Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

So my mother is a painter and taught a lot when I was younger.

She taught at the elementary school I went to.

She taught private lessons for a long time.

So I grew up around visual art.

I was taught how to do a lot of the, you know, technical art stuff when I was pretty young, but I didn’t really get into visual art until undergrad.

I was going to college for writing and double majoring in anthropology.

So I have an archaeology degree of all things.

And I took a print making class, my freshman year of undergrad and just immediately fell in love with it.

I don’t really do art a whole lot any other way, except for making prints these days And it wasn’t until about three years ago that I decided that I was gonna do this full time and actually make an art business instead of just, you know, in my spare time.

What are you known for when it comes to what we see in a print?

I think it would be hard to say when I first started out, I didn’t really know what I was going to make visually.

Like, I had interests, and I had things that I liked carving, but I didn’t really have a particular artistic voice.

I think once I really started my, like, mythological series, I was always super into Greek mythology, and when I got to college, I studied a lot of epic poetry and literature and kind of fell deeper in love with it.

And once I kind of got it in my head that I can just make what I want, and that was what I wanted to make, was things that are inspired by, like history and common literature and even, like, religious history.

I have a Joan of Arc print that I really love.

How do you begin the process?

Are you thinking of your ultimate, finale?

I usually start with a pretty good idea of what I want it to look like, and then I will draw it.

I start everything in Procreate on my iPad, just did digitally to get kind of the shapes worked out And then I finalize everything digitally and transfer it to a lin of block, and then I start carving.. And that’s kind of where everything comes together.

How do colors come into play?

It depends on the print.

Some people print only in black.

I like to do black and color.

A lot of my prints are two toned, so I’ll do, you know, red and black, or the print that I’m working on now is black and magenta, just because I like the the kind of juxtaposition.

All right, I’m gonna start with some ink mixing.

So I’m gonna do some magenta and transparent extender to make it a little brighter.

I’ll mix that up over here.

For this one, I’m probably not going to add a whole lot of different colors to the magenta, since Amaranth tends to be pretty much this color.

Conveniently, I don’t have to do a ton of mixing.

I am gonna add some blue.

And I just ink up my prayers.

There’s, like, a specific consistency of ink you want.

Some people do it by feel.

Some people do it by sound.

Apparently there’s, like, a particular sound it makes when you have the right amount of ink.

But I tend to load it up pretty well on a first inking.

These blocks have never been inked.

They were just finished yesterday.

can get just a nice, even layer.

And then blocks get inked.

It’s always extra satisfying to do the first time.

Part of what I like so much about handmade art is that you can tell that a person made it.

You know, the imperfections are what make it unique and that human touch.

What I like so much about print making is that even if I start something digitally you’re not just printing out exact recreations of an image, but that every single copy that comes off of this press is just a little bit different.

You know, you have different levels of ink, different ink that you get outside of the lines on a block.

It’s called Chattermarks.

Some people really like them.

I don’t as much, but you know, you have that evidence that a human person made this thing, and that everyone is slightly different than the last, which I think is what’s beautiful about it.

Look on this one one.

And then these get moved over to the press So this is the fun part.

This is the actual printing.

Inking takes up most of your time when you’re a print maker, but But this is where everything comes together.

So sometimes I’m more precise about placement.

With this, it’s just kind of eyeballing it over my piece of guide paper.

and then it goes through.

I never have to do arm day.

I just run things through the printing press.

And we have a print.

What’s on the wall that I think, we’ve seen in Kalamazoo before?

Uh, yeah, so, this framed print up here was it started out as one of my regular mythology prints, and I posted it online on my Instagram.

And when I applied for the Plymouth Art in the Park, their director, Rachel, she called me and she was like, hey, you know, we would love to use your artwork for our, like, promotional materials."

And I said, yes, immediately, because we wouldn’t want to do that.

So I sent her one of the prints, and it became the logo for 2025 art in the park.

Why Valley Volult Press?

So, when I was finishing up undergrad, I was an intern at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, and I was part of a poetry book project with two of the other interns, and we got poetry from fellow students at Western to submit to us and potentially include in our book.

And when it came to choosing a title, for some reason, you know, into my brain, I pitched valley folk, and so our book became titled Valley Folk,cause, you know, we’re in the Kalamazoo Valley, we are the folk of the Valley, we’re the Valley folk.

and I really liked it, so when it came time to give my business a name, I really liked Valley Folk Press, so that’s what I went with.

How does Kalamazoo help you get the word out, help you with your creativity?

Well, I mean, I grew up here, so I know a lot of people here, but also I went to Western for undergrad, so I did a lot of print making work in that time.

I’ve done a lot of work with the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center They were kind of instrumental in getting me started with all of this.

I learned how to do relief prints, I learned how to book bind there.

I did paper making, I was an intern for a while, and then I was a resident at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts at the Kirk Newman Arts School, and that sort of, you know, gave me a push into the community and helped me meet a lot of the like, local artists who work here in town.

You know, I have a lot of people who can help me out, and I have a great support system here, which is really nice, ’cause I know a lot of the local artists.

Tell me about creating the blocks that you use.

Yeah, so I start with drawing, and then, either with, like, graphite transfer paper, I will transfer my drawing onto a block.

You have to make sure that everything is backwards of how you want it to be, since it’s a relief, and you’re basically creating a negative of a print but I take the drawing, put it on a block.

Some people draw directly on a block.

I need an undo button when I start, and then I have a set of carvingving tools, and I basically carve out all of the negative space in the print so that anything that’s left and what I end up inking is what will be the print reversed, since it’s basically a giant stamp that I’m carving.

Yeah, it’s not tedious, but it’s definitely time consuming, but I find it pretty therapeutic, to just, like, sit and carve methodically at a block.

With the cat by your side?

Oh, yeah.

Or in my lap Or on the table You’ve got a lot of different things in here.

How do you kind of decide what you’re gonna put on display, crafting your studio space to all come together?

How does that work?

For me, I like it to be like, as intensely me as I can make it.

When you’re’re making art and you’re wanting it to stand on its own as, like, a very unique thing.

Like, the best way to do that is to, like, consult yourself, cause you’re the only one who can make the art that you can make it.

So I try and just overwhelm myself with, like, the things that I love, and especially things from, like, childhood, too.

So, like, Star Wars stuff is a big thing in you here, and, like, I don’t know, I just want to make an enchant an enchanting atmosphere that is very, like, childlike in that there’s like a childlike sense of wonder that I’m just creating this the artwork that I want to see in the world is the artwork that I’m trying to create.

I’ve been an artist my whole life.

Both my parents are artists, and I was homes schooled for the first part of my life, so drawing was actually like a big part of my upbringing, like, for early reading assignments, my mom would read to me and we were required to illustrate what she was reading just to show that we were paying attention.

You’ve lived in California, Arizona, Utah, and you studied in Italy, as well.

How do you feel like maybe all of those landscapes or those cultures have affected your work and influenced it all?

They’ve all influenced it a ton in many different ways.

I think colors plays a huge role in my work, and definitely the colors of Arizona and Utah, like the Red Rocks and all of that, have really had, like, a warming influence on the color choices I make, lots of oranges and earth tones.

In California, I lived maybe 10 minutes from the beach, and that was where I was born and grew up till I was 12.

And so I went to the beach all the time.

I think like, there’s much cooler air there and the blues and greens.

Typically, everything I make is just imaginary from memory of those places or things that really stood out to me.

And I think I can access a lot of those different places I’ve lived and bring them into the art that I’m doing pretty easily.

That’s how my practice works for me.

That’s how I come up with imagery is referencing past memories.

Yeah, that’s super cool.

So, your art is described as never mild and use a lot of unusual color and a lot of textural depth.

Can you kind of walk us through your creative process and maybe your unique artistic voice?

So I guess one thing I think that’s important to know about, like, my artistic practice is that, like, right now, I’m doing block printing and print making, but I change what I do very often.

Well, every couple of years, I change what I do.

So prior to moving to Kalamazoo three years ago, I was doing oil painting pretty much exclusively for like, 10 years.

But within each medium, I’ve noticed that I always kind of come back around to, like, really wanting to focus on subtle color, like how color can like subtly create these different moods and just the fascination of like the tactile quality of texture and that kind of thing.

And I think my work, because of those things, like I use very expressive colors and leave a lot of the texture and sort of like letting you see the process in the final product.

So we watched during your demo you doing some block printing, carving, and you kind of described it as being an opposite effect, where it stamps in the opposite direction.

How does that kind of register in your brain when you’re you’re cutting that?

Do you ever work with, like, words and then you have to do them backwards, you know?

Yeah, I don’t often work with words.

I don’t have the greatest handwriting, and that’s even worse when I’m trying to, like carve out that handwriting with block printing.

Like, the image you’re carving will turn out the reverse of what you want, so often I will draw something really like the the drawing, and then I’ll have to use tracing paper, trace it out, flip that tracing paper around And then I’m basically reversing my drawing to reverse it, like do a reverse on the block.

There’s this back and forth, but when you peel the paper up from the press, it’s always a surprise because you’ve been working for hours looking at a drawing or an image that’s one direction, and when you pull it up, there’s like a surprise for you, the artist, which is really cool to have that experience with your own work.

Print making is sort of a it’s a catch all term for any art that you can basically reproduce an image multiple times, but in like a handmade way, you’re basically carving a stamp, essentially, that you can then print as many times as you want, and each one is considered like an original artwork because you’re hand carving the entire thing.

And these tools that I’m using right now are called engraving tools isn’t so much a knife as like cutting material out as pushing it out, so not like a U or V shape.

It’s basically a very sharp triangle, essentially, that’s pushing material out.

Here’s a finished plate.

I’ve got all kinds of finished plates, and these are much smaller than I typically work when I’m doing like a wood cut with the much larger chisels, I’ll do something as large as this or even bigger.

I think the biggest wood block that I’ve cut is four by five feet, which we printed with a steamroller.

So I’m squeezing out some ink.

And then I’ve got a brayer here, so this is how you apply the ink.

So picking up some ink from up there, and then making a thin amount of it down here.

Because you don’t want to like when you roll it up, you don’t want to have, like the big, gloopy ink going into all the grooves, especially with the engraving tools, that carve really shallow.

So you want to have a super thin layer of ink going on.

the block.

So roll out a really thin, even layer of ink.

And then we’ll see, this part’s cool ’cause you can see the image sort of emerge.

It just looks sort of like a dirty block before, but you can see a little more clearly how the image is going to look.

So, yeah, this is an etching press.

So how you print print these, there’s a lot of different ways to print ’em.

Typically, like, when people are doing this at home, they’ll often use, like just a wooden spoon That’s sort of where everyone starts, is just using a wooden spoon to burn burnish their image, which I did for a long time, and I still have it in case I need to get a little bit of pressure on one specific area.

So I put the block down, then I’ve got my paper, which is a Japanese mulberry paper.

It works really well for print making So, after I put the paper down, I put just a piece of scrap paper, and that just gives you a little bit more pressure.

It’s like creating a pressure sandwich.

And then I cover that with a piece of acrylic, which in print making terms, you call it a tympan the name for this, but it’s basically just a thing to make sure the pressure is super even and holds everything in place.

So I start to roll it through, and I can feel it catches right there.

So I’ll take that off., that off, and now you can peel back the print.

So it gives you a print of that, and you can see it up reverses it’ because you’re like placing it down on top of it, so you get a reverse image.

But then I can turn around, take this print back to the desk, ink it up again, and reproduce that thing again and again and again.

It’s sort of like a much more democratic art in a way, because you can put a week’s worth of effort into making this really nice, beautiful print and rather than, like, if you had spent all that time doing a painting, like an oil painting, you might have to charge a few thousand dollars.

Whereas this, you can print it 30 times and divide that, like a few thousand dollars by $30.

and then more people can have the art at a more affordable price.

So I really like that about it.

You can share it with a much larger audience.

Here’s another.

block inked and ready to go.

So, you said you’ve been in Kalamazoo for three years now.

How would you maybe describe the art scene here and what makes it unique or fun to be a part of?

I’ve lived many places, and Kalamazoo is the best part scene that I’ve ever been a part of.

I think for many reasons, like, there’s a lot of funding here that is, like, easily accessible for just working artists.

There’s, like, the Caddy grain, as well as like a lot of opportunities.

Like if you want to take classes at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, they have scholarships that are available for people.

Like, it’s really easy to get involved with the community without a lot of resources, and then people are just very supportive, like, places I’ve lived before the art community can be very competitive and very, like, closed off and, like, a little standoff is.

And in Kalamazoo, people are like, they find out you’re an artist, they tell you about all of the artists that they know who do work like you, and then they tell you about all the opportunities that they think might be good for you.

And it’s like a really supportive community of artists.

Like, they’re not really trying to compete with each other.

They’re all trying to work together to make a better arts community.

So if, say there’s somebody who’s never experienced your work before, would there be one particular piece you’d need them to see, or you’d want them to see?

This is probably the most ambitious woodcut I’ve ever done.

So we had these blocks that I was pointing out earlier.

So this is made from three different wood blocks.

and one of them, I printed three different colors on on the same wood blocks.

So three blocks, but one has multiple colors printed off of it.

So I end up with like the yellow, the orange, the reddish, the purple, and the green, and then everywhere they overlap, because they’re all like transparent colors.

So you get this cool overlapping effect with all these different unexpected colors.

But this one was like, not only in scale, it’s pretty large for a woodcut, but just all the layers and everything was a very ambitious piece for me, and I just loved how it turned out.

And this is part of a show, actually.

I’ve been working on a show with a couple other local artists for a gallery in Flint, Buckham Gallery, but this was like sort of the for me, it was my piece that I think captures the spirit of what my work is, like where my work is going right now.

Yeah.

So each of those colors is a separate carving.

Mm hmm.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s super cool.

I was so nervous about this print prior to the last list layer.

The last layer was the green and you can see it covers quite a bit, like a lot of the detail is in green, a lot of green all throughout it.

And before that layer went on, I thought it looked terrible.

I was like, "Oh, I’ve put in like weeks’ worth of work, and all the colors are not layering how I want them to layer.

Nothing is in the place I want it to be.

But I was like, "Ok, I just, I planned for this.

I know that the green layer is gonna change everything and make it better," and did.

So that was very satisfying.

Yeah.

Brought it all together.

Yeah.

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