Every week, we'll be sitting down with one of our gallery artists to discuss their work, process, inspiration, and stories. This week we're speaking with Ky Anderson.
Ky Anderson has set up shop in Pencil Works - a pencil factory turned coworking space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - to create her lively paintings and run her various collaborative artistic projects. As an artist who works on many pieces at the same time, the studio is usually scattered with works in progress, but today space has been cleared at the work table and we sit down to talk over coffee about creating a community of artists, the themes she's exploring in her work lately, and the benefits of self-doubt.
What are some of your earliest memories of being introduced to art and getting involved with art?
Both of my parents are artists. My mother is a painter and my father's a multimedia photographer, so as a child they were very active making art and it was part of my everyday life. They were also part of a large creative community, so all of their friends were working hard as artists as well. It was the early seventies in Kansas City, and I was surrounded by a large group of artists being very free and expressive in their work. They were all very prolific too, making art with whatever was around them. It was a major part of everyday life growing up, so as a young child I learned that making art was what you were supposed to do with your life. I'm still inspired by all of the energy and the drive they all had, and still have.
What inspires your style?
My work is very abstract, but there are a lot of stories behind the imagery. I tend to work on groups of painting at once with an ongoing narrative that flows from series to series and throughout each body of work. Sometimes the stories are personal, sometimes they're from absorbing the visuals around me. Recently, I've been making work about piles of rocks. It comes from my past imagery of landscapes, mountains, and what the landscape is made of. The rocks have become a microscope of those things. But there's also a personal element to it; there's a guy I know who piles rocks. At first it seemed obsessive to me and I thought he must be crazy, but then I turned around and looked at myself and realized I do the same thing with my painting. I get obsessed with things and try them out over and over again until I've figured it out. So I decided to explore that a bit from those different angles. I have a need for my paintings to be slightly symmetrical and balanced, so when I started piling rocks in my work if was very satisfying and I began to understand the rock piler's satisfaction as well.
How does working on multiple pieces at a time affect your process?
One way that I work is if I see something in my work that I don't like, I'll often take it and repeat that image on a new painting as a way to dissect what made me uncomfortable and figure out how I can fix it. In this process, images get repeated over and over in my work until I feel I've fully understood what they are about and why I'm painting them. But, I do find that I'll start to drown in unfinished work. My studio is usually full of canvases piled up and works on paper covering the floor, so in order to actually finish anything I have to tidy up and put out only a few pieces to focus on.
I like the idea of a work never being a mistake, and just being an opportunity for something new. Do you always try and complete something even if you're not feeling particularly comfortable with how it is at the moment?
Oh yeah, I always try and work it until it's done. Very rarely do I throw things away. If it's not finished, it might get thrown to the bottom of the pile, and then I'll pull it out a few months later or a year later and I'll look at it again. Sometimes things are finished and I didn't realize it yet; I just needed to take the time to sit and look at them in that new light and perspective.
You mentioned there are a lot of repeating elements in your work. Earlier you said that symmetry and balance is important to you. What other things do you find gets repeated?
My paintings usually consist of transparent layers and line work. I think a lot about the relationship between these shapes and lines. I'll start by laying down shapes, and then the line work comes on top, usually. But then recently, even though I maybe have one dream a year, I dreamt about my paintings. I was looking at them as if the paper wasn't there and it was just the paint and I flipped it around and saw it from the other side. So, that is cutting into my work lately. I'm experimenting with changing the layers, and approaching it like I'm creating a three-dimensional space. The layering gives it distance and space and it becomes more of an object.
Has your work been evolving in any other ways?
I saw you did the walls for the room at Artist-Run in Miami.
Yeah, that was really fun. We were given an old hotel that was going to get torn down and had been abandoned for ten years. I had a space for my press and gallery, Dusk. I painted the walls as if they were the first layer of my paintings and then everybody's artwork was the second layer. It was a nice collaboration, but I could've totally just kept painting on that scale. It made me realize I'd love to do a big mural someday.
With Dusk, you work with different artists to create new original series and editions of their work. You also have a blog about your art collection that shares how you got each piece, a lot of which is through your friends and family. Between the two projects, you can tell that creating a sense of community among artists is important to you. How did that become such a big part of your work?
It's always been natural to me. I love other people's art just as much as I love making art, and it's great to have that sense that you're not going at it alone. I'm sure it's something that grew out of growing up in that big artistic community. With my art collection blog, a lot of that artwork has been in my family for a long time, things that my parents' friends have made and things they've given to me over the years. It's a way to support them and show it off. It was a pretty natural progression to start Dusk because it was the same feeling of enjoying promoting other artists and being involved with what they're doing, and creating that sense of collaboration.
I also have a project called Paper Giants that I've been involved in for the past couple of years with two other artists, Meg Lipke and Vicki Sher. We all work on the same size of paper - 6 ft by 5 ft - and show it all together. We don't work on each other's pieces, but as we're working there's a constant discussion of what's going on and we've got each other in mind. It's nice to think of those pieces as part of a bigger project.
It sounds so wonderful to be a part of all of these communities of artists.
It really motivates me to keep going. I’m excited about my newest work, the rock piler series. It’s starting to come together and I'm pleased to see it all beginning to making sense, at least to me. There are always those moments you have to work through.
You have those moments too? Those cycles of self-doubt where you go from thinking "This is the most genius thing that's ever been made" to being in it and thinking "Why do I even call myself an artist, this is the worst thing I've ever done"?
Definitely. I go through phases. Every day is different. Somedays I come in to work and everything I paint is just off, it comes out wrong and not at all how I imagined it. Then some days I come in here and I make three marks and think “This is amazing!” But then, of course, I look at it the next day and think it’s not quite, or at all, as amazing as I first thought. On those days I don’t get much done because I’m afraid to paint on whatever I think is so good. It’s far less productive to have those days. So it’s good to have a healthy mix of the two.
Explore more of Ky Anderson's work here.
