(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Welcome to Kalamazoo Lively Arts, the show that takes you inside Kalamazoo's vibrant, creative community, and explores the people who breathe life into the arts.

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

(gentle music) - We're talking a lot of, what, science in your work?

- Yeah, so I'm not a scientist, but I'm a giant nerd, and we watched a lot of sci-fi and, you know, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" and that kind of stuff when I was growing up.

So I'm really fascinated by space.

I'm really fascinated by science.

You can see that the majority of my oil paintings are outer space and astronomy-related.

And then the portraits are sort of that next stage where even as a young kid, I always wanted to do portraits, and I never thought that I was skilled enough.

In art school, they taught you when you're doing portraits, to try not to start with people that you're very attached to, because you're gonna want to make a very perfect likeness, and it's gonna trip you up.

- Here I am in your, we'll call it fine art studio, because it looks like fine art.

Congratulations on what you're doing.

- Thank you.

- Yes.

So how do you describe your fine art?

- I actually find it really hard to describe my art, because I do a lot of different subject matter.

So I usually call myself a multidisciplinary artist, which generally means you have a lot of experience with a lot of different types of media.

When I went to college, I took lots of different classes like figure drawing and silversmithing.

I never took a painting class.

So as far as the painting, the oil paintings and stuff, I'm all self-taught from within the last five years.

- How long does it take you to do this?

- Too long.

(laughs) - Too long, right?

- Yeah.

That is a really hard question to answer, because I don't always think that I create the work.

Sometimes I feel like the work just comes out me.

So I have had times where I sit down to make a painting, and I've actually been able to finish it in a few hours in one sitting.

Most of the rest of this stuff is not like that.

(gentle music) - As a little one, did you do art?

- Oh, definitely, definitely.

I've been an artist since I was really little.

I think I got really lucky that my parents really encouraged that, and both my siblings were out of the house by the time I came around.

So basically an only child.

Spent a lot of time reading and drawing.

I was a teenager, I discovered comic books, and that kind of lit a fire under me a little bit, seeing what you could really do with art.

- Why the medium of oil?

- So like a lot of folks in 2020, I picked up new hobbies, and oil painting was one of them.

I always wanted to learn oils, and they always seemed very intimidating.

There is something about it where I realize that this is my medium.

So this is my largest painting to date.

It's about five feet tall.

I call it "Venus in Stars Cosmic Portrait," where she's sort of made out of a galaxy.

- [Shelley] Let's talk about starting this from scratch.

- Oh my goodness.

- Do you start with the drawing?

Do you start with a picture of a person?

Give me the way it happens.

- Sure.

The smaller ones, I found Creative Commons portraits online, but when you go to enter art fairs and competitions and stuff, you cannot share the copyright with anyone.

So I had to start making my own reference photos for art if I wanted to enter competitions, or jury shows, and things like that.

So with this one, I took a whole bunch of pictures of myself until I got a pose that worked.

So you take the image, and then you turn it black and white.

I drew just a very basic line.

It's not an outline, but I really treat them as guidelines.

I initially had this taped to the wall, so it was all very flat, and then you tape the transfer up, and you go back over your line with a hard object, like a pencil or a pen.

And then I go through, and one at a time, add the layers.

(gentle music) - [Shelley] Do you name her?

- I did.

I named this one.

I'm, you know, what's funny is that naming my art is the hardest thing for me.

- [Shelley] Is it a must to do in the art world?

- I think so, yeah.

Yeah, in the art world, the art world really wants a story to come with your art, and most of my art does have a story, but sometimes it's so personal to me that it almost seems silly to try to force the viewer to see my story.

One of the things that I really have enjoyed about this when I have been showing more of my art to the public is people's responses.

And I'm really interested in the stories that other people, the stories that come up for other people themselves when they view the art.

- Talk about your use of color.

Here's a striking purple, one of my favorites.

Behind you, again, basic blue.

How do you choose the color?

- I don't usually make conscious choices about the color.

I just kind of go with, feel like I wanna paint in purple today.

Make my choices intuitively in the beginning, and then when I reach a point where I realize that I want to emphasize something or I want to make something stand out, then I will make more conscious choices.

- In your hand, I trust this had an aha moment for you.

- I realized that I was really on to something, I don't know if that makes sense, but the light, the glow, it was sort of accidental.

I ended up looking at a lot of YouTube videos and I bought a James Gurney book called "Color and Light," and then I sort of figured out, oh, this is what I did on accident, and it sort of helped me be able to make actual decisions moving forward on how to create the effects that I wanted to.

This series is about how it feels to be living through a great extinction.

You know about that grief.

Most of the figures in this series are the same.

It's another one where I used myself as the pose reference and most of the figures, they're sort of, they're curled up in the forest on the ground, - [Shelley] Almost in a fetal position.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Really just about that, like, holding on to a little bit of what's left.

(gentle music) - How has Kalamazoo helped your efforts?

- We're really lucky that the Arts Council changed their Art Hop to be, there's no fee now.

Juried shows, galleries, you always have to pay money for them to look at your work.

But I think Kalamazoo is a really vibrant art community.

They really show up when people are displaying their art, and that's really encouraging.

- [Shelley] Is this therapeutic for you?

How's it impact your life?

- Definitely, definitely.

Most of the art that I've made sort of pre-2020, a lot of it was political or about trauma in general.

I had a health crisis about 10 years ago.

I started a short graphic novel about that experience.

I also have started a coloring book about that experience, of dinosaurs, and they swear, and it's very silly.

But when I started oil painting in 2020, I think like a lot of people, I was really seeking an escape from that stress.

I do find that oil painting, weirdly enough, is one of the few places where the political, even processing about things happening in the world, processing about trauma, it doesn't really float up in these.

A lot of it really is just sort of about experiencing color and vibrancy, and sort of an escape.

I really hope that when people see the work, that sometimes they see themselves reflected back to them.

- Congratulations, so keep on exploring science through your art and your talent.

Thanks for you.

- [Annalisa] Thank you.

(gentle piano music) - When did you pick up your first crayon?

- Probably before I was in school, I would think.

Maybe at the age of three or four.

- Has art always been a part of your life?

- Yes, absolutely.

I can't imagine a time I wasn't drawing or painting or doing something, or wishing I were, and wishing I was getting back to it.

- When did you take it seriously?

- I took it seriously enough that I wanted to go to art school, but my father and my mother were children of the Depression, and that was not a real job.

And you know, you have to have something to fall back on.

So I went to school, I went to college.

I made it into something totally unrelated.

And then after college, I said, what am I gonna do with myself now?

And I decided to go to art school.

However, I was in art school in the 1970s in New York City, and what I really wanted to do was representational art, which is what I do now.

And it was pretty much all conceptual, and pop art, and things that just were a bad fit for me.

So I left there and went off and got a real job.

(laughs) Somewhere around the nineties, I discovered the KIA, and I started taking classes there.

And that opened up the serious part of taking my art seriously, realizing that it had to be part of my art, my life.

And I studied with Denise Lisecki.

I studied watercolor there for several years.

And then after that, I started studying with Kenneth Freed in oil.

And I have become, since then, become a private student of his.

I've been studying with him for about 10 years, and I wouldn't wanna live without it at this point.

- How important is it on this journey to find a mentor, a teacher, one who believes in you, as much as you as he or she?

- Oh, for me, essential, because self-doubt has always been part of my makeup in any field.

Having people who believe in you, and I'm not just talking about him, but also the people with whom I study.

You know, we get together as a group, and the encouragement and the belief from him and from everybody else that not only, yes, you can do it, not only yes, you are good, but there's so much more in you to be developed, and it's absolutely essential to me.

- So current day, what's your art?

- The things that I feel most comfortable in right now are egg tempera, which I took to right away as part of my, just kind of, it meshed with my disposition, but also when I wanna get a little bit less exacting, let's say, and a little freer with my expression, color and design.

I like working in acrylic, and I do that pretty much independently.

I just do that like in the morning when I wake up, I'll just go and paint for an hour in acrylic, and I feel better about myself.

- And that's your therapy.

(Shelley laughs) - It is my therapy.

Absolutely.

Yes.

- I wanna take apart what you're saying, egg tempera.

- Yes.

Okay, egg tempera is an ancient medium, which has been around for thousands of years, and you're probably most familiar with it from historical examples like Botticelli, and the people of the early Renaissance, and even medieval art, where you'd see icons in churches.

If you go to Europe, you'll see a lot of churches with altar pieces, egg tempera.

- Is there an egg involved?

- There is an egg involved.

- Okay, that's what I really wanna know.

- Yes, there's absolutely an egg, only egg yolk, and if you get any of the white in it, you have to kind of just feed it to the dog or something, because it's ruined.

You have to isolate the egg yolk, and then you mix it with pigment.

Every painting medium is a mixture of pigment and some kind of binder.

And for egg tempera, the egg yolk is the binder.

So the egg tempera paint is applied very, very thinly in many, many, many layers.

And I tell my students hundreds of layers, and you know, they'll do something that's- - [Shelley] Maybe hundreds of hours.

- Hundreds of hours.

The interesting thing about that is people start to enjoy that, and they just work, and they say, "This is very meditative.

I love this."

And it's interesting.

I like that very much about teaching people egg tempera, because at first they just wanna go in, and they wanna finish one in one day.

And I say, "Don't be silly.

You've got a 12-week session coming up," and they get to the end of that session, and they haven't finished.

And I say, "No, you still have about 25 more layers to put on that one."

So it's a very long, patient process, and people come to love it, and it's meditative.

(gentle music) What we're going to do is the very basics of applying color to an egg tempera panel that has already been previously prepared.

It is a panel with true gesso coated on it.

I have the reference photo that we're gonna be working with here, and I have already established the dark, the lights and darks that show up in this paint, in this photograph on the gesso panel.

And this is what we're gonna be working with, because egg tempera is such a transparent medium that you need to establish the lights and darks ahead of time underneath.

And then the egg tempera paint is transparent, and goes on in layers over.

I've already done that piece.

I have also already made the egg mixture, and this is half egg yolk, half water, what I have here, and this is gonna be mixed with the pigments that we have over here to provide, to result in the paint that we're gonna be using.

I'm going to start with the water up here, and just put some of the blue tone in over the gray that we have already there.

Just a little bit of that.

Gonna mix it up a little bit.

The egg water, egg yolk water mixture, about the same amount as what I've put in pigment, coming out slowly.

And then I will be mixing it up.

Now with what we call the junky brush, the less expensive brush that you can buy just anywhere, I will be adding water, and mixing it up.

And there's kind of an art to this, and you just get this by the experience as to how liquid it has to be.

You don't want it to be too wet, because then you've dispersed the pigment so far that the binding, the egg binder does not hold it together.

But on the other hand, you don't want it gloppy either.

So you always dress the brush.

That's kind of getting the excess off it, just so you don't leave a big pool of paint on the painting.

And I always like to start in kind of a low stakes area of a painting, so that I don't make something that just attracts the eye, and is just awful.

And speaking of awful, the first couple of layers of egg tempera tend to look awful.

And that's one of those things where students always say, "Oh no, oh no, this is terrible."

I myself do that.

I say this is just awful.

And then after about the third or fourth layer of paint, suddenly it starts to look okay, and you can start building on it.

And I was told by the person from whom I learned egg tempera, who is Fred Wessel, who came and gave a workshop at the KIA, the technique you wanna kind of use is like landing on a runway, going down the runway a bit, and then taking off again.

So you don't start and let a pool of paint pool up on the board, nor do you leave it on at the end.

You just come down in a very gentle swoop, down the runway and then back up.

And the other thing about egg tempera is it dries very, very quickly, which is why it was superseded by oil paint later on, because it doesn't allow for blending.

If you're doing fabrics and folds in fabrics, it's dried so fast that you can't blend the paint.

If I go over here, it's already dry, the stuff.

It's just a matter of a few seconds, it gets absorbed in, and then it's dry.

(gentle music) - How about career progression at any stage in life, from acrylic to, I'm gonna start doing this.

How does that happen?

When's the light bulb come on?

- When I was in art school, I always thought, well, oil painting is out there for the real artists, and the people, because I obviously was not gonna be making it as an artist, because I wasn't doing realistic art.

Then when I get into watercolor with at the KIA, I thought, "Oh, this is good, this is good.

This is what I do."

I did many, many years of watercolor, and then I did a commission for a friend of mine, and at the very end of it, I sneezed on it.

And, psst, (laughs) and that changes my- - Does it add to it or take away from it?

- Oh, that changes it dramatically.

- Ooh!

- So I had a lot of doctoring up to do on that.

And at that point when I was doctoring it up, I put so much water on it that I could see through the paper, and I thought, "Oh no, I worked very hard on this."

At that point I realized it was causing me so much stress to stay in watercolor that I better think about something else.

And so that's kind of when I decided I will, I will sign up for oil, and just see how this is.

And it, you know, I still am going to be working in oil.

The acrylic is fun.

It's fast, and I can clean up quickly, and it's not quite as messy as oil.

- Let's talk about a couple of examples.

One has some family involved.

- [Mary] Yes, yes.

I have a painting of my mother and my aunt from back, I think around 1940.

And it was kind of a fanciful thing.

I always wanted to paint that one from the photograph.

Of course, it was black and white.

- [Shelley] What about the examples we see with a closeup of the eye?

- That actually was from a full-size photograph of the child, and then I'd narrowed it down, because I thought the eyes were just so intriguing, and so I narrowed it down, blew it up, and put it on the canvas.

- And what are you teaching your students?

What do they need to know from your talents?

- I really want to teach them, first of all, I get very frustrated, and I feel so sad for them, because they get frustrated, because they can't do the painting that they wanna do.

And I say this, first of all, you're learning.

Secondly, if this painting doesn't come out wonderfully, it's no reflection on you as a person.

People tend to internalize that, because they have so much wrapped up in themselves.

They don't allow themselves the time to learn and to improve.

I think it was Ira Glass who had, he has a good YouTube video, or it's an audio actually, about how your taste is always farther along than your actual abilities are.

And you keep striving and no matter how good you get, you're not quite ever reaching what your taste is dictating, because it just gets farther, and it's moving the goalpost away from you.

- Isn't that okay, though, to strive to be better?

- That's fine.

It's absolutely fine, but people don't understand that.

And once I tell them that, and I show them that little audio on YouTube, they go, "Oh, thank you, that's so good."

So I like to, I mean, not only opening up people's eyes to a new medium that they're not familiar with, or to principles of art, but just telling them this is work, and this is not a reflection on you.

If it's not perfect right now, don't tear yourself to pieces over it.

One of the things that people like about my classes is that I give them permission to not be masterpieces, not paint masterpieces.

- Not be Mary Kenney just yet.

- Oh yeah, really.

Yeah.

- What's still next for you?

What are you striving for?

- Ah, I am striving to work more, and I'm trying to carve out more time, and spend more time at the practice to be able to produce things.

I'm trying to work a little bit faster, and be a little less impatient with myself, again, striving to be Mary Kenney when I could just be the artist and working.

- How has Kalamazoo been a platform for your success?

- Oh, it's been wonderful.

I mean, the KIA has been invaluable to me.

They offer and have offered in the past a wide variety of courses there.

I've taken some other courses besides watercolor, and certainly the egg tempera workshop that I took was a wonderful change.

You know, it was a marking point in what I've been doing, because there was a medium that I just really liked, and was able to take to it right away.

And the support that the KIA people, the instructors that I've dealt with, I have never run into somebody who wasn't generous with their knowledge, and just eager to help people along.

You know, they weren't there telling you how wonderful they were.

They were there to share any knowledge that they had.

And Kalamazoo has the Arts Council.

There are so many art forms in Kalamazoo that are being supported if you look at everything.

There's so much theater, there's so much music, there's everything.

And we've come out the other side of COVID with, you know, lively arts seen.

It's been very good to me.

(gentle music) - Thank you so much for watching.

There's also more to explore with Kalamazoo Lively Arts on YouTube, Instagram, and wgvu.org.

We'll see you next time.

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

(upbeat music) ♪ Yeah yeah yeah yeah