant, colorful, dynamic paintings). Those are some of my first ones I did. Especially those two smaller ones in the middle.

Those are some of those are like the very first ones I did probably. And the Ganesh one over there. But that's kind of like Shiva Shakti or the one in the middle bottom. And so, yeah, it was you know, it's kinda like a spiritual practice, similar to the way it feels like music is too. I'm kind of in that meditative flow state. It’s kind of like a spiritual, meditative thing. 

Yeah, it was just kind of funny. I was like, “well, I don't really want to make noise”, but then I was using these like bright colors. So it's like I ended up making noise through them. (Laughs)

Poet: (laughing) You had to make noise somehow. It had to come out somehow. That was a good way to do it. 

I love it. It means that your soul had to come out one way or another. And that was what you picked.

I think that's important. Art is an expression of who we are. So it's going to come out one way or the other, right? 

Clare: (smiles) Yeah. Yeah.

Poet: That moves us nicely to the next question. What is your inspiration for your paintings? And I think in this interview, there will naturally be some overlap between your music and your art.

But thinking specifically about you as a visual artist, what is it that inspires you when you're painting?

Clare: Just the entirety of the universe. Right? 

I mentioned all the colors and it's because that's reality. You know, there are far more colors that we can even see with our eyes.

And, I feel like I'm not really intentionally trying to create anything when I paint. I don't have a plan in mind, but I'm trying to be kind of.. (reflecting)

We said the word channel earlier. just trying to, like, let the universe come through and display itself. 

I feel like there's a lot going on (in the paintings). 

You know, I hear that sometimes. “There's a lot going on in my paintings.

There's a lot of colors. And it's really because I feel like there are so many things happening at once. In terms of realms or dimensions or something that feels like there's always…

You can look at it this way, but then the foreground changes to the background, and I feel like that's kind of what I eventually start to like to bring through to encapsulate that universal energy even more.

There are many dimensions, many ways of looking at it, a lot going on.

But there isn’t a specific inspiration. 

It's just kind of… (smiles) letting the universe present itself in all of its strangeness and complexity and dimension.

Poet: I can definitely feel that. And it makes sense. Eckart Tolle says, and I am paraphrasing, “You are the Universe, expressing itself as human for a little while.” 

Clare: Yeah. 

Poet: And I think that human beings have a definite relationship to the Divine, whatever form it takes or whatever makes sense to them. 

We all are seekers in one way or another. 

And I can see that language in your paintings and having had our conversation before the interview.

(Sorry folks, you missed that. Deep, spiritual pre-interview talk.)

But our conversation before the interview definitely opens up what your paintings are expressing. 

So, that leads into the next question, which is are there concepts or ideas that are informing your work, or that you are wanting to share, that you would like people to see and be able to take in or understand? 

Clare: Yeah. The only times that there's been a clear conceptual inspiration would be like these ones I pointed out, the Shiva Shakti and the Ganesh, which it's like, you know, if you've if you've heard about Hinduism or Buddhism, it's like Shiva, Shakti, Ganesh. You might know what these things are but again, those were some of my first ones I did and I was it was all about that meditative, staying, kind of state.

And I wanted to do something that was, sort of a form of worship or my devotion to these supernatural forces of the Universe. But then in other ones, sometimes I'll see something in the middle of it, it'll start unintentional, and then I'll be like, “okay, well, that that kind of feels like a concept I have inside of my mind that is being realized on this. So, maybe I can accentuate that aspect and maybe someone will see it.”

I feel like with that one (points to a larger vertical painting), and I've pointed this out to a few people, I think maybe like 1 or 2 of them saw it. (Stands up next to the painting and starts illustrating as she points through different areas on the painting). 

I saw this as a person sitting and this is a face from the side.

That’s the eye and the mouth. And that’s, like, a brain. And then it's like looking up at whatever this is. 

And so I saw that as kind of a person in this almost spiritual mania or this realization, this revelation, or just, you know, kind of pondering the complexities of the Universe, seeing that it's the same thing that's in the mind.

So, sometimes I will kind of start going with a certain way of looking at it and wonder if anyone sees that. It kind ties back to that same Universal mind blown. Like not ever fully understand the mystery of it. Yeah. Vibe. 

Poet: Yes, definitely. There is a lot going on, but it's not so much that you can't look at it and see it as a whole and then see the elements of it individually. 

Your mark making is really unique and there's so much movement in your paintings, they're not stagnant. There's so much movement. 

And I really think that speaks to what you're talking about it. Universal flow.

Clare: Yeah. Energy that is always moving. 

Poet:

So I think there are some people that do have an idea. “Let me sit down and I'm going to paint this specific thing.”

Then there are other people who say “the materials really show me what needs to happen.” and “my process unfolds as I'm working with the materials, I don't know where I'm going. It just moves me along. And then as I start to touch the materials and work, then the ideas come or then I see which direction to take”.

And it sounds like that's maybe how you work. 

Clare: Definitely. yeah. If I start with a concept, it usually ends up like, not what I'm going for anyway. 

Poet: Yeah. Sometimes I would just paint over those things. If I came to sit down with an idea and I tried to get really locked into it and make that thing happen, I would usually end up painting over it and starting again.

So I really understand or relate to, sort of that dynamic process of just allowing the, the ideas to come through to the canvas. 

Clare: Yeah and like allowing the lines of it to come through. I’m not one to try to go in with the concept and paint a line, you know. It's like, no, I need to start with scribbling everywhere.

Scribble again, see where the line comes through. I can’t… (reaches for words then just smiles and shrugs) Yeah, you understand.

Poet: I absolutely do. It's the conversation we were talking before you started the interview: about communication, about listening and hearing. And I think that's something that artists really understand on a deeper level in terms of how they're connecting with their ideas and their creativity. So, seeing and hearing.

Clare: Yeah. And being responsive, too.

Yeah, definitely, visually with painting that's how it is. 

I think that comes through even more with playing. Playing especially. Something that's producing a melody. And then just hearing where the vibration is extending to. And yeah, just totally feeling your way through being responsive. That's I mean, that's how I do it because I don't have any training in these things.

But it's also, I think, and I don't know because I don't know the other way, it's very enjoyable to do it that way. Because it does bring you into meditation, because you have to be so still and receptive to be able to be responsive to it. 

And my favorite thing is whenever that's happening, like say I'm like doing like guitar looping or something. And then the birds chime in and it's perfect. 

It's perfectly… maybe it's not completely symmetrical, but where it is, it's adding its own element to the piece so perfectly. And I find that that's what happens whenever I'm truly in that meditative place. Nature will start to just make the music. 

But what I also love is just to listen to the sounds of nature as music.

I don't even listen to music that much anymore. I used to all the time, and I think it's kind of exhausting because it is maybe so emotional or powerful or impactful.

I like to just listen to nature as music a lot. 

It is. It’s the original soundtrack of life, right?

Clare: Yeah.

Poet: Music is all of those things and music changes us. Music and emotion are so closely tied together. I was doing some research for a project I'm working on and researching music therapy and expressive music as a way to help ground people who are going through, different kind of psychological burnout, parental burnout or emotional burnout even, and so much more than that. Like, we know how it impacts depression and all of those things. But, but yeah, I was talking about an emotional piece of music and how it has the power to change everything just by a few notes.

And, that definitely helps lead into the next question. It's kind of a two part question. 

So, the connection between painting and music and creativity is there is there a connection between the two for you? You live in in both worlds. You live in the world of sound and you live in the world of visual expression.

Is there overlap? Are they segmented? Is one creative process different from the other? How do they relationship to each other, or how do they have a relationship to each other? 

Clare:

I think because of the responsiveness, because of going into both without an intention, when I approach both forms of art or when I’m going to do those things (laughs and opens arms to gesture all around her studio), it's always just, setting myself up to be in the zone. In a meditative zone where, you know, it's not necessarily the zone I'm going to be in whenever I'm going to work or going, you know, that more like in the Ego..(pauses)

I don't know, there's a little bit of, like, a spacey place that I go when I feel like I'm trying to be relaxed and it’s almost in between those realms. 

So it's the same approach with both just setting myself up to be in that zone and to be responsive. 

Poet: Sounds intuitive.

Clare: Yes. 

Poet: Very intuitive. Almost like the music comes through you and tells you what it wants to be. The painting comes through you and tells you what it wants to be. 

Clare: Yeah. All I need is one note. 

Like if I sit down to play, it's just wherever my hand goes. Because I don't even know, looking at the frets, what is what. But I just let wherever my hand starts (motions as if holding a guitar), and I hear what that is, and then I build something from that.

And this is the same with painting. It's like, okay, I'll start with this color, and then I make a scrape and then I can go from there, you know? So just starting with that first point, then seeing what happens. 

Poet: And I think, to circle back to your, thoughts about being not formally trained, you know, not being formally trained is that there are many different kinds of artists.

Some really thrive in that structure, and they can create well in that structure. But that's not the only way, not even to say “but”, there are many ways to create. 

You are intuitive and and your mark making is very intentional. And if I walked in here, I wouldn't say “this is a person who has not been trained.” Not that I'm the end all be all of that. But if I walked into a gallery and I saw your work, I would never question that you had trained yourself in art, whether it was formally through college or on your own. Your mark making is intentional. 

And I feel that has allowed you your voice and creative process as an Artis. If you were “formally” trained, you might not have access to paint the way that you do.

It might have stopped you from being able to access that receptive mode that you go into and that inspirational flow. 

Clare: Yeah, I think that's true. People have said that to me before in music. I’ve worked with all sorts of musicians, both like me and unlike me in that way. But all of it's needed, especially if you're going to collaborate.

So, yeah, I've worked with people that are, you know, like theoretical geniuses. And I'm like, “I don't know any of this”. And they say, “just don't learn it”. And yet other people love it (music theory)and are into it, and they create amazing pieces with that theory. So yeah, there's so many different ways to approach it.

But I do feel like there's some sort of subconscious shut down that occurs when people have tried to really teach me guitar before. 

I'm the type of person that I'll put in the work to learn something, like if I'm in school or whatever it is I'm doing that I need to learn. But for some reason, with that, with this thing that obviously has been a huge part of my life… the music, the art…there's this subconscious log out where I don't take in what they're teaching me. 

So I'm like, “oh, well, yeah, just keep just keep doing it for …”(pauses and redirects) …because the meditative place is one where you're not actively using your mind.=

So, if I'm enjoying these things because they bring me that meditative quality of mind, it doesn't make sense for me to fill my mind with things while it's happening. 

But I really appreciate people that do that (use music theory) because it's incredible and needed and wanted, you know? 

Poet: Definitely. There’s a place for everyone. That’s the difficulty with criteria.

When you start setting criteria, you exclude someone who doesn't meet those criteria. And I think there's a long standing history of criteria in art and music. I feel that we're getting to a place where so many people are saying it's fine if you want to operate within those criteria, but it's also fine to operate outside of them.

Clare: Yes. And like, whose criteria? Like which region of the world? We could go back way before the documented, recorded history of the evolution of music and of theory. But then before that, it's like tribal, primitive music. There's beauty to that. And there isn't a specific place where the tones are supposed to go in all these different lineages. 

So, yeah, I like that it doesn't have to fit perfectly on the scale or on whichever scale you're talking about. And there's beautiful stuff that does fit perfectly on the scale. So it's kind of whatever. 

Poet: Yeah, it's the Both And. You know, the idea that we have to be one or the other, I think, is starting to go by the wayside. We can be both. 

Clare: Yeah

Poet: We can be classically trained and we can be untrained and both exist and have their place and purpose in the world. And that's a beautiful thing. 

It's letting go of that judgment. This is good. This is bad. This is right. This is wrong. And just embracing what is and experiencing it as exactly what it's meant to be.

And that's what your music and work feels very much to do about this is a moment in time. I've documented it with paint, I documented it with sound, and I'm sharing it with you because that seems to be what needs to happen. You know, it needs to express itself in the world.

And its kind of like, you know, when you think about there being a person for everyone, or several people. Whether it's a partner or a friend. And sometimes we can only hear things we need to hear in life, through their voice. People that connect for a reason.

And there are people that will only be able to hear the message through your art, that will only be able to hear the sound through your music.

Clare: Yeah. And it might be a very small fraction of people, too. It's like, who knows what, what's going to resonate?

But… Who cares?

Poet: Right? We have to let go of the size criteria. Like, “everyone in the world needs to know me!” 

Clare: Well, and that's whenever you start being methodical, because you're trying to appeal to larger groups. Yeah, in my early 20s, there were people sending my stuff to record labels, and it just became this whole weird thing.

And I was like, “I really don't want anything to do with this”. 

I'm a pretty introverted person. I say often “I want to just be a monk”. That's how much I do love that life. In reality, I'm not doing art as a pursuit. Maybe I was when I was 21, you know? That doesn't sound appealing to me.

So, however many people, whoever it does resonate with, that's wonderful because then there was something to it besides just for my moment of meditation that day. 

Poet: Right. And then that just falls right in line with what what your work is about: it's Universal. So it will find its way to whoever needs it.

And that's the beautiful thing about it is that, you know, we're all spiritual seekers on some level. I mean, it's not contained to just reading a book or sitting on a meditation cushion. Right? Life is meditation. And that comes through in your work. And that's what you're sharing with us. That's what we feel.

And we talked about power, before the interview started. That power isn't necessarily an explosion of action, but it's that internal strength and quiet. And meditation can be even the flip side. So while it's a meditative process, the colors that you use and the lines that you use express so much. Meditation in the universe, isn't always internal stillness, but it's external as well.

And so it's a language all of its own. And again, that comes to the Both And.

It can be quiet and it can be loud, it can be still and it can be movement. 

Clare: Yes. And, yeah, just like nature. Nature can be really peaceful and still or can be a tornado. Or hurricanes.

Poet: Perfectly said. 

So, shifting gears a little, do you have other creative outlets besides painting and music, other ways that you're exploring creative expression? 

Clare: Gardening. Cooking. I haven't gotten like deep in the cooking mode like I used to in a minute. So I need to do that soon (laughs), but, yeah, I do. I love being in that intuitive place with cooking. Seeing just like, well, what is around, what is in the kitchen, and creating something from that.

And I'm just obsessed with gardening. 

I long to be tending to plants. Like all day.(Laughs sheepishly)

So, that's definitely a main one. I love, the long arc of it, especially because I like to do a lot of volunteer gardening. 

Getting down really close to the soil to see little sprouts coming up, you know, and then like weeding around that little sprout. It is similar to the painting, I guess. Kind of like letting it reveal itself and then like sculpting around it

Yeah, I'm obsessed with gardening. 

I just want to continue doing more, grow all the things. 

Poet: On that idea of how intuitive creativity intertwines with everything, have you ever thought about combining your art and your music in a show to do more of a performative based or collaborative installation? So, is there is there ever a time that the two would exist together in a space?

Clare: Yeah. I mean, it might be happening at this next show. (More laughing from both of us)

Poet: Ok! That was the next question: could that happen at this show or could we book one? Let’s do that!

Clare: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many things that that could be done.

We were thinking about doing a Glitch set at it, but I'm like, I'd rather not. 

The painting stuff seems so much more about, like, this tranquil space for me. And the paintings are the loudness. 

But I was thinking about vocal loops as well as percussive stuff. one of our friends Brent, you might know him, too, but he's a really good drummer. I was even imagining him and I both doing percussive stuff at the same time. 

Who knows? (Smiles) It’s coming up soon, but we'll see what happens. 

I was just wanting to stick to a more primal kind of chanting, like loops or something. Maybe some percussive elements. 

Poet: Playing live or a recoding in the background?

Clare: Well, I actually actually at the last show I did there with Casey, I had a vocal loop playing in the background at one point. But I think this time I would just like bring my vocal loop and maybe make some noise using it. Yeah. 

Poet: Excited for that potential and will be curious to see how that evolves!

Poet: What's next for you in terms of…and I'm almost don't want to ask this question because this show is about a collection of work that you've been making intuitively. And like you said, I don't have a plan .

Are you thinking about continuing with your paintings? Are you going to continue to work in that medium, or will you focus on music or just go with the flow?

Clare: Probably all of the above. 

I feel like there are a lot of projects that are ongoing that I’ll take a break from, maybe even for a while, and then I'll revisit. 

You know, like, we have that four track over there (points to the music area of her studio) and I'm like, I need to listen through all those tapes because, the way that we've wrote the glitch stuff, almost all of it that we've played, was also just like spontaneous.

We just put a tape in and were like, “okay, go”. And we just go crazy. 

Yeah. So we have those tapes. I want to listen back and maybe even just make copies of those tapes, because I think that would be interesting to hear. This long crazy thing where these songs came from.

And then I also have like 2 or 3 songs that are old songs of mine that I played on acoustic guitar and put on a tape maybe like a year ago.

So, that'll probably be one of the next things I do is just listen through those tapes because also those are the songs that are old songs of mine on guitar.

It was like the first time I had tried to play them in a really long time. So it's very stripped down. Yeah, that could be interesting. 

I don't have anything in mind, like writing a new album or anything like that. 

For the past, maybe like five years or so I have felt so much better if I’m singing Indian music. I love chanting a mantra but more so like actual melodic mantra songs and stork drums and stuff. So I will probably be doing more of that. And then, yeah, I love painting too.

I just need to, get these out of the way (motions to all the paintings and laughs). 

Poet: (laughing) You can sell them all at Resonator and you’ll make more space in your studio. 

Clare: Yeah, that's another thing. I decided not to have titles or prices on any of them up I do think I’m going to do a name your own price element.

Like, if you want one of these crazy things, then you can just give me some money, however much you think, and do it that way. 

So there's there's a bunch of them. They're taking up space.

Poet: I'm sure that will work as it should. There’s some really beautiful, stunning work here. Clare, thank you so much for your time. What a pleasure to talk with you. Is there anything you'd like to share?

Just last thoughts you'd like to share about your work or yourself or anything you'd like people to know about you coming into the show? 

Clare: (smiles)  No, not really. I’m glad I had some words because sometimes I just don't have many words. 

Poet: I think there's a beauty in that. Sometimes there's far too many words.

Not enough quiet in space. Thanks again so much, Clare. Its been a pleasure spending time here this morning. Deeply looking forward to seeing your show.

Clare: (another smile) Thank you. 

A Conversation with J. Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson is one of the most prolific visual artists in Norman. Once he gets on to an idea, he is irresistibly compelled to see it through to fruition, no matter how long it takes to do so. In June, Resonator will be the beneficiary of Chris’ remarkable and compulsive art-making practice as we proudly host his most recent body of work, J. Chris Johnson’s Yearbook, an impressive series featuring 102 18” x 24” painted portraits that will completely fill the walls of our space.

In anticipation of the exhibition opening on June 14, Resonator’s newest contributor, Poet Clark met with Chris in his home studio to talk about his work and where it comes from. Here is the transcript of their conversation

J. Chris Johnson in his studio

J. Chris Johnson Interview 

May 26, 2024 

Poet Clark, Resonator Institute 

I am in the home of local Norman artist Chris Johnson, visiting about his upcoming show at Resonator Institute and the progression of his work as a drawer and painter. We are talking in the kitchen, just off his studio area, where we are surrounded by grayscale portraits covering the walls, waiting to be a part of the show. 

Chris, thank you for sharing your time this morning. I’m really looking forward to hearing about your work.  

Sure

I’d like to start with how you’ve developed as an artist. Is there anything you’d like us to know? 

I had high school art. And I just like to figure out things by myself. I was a skateboarder because it's like, there's no coach, there's no rules. There's just whatever ride I wanted.  

That's the same way that I do this.  

But yeah, if it wasn’t for high school art and learning, like the blind contour technique and stuff like that... 

I'm not a painter. I mean, I draw, but this is just kind of... 

Honestly, this is just cheating. That's all it is. There's no technical ability there whatsoever (points to the portraits on the wall). That's just drawing.

And so, how did you start the shift from drawing to painting?  

Well, because I got so obsessed with drawing...that, like “an eighth of an inch would matter”, that my neck would shake. I would get so obsessive compulsive about making sure that that line was correct.  

So, that's when I switched to painting. And I was like, “oh, I can just put the shapes in there”. They can be wrong. And then when that dries, I go over it and it lets me find the right shapes.  

And that's why it's switched to painting. 

I love that. Give yourself some freedom. Kind of let go of that need for perfection. 

 Yeah, I threw out my back out drawing. Because I just got so... (gestures by leaning forward and squinting). And then, like, I sat up and I realized I couldn't sit. I couldn't stand up.  

So, I was like, you know what? (Shakes head).  

And so, I started painting with socks and paper towels and, like, the worst brushes possible. 

 That's incredible. How long have you been painting? When did you make that switch?

I think I lived here, so that was maybe ten years ago? 15 years ago? Not sure, but I booked an art show based on paintings I hadn't done, which is what I do. (Laughs)  

It was in Oklahoma City, at Smith's place. And I asked her how big that wall was, which is what I asked Curtis. And I just did the math to figure out how many paintings would fit there and at what size.  

But yeah, I think I talked to my friend John about Resonator. And I was like, I think that's the only place I would do this because it’s got that long hallway. I had done one painting and I was like, oh, maybe I could do 100 of them just like this. And I was like, “I just figured this thing out”. I was in between projects, and I needed a win. You know, I needed one thing to be good. To keep going. 

So, I did a painting of this Greek sculpture, and I just did it in black acrylic. And it dried and I put gray oil over it. Then I just put white in there. I was like, oh, my God. Like, how did I not figure this out 30 years ago? I would have been doing this 30 years ago if I had figured this out! 

So, that's that cheat technique that I came up with to do this. They always say, you know, you're not supposed to use acrylics and oil together. Not wet. But dry, yes. Because that white gesso on every canvas, that's just acrylic and chalk. So, you're painting on acrylic anyway.  

And so, yeah, the black is acrylic, the gray is a wash. And then I put black and white oil color over it again. So, it gives it that depth. That's not skill. That's just technique.  

Portrait of Brad Hill

Well, we could argue that either direction, I feel like. I think that concept of the cheat is really funny because there are all of these weird criteria around what art is and what it should be. And which technique is “right”. I don't really believe there is such a thing. As an artist you find your voice and your own language in art, and how you communicate it.  

That's what you've done. And it's stunning. 

 And I've always said this, too, that there are a couple different kinds of artists, if you boil it down. There's artists and then there's, like, crazy people that have art supplies. (Laughs) 

And I lean more over that way. Crazy people with art supplies. 

You know, who else has 200 of anything is their house? You know? There's 300 failures in my garage right now. But that's what it is.  

And finding those mistakes is the most important thing. Making mistakes and being fine with it. You know, (pointing gesture) that didn't work. Move on. 

I'm not going to struggle.  

One of my professors used to say, fail fast. Figure out really quickly what's not working, because that's the bridge to what does work. And again, it comes back to the language of it. We have these words like “mistake” and “failure”. But really, the truth is we're just exploring. 

It's a one big experiment. And you're like, “oh, this worked out. And I really like the way this worked out. This not so much. I'm not going to do that again”.  

And that lets go of that binary of right or wrong. Yeah, I love crazy people with art supplies. I consider myself one of them. 

I think that today we're starting to see a shift away from that black and white rigid thought about “What is an artist? What is art?” What does that mean? We get to define ourselves. And I just I feel like we're trying to wash all that away, and let's just make stuff and talk about it and look at it. 

That's someone else's decision. An artist? Because I didn't decide to be one. You know, I didn't pick because, you know, I would have picked something a lot easier. (Laughs)  

(Laughing) Right.  

I’m thinking about this series and looking at your decision to do the grayscale. Now, you've worked in color before. So, I wanted to ask if you would talk a little bit about the significance of the grayscale and how you made that decision to move from color to grayscale?  

 Well, for this one, it's like a yearbook, right? But only upper class students get color.  

But I've got so many friends that are so talented.  

I've met so many talented people.  

And they're still in black and white. Compared to people who are in color that, you know, may be a little bit better at talking about (their work), you know, or whatever, that “success” part is. Which is fine. But that was this (points to the greyscale portraits on the walls around him). If you're going to this show, when you’re standing there, it's like you're inside of a yearbook.  

And you see those people whose faces talk to you.  

Because that was a lot of it, too. Where, like, I wanted to be able to paint people that said something without, you know... 

That you could stand there and go, “Oh, yeah. That's a thought”. 

That’s a thought person's having it that makes you...makes your imagination go see who these people are and what they're doing and why their face looks like that.

“Never Met Him”

Right? The human connection.  

When you look at this person, there's a story there, but we don't know what it is because you haven't given us the story. But you've given us this emotion in this space, right? And we get to ask the questions. What is she thinking? Why does he look sad? What's going on in her world? I feel like that's what I'm hearing from you: “I'm going to show you this moment in time, but you get to be curious, and you get to explore it and ask those questions.” 

And I immediately sensed that when I came in and saw your work, it was like, oh, I want to know more about that and what's there and what's that?   

This thougth leads into the next question, which is how do you choose your subject matter? How do you find these people?  

 Well, I think it is that people speak with their eyes. 

You know, the eyes are locked in.  

And then some of them, honestly, were just because the shadows looked good, you know? When I started painting, it was the old Hollywood photographs. The black and white, perfectly set up photo. That's how I learned how to paint, was by painting those. So, I was looking for the shapes. And I loved the old Hollywood ones that would be light on both sides, but then dark back in the center, which is back at (points to a specific painting on the wall)...yeah, this one here. Where you can see this. (Gestures to one part of the painting). And no one does that anymore. But yeah, mostly it was just expressive faces. Like interesting faces.  

And so people say “Why don’t you paint, like, Jimi Hendrix? And I think there's enough pictures of Jimi Hendrix. If I wanted to do 100 paintings of the most common denominator of famous people, I would have done that sh*t, you know? 

But I don't care about that. This is not about that. This is about the Jimi Hendrix's I know.  And plus, I mean, half these people I don’t know.  

Right. But there's something that you want us to know. Something that you're experiencing, that you're sharing with us through your work. 

And I think that's really important. And what I'm hearing is that’s it about that human connection. “I want you to see the stories of these people.” 

 Most artists are storytellers. There's something that we want to share. There's something we want to say. But when you put the human being into it, it changes completely because there's a connection there. There's an understanding, I think, that is coming forward, you know. Even just those moments of time. 

Or, “it was fun. It was play. I love the shadows. I love the light. It was a challenge and I wanted to I wanted to paint that.” And all of those things exist together. They're all important and they all have value and they all have meaning. And, I think that most people can relate to that. They can stand around your work and go, “oh, I see myself here.” Which is really beautiful.  

So, what do you do when you're not painting?  

Dang, that's a good one.  

I used to do yard work all the time. I like to do a lot of flowers in the front. I've gotten super lazy about it, but honestly, I like doing stuff in the house. 

Like, I painted this kitchen. I did the gray, I did those floors. I had no idea where that came from. Right? But it was always about making something a little bit better each time. And see, I'm still working on that (points to the kitchen table nook). I’ve got to get the table top finished.  

Portrait of Gil Harris

Have you thought about what's coming next after this series?  

Well, throughout the years of my doing art, it’s been like, “Oh, that's the guy that does skeletons. Oh, that's the guy who does boats on fire. Oh, that’s the guy ths does...you know.” (Laughs) 

So, there's always going to be a drastic shift in what I do because I run out of interest. 

But, doing this, like, I was probably burnt out at about 50 (paintings). I was like, why am I still doing it? And I thought, “well, I said 102 and 102’s going to be overwhelming but it’s going to be a cool thing to see.” The idea was finished. And when an idea is finished in my head, I don't want to work on it any more. (Laughs) And I certainly don’t want to do portraits for the rest of my life, right?  

So, that's why I completely switched. I bought 6 by 18ft of canvas. And I'm just going to do one painting and it's all drawing. But I'll probably seal it then paint over it. And it's going to take maybe a year. I don't know. (Chuckles) It could be done next week. I’m not sure.  

But that's also the thing is, like, you have to be right with those shapes and lines on a portrait. And in this, it does not matter. It’s going to be...(laughs) like, the scale of the figures doesn't matter. If they overlap, it doesn't matter. I don't have a show set up for it. I don't want to think about that. 

And, I’m probably going to do, like, I don't know, maybe five that big? I'm not sure.  

That’s so cool! Well, when you get them finished, maybe, Resonator would love to show them. (I slide in a sly smile and Chris laughs) 

Do you ever do any collaborative shows, or are you generally solo? 

Generally solo. but I have done group shows. A friend works at a tattoo shop in the city, and they always invite me to do their shows. They’re always kind of thematic and I always try to mess with them a little bit. But, that's just kind of fun stuff.  

Whenever I do stuff for the tattoo shop, I do it for the guys who are in the shop. You know, because they're like, “What is Chris going to do?”. That's why I did this. (Points to colorful portrait). It’s an H.R. Giger painting but that’s Blondie instead of the original face. 

 Because Giger did a video with Blondie. They’re bizarre. I didn't know about it until a couple years ago. But, I mean, I spent way too much time on that, and I was like, why would you spend so much time on somebody else's work when you could be doing that on your own? 

 So, it kind of shifted my gears, too, into doing stuff like this. Why would you paint Jimi Hendrix? You know, it’s either going to look like him or it isn’t. And how many how many different ways can you paint Jimi Hendrix before it's been seen before?  

Right. Or like how many Bob Marley pictures do we really need them? I mean, don't get me wrong. I love Bob Marley, but you get those icons and they're used and used and used and used. And so sometimes it is about, well, how can I spin that in my own work? How can I bring something different...create my own Jimi Hendrix's. 

Chris, in closing, is there anything you would like us to know about your Yearbook work that may not come through without an artist statement? (Chris does NOT like artists statements) 

(Laughs) I'm not sure.  

Some of these people are friends of mine who are incredibly talented artists. They're very special people and no one gives a sh*t how talented they are. Like, I can play guitar. I know the same five chords everybody else does. But I've seen some people play and I’m like, “Holy f*ck, you're a roofer?” You know, it's like, damn dude. 

So, some of this was highlighting these people that are incredibly talented and still do it all the time for next to nothing, you know? And what is that thing about “if you were on a spaceship alone for the rest of your life, would you still do art?” Because there was a concept that everyone does art for one person. Even subconsciously.  

I would, you know. And I think it's probably that this house is my spaceship now. This is where I want to be doing art all the time. 

I would be on that spaceship, too. I want to be on the spaceship with all the art. 

Chris, I can’t thank you enough for the gift of your time and for sharing a bit of yourself with us.  

 (Big, genuine Chris smile) Absolutely. 

 Please join us for the opening of J. Chris Johnson’ Yearbook: Paintings from 2023 – 2024 on June 14, 2024 at Resonator Institute 325 E. Main St, Norman, OK  

Skelley Queen: Garden Trip

Skelley Queen’s Garden Trip

Skelley Queen is an Oklahoma based mixed media artist who combines several different mediums to create wonderfully articulated pieces that draws in viewers into her magical mind. Whether she’s painting, drawing, crocheting, or sculpting, Skelley Queen brings a child’s sense of joy to the adult themes she explores.

Skelley Queen’s exhibition “Garden Trip” was something out of an Alice in Wonderland themed universe, in which the little creatures of her imagination are sitting at a table having tea, or flying through the air with their colorful wings. Skelley Queen skillfully combines the usage of eye imagery throughout all her work, and created a wonderful, magical space for all to see. Almost as if the world is seeing her work through her own eyes.

Resonator’s Ivanna Wilson sat down with Skelley Queen to get a better understanding of what fuels her artistic vision. Here’s what she had to say about it.

Q: Skelley, what is your background?

A:  I am from Oklahoma City! Really other than finding a lot of inspiration from local artists back in high school when I started taking art making a little more seriously, I don’t feel like Oklahoma influences my work too much necessarily. There’s been times where I’ve used our Thunder colors for some crochet projects! I do think entering into the Oklahoma art realm isn’t as intimidating as it could be like in much larger cities and their scenes. There are so many kind and welcoming local artists, shops, and venues that welcome artists in and I think that was really important when I was getting started on my artistic trek. 

Q: I noticed throughout your work, there is a lot of use of color and fantastical imagery. What is your inspiration for this?

A:  I find inspiration from other artists frequently, some of them being local artists and close friends of mine, others I follow on Instagram that do crochet work and others that use a lot of the same eyeball, floral, colorful imagery that I also do. Sometimes certain songs will kind of conjure up an image as I listen. I love the 90’s Lisa Frank style aesthetic and more recently I’ve been really attracted to this kind of spacey dreamy medieval aesthetic, which really found its way into this exhibition. I also find a lot of inspiration from the otherworldly immersive art at Factory Obscura. They have a tunnel of love in their experience that I’ve spent a good amount of time in that inspired me in this show. 

Q: Your work contains a lot of mixed media, is there a reason for this or do you like the complexity of using multiple mediums?

A:  I absolutely adore using mixed media. I’ve been into it for like a decade now! I love the way it brings variety to a work and can create layers and dimension. I will say, it does help make a piece more interesting when I use imagery I don’t feel incredibly skillful at executing. I love painting images of women’s faces and flowy hair, but I’m honestly not good at making faces more realistic so it goes very simplified and kind of abstract. Definitely something I want to improve on though! I do find creating art more interesting when I can use numerous materials on something. I can definitely get bored just using one medium for an entire project. I also seriously love adding jewels to things :,)

Q: Just by walking through your exhibition, I felt like I was transported to another world. What kind of art do you most identify with?

A:  I most identify with art that is an otherworldly or a hyper whimsical version of existing things. I really am intrigued with larger than reality representations of things we are already familiar with. In my work, I want to take the viewer to another planet in a way, so art that also does that for me is really exciting. In college I learned about different crochet artists that really push what I ever thought crochet art could do. From that and places like Factory Obscura, I’ve become more and more interested in immersive, interactive art as well. 

Q: Your work seems to contain a lot of imagery involving eyes and the body. What themes do you like to explore in your work?

A: I enjoy exploring themes about the body and use imagery of hands, eyes, and faces in a lot of pieces. Nature is another theme I like to incorporate in my work and I use a lot of flowers! Relationship to self, comfort, and playfulness are other themes I have fun exploring too. 

Q: How did your exhibition at Resonator improve you as an artist, and what experiences did you take from it?

A: This exhibition gave me experience in arranging and hanging up pieces, which I haven’t had a whole lot of experience in. I had a wonderful opportunity at Resonator to really just go for it and do any kind of setup I wanted to do and having that freedom was really groovy. I had to consider the space and how I wanted the show to flow and also how to arrange the fake grass around the room. I also really loved watching people view my work and I haven’t had a ton of experience in that either, so seeing the reactions throughout the night was a lot of fun. I feel like I grew from this experience and reached a personal milestone! 

Q: We all thoroughly enjoyed your presence at Resonator during the 2nd Friday Art walk. How would you describe your experience?

A: My experience at Resonator was, as I expected, fantastic! The wonderful folks that run it made the whole process so chill, efficient, and fun. I felt supported throughout everything and it was very smooth sailing. The venue is spacious and still cozy, which is a great combo to me! Also I have to mention the font that was used for the wall text is called Kelly Ann Gothic, which is so destiny and wild because my name is Kelley Ann and it just 100% fits the vibe of the show too. It blew my mind, haha. The opening of the show was sooo much fun and having friends and family there was so special too! 

Q: Would you come back to Resonator and host another show? If so, why? I know we would love to have to you back!

A: I would heck yes host another show at Resonator! Everyone is so kind, chill, and incredibly helpful and supportive! I love the energy at this venue and would love to come back for another show sometime. 

Q: Non-profit art spaces can be very helpful for the growing artist and people who want to get their name out there; do you feel this experience helped you in your future exhibitions?

A: Yes, I think this experience has helped me for future exhibitions! I feel more confident in myself and ability to assemble a solid looking show haha. I couldn’t have done it alone and I’m so thankful for all the help I received! I look forward to future exhibitions and am grateful to the folks at Resonator for this fantastic opportunity! 

Skelley Queen’s Artist Bio:

My name is Kelley Queen and I am a multidisciplinary artist living in Norman, Oklahoma. Bright, bold color schemes, otherworldly environments, and plenty of eyeballs are commonly seen throughout my work. Crochet is one of my most used mediums and has been part of my life for over a decade. I love incorporating it into sculptural works, jewelry, and funky stuffed creatures. I seek to infuse whatever I do with a sense of playfulness and thoughtfulness.

Leticia Galizzi

Leticia Galizzi wants you to embrace the abstract, to see things without having to define them, and to appreciate the wonder that exists in the world when you slow down enough to recognize it. She presents her paintings as conversation starters instead of arguments trying to prove a point, and your input is just as valuable as hers in this conversation.

Leticia’s exhibition “Paint Planet” brought our walls to life during the month of April. As the title suggests, the star of the show was paint, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of creating illusions of space, Leticia skillfully utilized paint as a sculptural material, capable of providing texture, structure, and physical depth. The result was a stunning and playful array of truly fantastic pieces that bridged the gap between the idea of what it means for work to be categorized as 2D or 3D.

Resonator’s Taylin Han sat down with Leticia last week to get a little better understanding of her work and the ideas that animate it. Here’s what she had to say.

Q: Leticia, what is your background?

A: I had my MFA in Painting at OU. Before that, I went to Yale School of Art. Part of what I do in this exhibit comes from my experience there. Also, I was born and raised in Brazil and  the region I come from is very strong and supportive of the arts.

Q: I noticed rather than opening your exhibition with text about yourself or the artwork, you provide a series of questions for the audience to consider throughout the exhibition. What is your purpose for that?

A: I feel that many people are not very used to abstract art. They don’t know what to do with it, right? So, this was one of my concerns. I wrote the questions in very simple English. I have a kid at home and I wanted to make sure it was accessible to people of all ages. Also, I think art is less a part of people’s lives than I wish it were. When you have at a gallery and the gallery setting, it is almost as if it is expected for people to understand what they see when they come in, to know how to digest what they are given. And they don’t actually have to. I wanted to have an exhibit that is welcoming to everybody. As an artist, I feel the need to live in a place with more engagement with art.

Q: Tell me about the visual qualities of these works here. I’ve noticed a lot of layering, shapes, and texture.

A: Yes, something that is always present is the layering. Another one is that the paintings give you the impression that what you are looking at is just a part of something bigger that extends beyond the canvas, instead of being contained within it. Also, I try to make paintings that make you feel like reaching out and touching their surfaces. I experiment with a lot of different mediums and methods to get different surfaces. They are aimed at your senses, mostly at sight and touch.

Q: Brazil is such a colorful place, all the art and clothes and the country itself is so entrenched in color. Is your wide use of color and texture inspired by this background? Is there another source for your inspiration?

A: I must tell you, I am hoping OU will allow me to teach a course at the mini college in the summer. I made a proposal for a class based on Josef Albers book Interaction of Color. This book made me approach color differently, taught me how to negotiate colors on the painting to my favor.

I am strongly influenced by Brazilian color and by Helio Oiticica’s studies on color,  I also noticed, certain cultures deal with color in a much more systematized way, something that Brazil doesn’t do. In Brazil, red and green are not associated with just Christmas. They are just colors, you can wear what you want anytime and it doesn’t mean it’s Christmas.

Q: What is your process like in developing these kinds of works?

A: Narrative is very powerful. When you start with, “I want to discuss this subject”, many times you become more focused on how to convey your ideas on that subject rather than opening up to what the medium has to offer you. When you don’t start with a specific narrative in mind the work unfolds as you create it, you see what the material can give back, it is really interesting. Here (in this body of work), I started my drawing studies with only the ellipse. I also used straight lines, but I limited myself as much as I could to horizontals and verticals. I started filling up my notebooks drawing ellipses, using colors,  sometimes drawing only one or two ellipses on a page, sometimes filling the whole page with them. Then I asked myself, “Is this interesting yet simple enough? Will paint have a room here?” This way, the drawing wouldn’t take over and instead, there would be room for the medium to “speak” more intensely. So, it was primarily the medium guiding me. When the work was done, sometimes I would step back and see a narrative there. It doesn’t matter if you intend to make the narrative or not, we just feel the need to create it.

Q: Tell me about some of these thick, shiny, textured stretches of acrylics paint. Usually, you get this thick texture from oil paints but this is all acrylic. (See in Paw, In Movement, Hammock, through a perforated brick wall)

A: I have a 12 year-old, who at the time was 9, she said to me “Mama, I like when the paint is wet and I don’t like it when its dry.” I think she was right, when you put the paint on the canvas it takes a lot from it. So, I thought, “Okay, let me make some pieces without the canvas, using just paint that stands by itself.” So, to get this result, these were made off the canvas, peeled off, and then reattached to the canvas. I really had to work around the temperature of the environment. In this process paint can withstand the cold but in the hot, Oklahoma summer, it can be a challenge.

Q: How intentional are you in your work? The ellipse drawing and then picking the shapes and outlines are pretty loose but what about the laying down of colors and texture?

A: Well, the things is, you start with an idea in mind, but the work usually takes you to different places. And I must tell you, the most frustrated I’ve ever gotten was when I completed a large work and it came out exactly as I had planned. It was unsatisfying. It’s not mathematics, it’s not supposed to be so systemized. I have already heard people complain that they have an idea that they don’t know how to transfer it to the canvas and I think that’s precisely what we should look forward to. Painting is about embracing the surprise and the process. I’m eager for the moment of surprise. For example, when I pick a color, I’ll pick that color and then go a few shades right of that color on my color of choice just to experiment with something new. I think it is more enjoyable and exciting that way.

Q: Leticia, there seems to be some sort of intentional organization of the layout of your works. On this (right) side, it seems like there are more layers and ellipses whereas this (left) side has more color and pattern.

A: Well, I was going from works that display fewer ellipses (on the right side of the gallery) to works that resulted from the use of more and more ellipses (on the left side). I think on this (right) side, the paint is talking to you more strongly. It somehow tests my theory that the less shapes you have, the more room you give for paint to do its thing. I was also thinking about a study I read about how the public tends to move in public spaces. According to this study most people, when entering a room will turn right first. So, I had that in mind too.

Q: What are your favorite works here?

A: Maybe this one (Ceschiati and Warhol in talk) and this one (clown). Ceschiatit and Warhol in talk because some parts of it came out looking very much like the work of a famous sculptor in the city I come from: Ceschiati. I didn’t plan on this so when I saw it I thought, “Wow, Ceschiati came to visit me!” So, I was very happy about that. I also like the green, I feel it speaks for Brazil. The “Warhol” comes from this combination of ellipses here. I just thought that was such an interesting dialogue. With the work clown, I thought it was incredibly tacky and this tackiness was so appealing to me! It was so nice that I overcame that initial impulse to “adjust” the colors trying to make a work that I thought could be a little more palatable.

Q: What is the underlying essence in your work and its relationship to you?

A: I think, no matter how you choose to express yourself, you are yourself. There is always your own essence that’s going to be present. In a way, I think we are caged in ourselves. You can’t be anyone but yourself. You are this given. Of course, you can change over time but there are things you love about yourself that you probably won’t lose. There are things you don’t like about yourself that you’re not going to lose either. These things are intrinsic to who you are. So, we are caged in that sense that we are limited by our intrinsic selves. That’s what makes you more forgiving towards others, being aware of your own limitations. In my case, I can’t see with my left eye. If I look at you using only my left eye, the area where you are appears gray to me, but I can see your surroundings. So, I see you with my right eye and my sense of depth comes from this other eye with which I cannot see details. This impacts the way I look at things. At my first painting class in the east coast, when I tried to do something observational, my professor said “You have some visual issue.” It is true, and I can use it for my benefit, or not. This is just a metaphor but this idea is in everything.

Dayton Clark: Folds

Dayton Clark’s work inspires curiosity, questioning, and amusement. He doesn’t want you to know exactly what you’re looking at, but at the same time doesn’t try to hide it. The materials are familiar, they’re just not acting like or doing what you expect them to. And the effect is something you have to see for yourself.

Dayton has hung some of his recent work exploring the intersections of painting, sculpture, and architecture at Resonator through the month of March. He sat down with Resonator contributor Taylin Han to talk a little bit about this work and his background. Here’s what he had to say…

Q: Where are you from? What’s your background?

I finished my undergrad in 2015 at the University of Oklahoma School of Visual Art. I got my Master’s in Architecture at the University of Washington. When the pandemic hit, I was presented with the opportunity teach at the College of Architecture at OU, so I currently teach studio classes and architectural theory and criticism there.

Q: What place does art hold in your life?

I would like art to be a 60 percent of my time thing and teaching a 40 percent thing. Ideally, I’d like to do art full time.

Q: What or who inspires or influences your works?  

My work has lot of architectural influence, especially in materiality. I originally started as a painter and consider myself one. I became interested in the visual illusion of movement and fluidity of fabrics in works I saw in art history. I thought of the canvas as fabric I could manipulate. I then added the concrete and casting as the architectural counterpart. In terms of artists, I have been inspired by environmental artists Christo and Jeanne Claude, sculptor Anish Kapoor, and modern Italian artists Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri. I’m also interested in contemporary works by Gedi Sibony, Marlies Hoevers, and Charlotte Thrane.

Q: What are you exploring in your works?

I’m more focused on the aesthetics and visual aspect although I do have thoughts and ideas behind the work that I could talk about if I needed to. Early on, I was thinking about Folds as a property of fabric. If I had to give this exhibition a title, I’d probably call it “Folds”. Overall, I’m interested in the contrast between hard materials like concrete and the fluid movement of fabric.

Q: What are you trying to communicate or achieve in your work?

 I try to be a little mischievous. I want my work to be kind of tricky, like it promises one thing but its visual truth is another thing. From far away it looks like fabric draping but once you get up close you realize its concrete and manipulated canvas. So, I’m trying to curate an experience. I’m really interested in “Trompe l’oeil”, or “tricking the eye”. I think of it as breaking the two-dimensional plane by implying depth in a two-dimensional work when there is none. On one, I painted a canvas to look like concrete. In another, I stretched the canvas so it appeared folded and fluid, like fabric. My work is very intentional in the way I want it to be perceived.

Q: What is your process like?

I usually start by asking myself “how can I make people question this surface?” I also started just doodling labyrinths as a sort of meditation which is how a lot of the labyrinth forms in my work came together. In casting and mould-making, I like to think about the relationship between the material and cast, positive and negative forms, and how it can affect the surfaces.

Q: Do you have a work you particularly enjoyed creating?

The most exciting ones are the ones I created impulsively, the ones that I didn’t have planned from the start. The painted concrete one was the most fun. It was impulsive. I was working on something else that night and saw it in the corner and thought I could do something interesting with it. This one with the concrete block pressed into it is really exciting too.

Q: Is there anything you try to convey about yourself or your thoughts in your work?

I don’t really want to talk about myself. I don’t want people to know who did this stuff I just want people to come enjoy it. Again, I more focus on the visual experience.

Cover Your Pie Hole!

Resonator is calling on local artists and designers of all levels and backgrounds to help us help make our community a safer place. "Cover Your Pie Hole" (working title) is an ongoing project we will be sponsoring throughout the summer. As the project continues, we will fill up our front windows with posters encouraging our community to make and wear face masks.

If you would like to participate, the way it works is simple--

1. Design, draw, or paint a poster promoting mask-wearing

2. Make it into a PDF measuring 11 x 17 inches (dpi 144 or above please)

3. Email us that PDF (resonator.ok@gmail.com)

4. We print up a copy of your poster and put it up in our window for the whole world to see. We will also post a copy to our social media pages (for even more of the whole world to see.)

Be as creative as you like, just make sure the message is coming through. Our primary goal is to maintain awareness that wearing masks is an important component of public health these days. If you are someone who is currently making masks and wants to promote that activity, by all means, please make a poster advertising YOUR masks and telling people where and how they can get one from you. We will display all good faith entries until we run out of room to do so... then we'll start changing them out to keep the window constantly refreshed.

Artist Profile: Craig Swan

-Amanda Deng

July’s Second Friday at Resonator will feature paintings and sculptures by artist Craig Swan. His show, titled “Part of a Part of a Story,” will be open to the public from 6-10pm Friday, July 12, 2019. Our video interview with Craig gives a behind-the-scenes look into his studio space and artmaking process. 

Artist Bio: Since graduating from Boston University with a B.F.A in sculpture in 2007, Craig Swan has shown his work in over 25 exhibitions, taught drawing and sculpture classes, and served on multiple arts committees including several at Resonator. Craig also contributed two pieces of public art to the city of Norman, Oklahoma: Sundial for the West Main Street Sculpture Project, and Ziggy Star-Duck for the Parks Sculpture Project. He likes house cats and heavy metal and lots of other things.

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Q&A

Q: In the description of your show on Facebook, you were talking about wanting people to form their own narratives around the different pieces.

 A:  So, like, when you read a book in school, in any school up to any level within any academic kind of setting, there is a more correct or accepted interpretation, right, the thing that makes the most sense. I think that that's the kind of critical thinking skill I would hope a viewer might employ, and look for connections between the pieces or look and say, "this must be an earlier one because he took that thing and did it a different way over here, and it's more complicated now than it was before." Or like, "he learned something from these not-so-great colors that he picked in these and did something else over here, or he must really like this or that. If I were better at telling really specific stories I probably wouldn't make paintings. I would probably write a book instead and build the world in there, and the concerns and everything would be different.

 (On the symbolism of anvils and birds in his work)

Detail of mountain bluebird on anvil, Craig Swan

 The anvil I did with two-by-fours that I laminated and jointed. It's big and heavy but also completely not functional, which is sort of the point...it's meant to be this like, I guess, an inert version of an even more inert object. Like, it can't be used like that, and it's a completely functionless kind of thing. But anvils always kind of looked like birds to me too, because they have the beak and the other thing...

 Birds are a weird symbol in my work too because they're...We think of them as like these sing-songy beautiful soft creatures. But if you ever go near their nests, or if you ever have been dive-bombed by a bird while you're on your bike or something like that—you do not want to deal with a pissed off mama bird at all. And so I think that that duality of intention, disposition, and you know just whatever the situation is—that things can be soft and beautiful and good or evil at the same time. Or hard and strong. And so that's kind of what the anvil bird metaphor thing is about.  

 Q: Crows or ravens?

 A: Both. I'm a little fidgety on which one it ends up being, but I think that ravens have a better wing shape, but that crows make better sounds. Ravens have this weird thumb-feather-thing and crows are kind of flat, and ravens are kind of hairier, too. They have like, this mane about them, but it's hard to do that in a drawing or a painting and do it right, and make it not look like a Death Cab for Cutie cover or something like that, you know. So it's tricky.

 Q: Can you talk about the symbolism of bodies to you?

 A: It was central to my training as an artist. There was tons and tons and tons of figure drawing, and it was like this, this most revered kind of art form. And I don't know, I just like them. I think I think that you can appreciate the body in multiple ways, right? I mean there's the obvious, right, the magazines and the all of this predatory advertising that plays on people's insecurities. 

 But I think like, even just seeing people out jogging during the day—maybe I'm projecting—but there's like a transfixion that happens. This person is using the thing that they have in the way that it was intended, and it's kind of beautiful. And you see things that you don't see in really cloistered or closed off or "proper" environments. I think that it says a lot about a person like, your back tells a story no matter who you are. Your hands tell a story.

 I think that we as a culture, as a society, don't express ourselves with our bodies necessarily enough. I think that there could be more of that and it would create, maybe, more equality and appreciation for all kinds of things like privacy, and consent, and respecting distance, and being able to appreciate from afar. All that kind of stuff. It evokes so much for viewers.

Tempestuous Sleep, Craig Swan

(On Harry Clarke)

 He did these really crazy stained-glass windows that, as insofar as a stained-glass window can be iconoclastic, he did it...telling stories of Irish mythology or the Bible, or history or whatever. It's kind of what I'm doing a poor imitation of, I think, where he has these...there's all these little dots and details and animal forms. 

 And his style is connected to the illuminated manuscript tradition from the Middle Ages of all of these floral kinds of animal motifs, and things like that. And in terms of, I don't know, identity and personal history and all of that kind of stuff, I want to be able to at least—in some small visual way—connect to that and feel like I'm participating in it, and that it is a part of what I do and the way that I do it.

 Q: So you're Irish?

 A: My family came to America when I was four and then I lived in Massachusetts for a long time, did a brief stint in Pittsburgh, and then moved to Norman ten years ago.

 Q: That still comes through in a lot of your work.

 A: It's kind of an inescapable part of me, I think. I didn't get my American citizenship until I was…it was like, the very end of Obama's second term. Because when Obama became president I was like, "fuck yeah, I'll do this so I can vote and stuff," and then I got my citizenship. But up until that point it was so hard to give up what felt like the last vestige of my identity on paper that confirmed that I was...more complicated than "white America."

wooden anvil sculpture by Craig Swan

 Q: In metal there's a lot of references to mythology. Is that what connected you to metal?

 A: The Sword’s first album Age of Winter there's a whole song about Freya, this Norse goddess. It's just cool shit to sing a song about and have like this kind of epic sound. It only really fits in a certain type of metal, like a genre within a genre kind of thing. And I don't know, I just like it. There's a song by High on Fire where he talks about the plains of Tiamat, and it's all got to do with Babylonian gods, and Marduk, and this conquest. And you can see dudes on horse...all kinds of exciting things in there. Yeah, it's probably connected. It has the same sort of aesthetic.

 Q: So who do you listen to?

 A: I've been listening to High on Fire, Mastodon...I didn't like their new album as much as some of their older stuff. The first five Metallica albums and sometimes the most recent, too—we don't talk about what they did in the 90s. I listen to Meshugga sometimes, when the mood strikes. The Sword for sure, but again, not their most recent work. I go up to about Apocryphonand that's it. I've had the Deftones on repeat for a while. I've also got Elvis Costello and The Tallest Man on Earth. It's not all metal, but metal is the thing, it's the core of the stuff.

 Q: Are you familiar with Jinjer?

 A: I don't know them.

 Q: They're a female-fronted Ukrainian metal band...I saw them in September at the Diamond Ballroom and they were one of the openers for a couple of other really masculine really aggressive bands.

 A: That's kind of the thing too, what you said about these very masculine kinds of...I think that some men get their masculine identity from sports, or working out, or you know, various other stupid things. My stupid thing happens to be metal. I went to a High on Fire show in Pittsburgh like 12 years ago. It was at the Rex Theater, I think. It has this bar above it called Jimmy D's, and they play very inappropriate things on the TVs, and they have pool tables, and tons of beer, and all kind of stuff. Down in the showroom--the room was half empty, and it was probably like 200 sweaty dudes in this really smelly room. The whole crowd was this enormous circle pit taking over your entire body...it was the most tribal...like we're doing the same thing together kind of feeling. The beer probably assisted in that but it was really good to engage in that kind of thing.

 Q: Books, movies, podcasts?

 A: So in the last year I subscribed to Audible and I found that—not sponsored—I found that it's easier for me to read books that way, but I've been a big fan of reading audiobooks and reading in general for a long time. I will sometimes put on “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, read by Douglas Adams. I have this audiobook version of “Ulysses” by James Joyce that I only ever get so far in. I'll try again very soon. I started reading books about psychology, cognition, and creativity like a year ago. 

 There's a book by a statistician and psychologist, Daniel Kahneman—he's one of the big names in this field. It's called “Thinking Fast and Slow”. It talks about the two systems of the brain, and the way that we can mistakenly employ a system of fast thinking when slowing down would be really more effective for getting some kind of result, and about managing your emotions, and things like that.

 I had never read “Dune”—I read the first four books in the last year. I read a book called "Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, Or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything" by Ulrich Boser. It sounds like a self-help book but it's not. It teaches methods for studying, and for managing your emotions, and how to learn how to learn how to do anything. 

 There's another book called "Creating Things That Matter," which talks about the dovetailing of science and art and how they're both aesthetic pursuits, and how the thought processes and the way that people get to them are different. "Culture and Imperialism" by Edward Said is one that I have on my list right now. I read "Circe" and "The Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, those are really good.

 Podcasts...I listen to “Making It," which is three YouTubers that talk about making stuff. There's another one that's called "Fools with Tools" that is like an offshoot of the "Making It" podcast. I listened to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" is another podcast. I don't know if you can tell but I spend a lot of time just ingesting stuff. 

 "The BlindBoy" podcast is another one. He's an Irish guy who's in a band called the Rubberbandits. Sometimes he talks about Marxist theory, or he talks about social-political issues, he's done multiple podcasts on the origin of Pride Week... He's done things on cognitive psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy, mental health, stuff like that. And there's one that I just subscribed to yesterday called "With Our Arms to the Sun." There's a guy who does all the stage art for Mastodon called Skinner and he got interviewed on that, and it's like five metal guys talking about drawing Satan and stuff, and I was like, "fuck yeah, into that." So, give that one a try.

 Q: Who are your favorite artists that you follow?

 A: I would say Mike Mignola, the creator of “Hellboy.” He did a run of X-Men in the 90s but you can tell he was kind of rushed. He does, now, watercolor paintings where he really invests in these pictures of Hellboy and things like that. I collect the novels and comics and things and I only buy the ones that he's drawn. In the back of the trade paperback they have the Mike Mignola sketchbook, and those are so good to see. 

 As far as living artists besides him I would say Zak Smith. He's a strange person, he also does porn under the name Zak Sabbath. Half his head is shaved and his hair is green, and he's got a big tattoo. But he also does a podcast that I listen to sometimes called "We Eat Art." I follow James Jean on Instagram because the man is crazy with the work that he does.

There's this Korean savant guy named Kim Jung Gi...he does these crazy, enormous, detailed drawings off-the-cuff, and it's like, complete in his mind before it comes out. And it just falls out like a, I don't know, like a peg through a hole, it just goes BOOM and there's the drawing. But he hangs out with a guy named Terada Katsuya, and they both do these amazing completed things.

 Q: Anything else you want to say to the people?

 A: Read the blog but don't judge. I tried to make them thoughtful essays, but I don't know what they ended up being. I've been working on a new thing to put in there for like seven months, but I kind of got a little a little scared putting it out there. Come to the show, please.

 Q: Are there any other shows that you're excited about? Art shows, music shows, performances?

 A: People have been telling me for a few months that I should go and see Glen Hansard when he comes to Oklahoma, so I'm still thinking about doing that. I've never seen Metallica live but I should probably go do that. I think they're probably gonna go on tour soon.

acrylic painting by Craig Swan