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

kind of all over the place.

I get different inspiration from a lot of things.

One thing that’s consistent in all of my work is my love of color and specifically saturated color.

I’ve been working with collage a lot.

And pairing it with, um, not only oil paint, which is my favorite paint medium, but also pastel.

Sometimes I’ll use collage in the background of a pastel drawing, too.

So have you always kind of had this creative spark?

Were you an artistic child?

Yeah, you know, like when you’re a kid and they ask you what you want to be when you grow up.

The most common things were veterinarian because I liked animals.

Once it was... MSU Cheerleader.

Not much of a cheerleader, so I don’t know what that was all about.

And.

An artist.

So, yeah, I stay pretty true to that.

With all the materials or the techniques that you use, how do you decide which medium to use with which piece?

And does maybe the medium?

influence the message of the art at all?

That’s a good way of describing it.

I’ll think of... color schemes or different materials.

and they can evoke different ideas.

In grad school, I learned a technique called Rust Transfer, which was a way of print making, but like using Rust.

But I would make these rust transfers and I saw them as kind of a way of showing decay.

And for me, that was a connection with bones and fossils.

So I did a lot of work that related around that, where sometimes they were a little bit more macabre, or I was thinking about the inside of bodies, or decay, or, you know, things like that.

And then, on the other side, I would be like, Oh, I need my bright colors, so I’d have fun little ones, like, all those examples of my pugs that would be, like, 2 bodies of work going on at the same time.

And then I think in, like, 2012, I wanted to try to marry those ideas of the... bold colors and the sort of more macabre ideas together so that when I started a series called It’s a Fact, which was about fun facts about animals.

And that idea actually started from a snapple cap.

You know, the snapple caps always have some sort of weird information on the inside, and the fact was, there’s owls on every continent except for Antarctica, and I was like, huh, that’s interesting.

So like that little thing started a whole series of work for me.

So can you maybe... walk us through, you kind of just did, but your creative process from a concept to the finished product.

I spent a lot of time in my head thinking about it.

and visualizing it, and collecting references and looking at images online and looking through my own photographs and taking photographs.

and kind of coming up with some sort of theme.

And then from there, it’s just like, okay, now I can start putting these things together, and I sketch out different compositions, and, um, decide what format.

It’s gonna be, decide what medium it’s gonna be, what materials I’m gonna use, and then I just go for it.

How I’ve been using collage because it’s been pretty important in my work since grad school.

Um, and this is just part one of the ways.

that I turn this contour line drawing... into a collage by tracing the shapes... with some vine charcoal.

Trying to view as accurate as I can.

And then I take the paper and just try to line it up over the... shape.

like, I have this really tight piece of paper.

There we go.

And then I just kind of rub it.

Sometimes I use my brayer.

Make sure that I’m transferring that line onto the back.

When you see it on the back there, and then I will just kind of cut it out.

Some people like to use exacto knives.

I have always been better with scissors.

So that’s, the process of cutting them out.

Like, normally, I would have all the paper picked out, and I would be cutting, um, all of the little pieces, but I’ve done that already.

on another one, so I’ll show you the next step.

How do you balance being both an artist and an educator?

Obviously, you’re an independent artist, but you also work at KVCC.

Do you feel like those roles ever influence each other?

Absolutely.

I feel like um, professors should be a professional in their field as well.

So I try to model that and be a working artist so that my students can see what that looks like.

Now, I mean, I don’t, like, put myself out there too much, because I have the full time job of teaching, and, um, I also have a family and all the things.

Creating my art is just one aspect of My professional life, but I definitely see it as a union of me modeling what a professional artist looks like.

students, and then encouraging them to do some of the same things, and I think that that just goes well together.

I have, like, uh, in the more advanced classes, I’ll have an assignment near the end of the semester where, They kind of get to come up with their own ideas, but I also have an advanced painting class, which is the semester right now where I have my students come up with their own goals.

They have their own ideas and I help guide them on the start of a body of work.

So that’s kind of a place where I get to really coach students on how to come up with their own ideas.

With all the different directions your work has taken over the past few years, what’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for you, like any upcoming project?

or exhibitions.

I knew you illustrated a children’s book not too long ago.

I definitely think this new body of work that’s right behind us here is what I’m the most excited about.

I haven’t worked this big in a long time.

And this is a companion series, so I’m thinking about, like, mother earth and having female figures kind of represent... Nature, and then they’re paired with a flower or a plant, and then a pollinator.

So, this one will be with peonies and ants.

So I guess tell us a bit more about this piece specifically.

It looks like both collage and oil painting.

Yeah.

The flowers are collage.

This early spring or late spring, early summer when all my peonies were blooming, I was going outside on a regular basis and taking pictures of all of my flowers at different stages.

The model here, her name is Jasmine.

She was one of my neighbors.

She’s moved recently.

Um, but I asked her to come over, and we took pictures with all of my flowers around her, and then I looked through all of my photo references, did some sketches, and got going on it.

So that’s where you hope things line up, right?

I like to tell my painting one students that all paintings go through a stage of suck.

where you want to quit, but if you quit, then you’re just gonna get to the stage of suck over and over and over.

So for me, like the beginning of a painting, the 1st layer of fat paint is usually the part I hate the most, where I just sit there and I’m like, ugh, I don’t want to do that.

this part, and then I’m done with it for the day, and I’m like, leh, I don’t like it.

But then I come back the next day and I... work it, and then finally, I get on to the end, where it’s the details where I really am more excited about the details, because then that’s pulling it all together, and good to see, like, the vision come to life.

I like the way it looks, so we’re gonna see how it goes.

Okay.

These pieces first.

Have there been any moments or specific projects that you can think of that have been, you know, what you feel like would be transformative in your career?

Have you ever had any crazy breakthroughs?

Hmm I think really for me, with my artwork, it’s been my use of collage, because at 1st I think that I felt like that was kind of an easy way of blocking things in to like, oh, pick this whole piece of paper to make this face.

But just because it is easy to, me doesn’t mean that it’s easy to everybody, and I started to let go of that idea.

And then I was also reminded of, Henry Matisse, who used a lot of collage in his artwork, and I was like, okay, I’m kind of following a tradition of, you know, fine artist.

So it’s not really... you know, cheating or, you know, making it easier.

It’s actually more complicated than that, because I’m cutting out a lot of shapes and putting a puzzle together.

Yeah.

So I think that has been, because, I mean, I’ve really have grabbed hold of that idea and, um, like my most recent... of work that I finished on the sleeping babies.

Uh, I’ve had a solo show.

I’ve gotten that piece into the KIA West Michigan area show.

The Muskegon Museum of Art, um, contemporary show.

And now it got me a show in, um, at all of that college, University of Olivet in the end of January.

So that use of collage and line work and rendering with paint has opened up a lot of opportunities for me.

My name’s Aubrey Jewel Rogers, and I am the chair of Applied Arts and Media Technologies, here at KVCC, at the Center for New Media.

So how would you describe your art and the kind of work that you create?

My art is a combination of traditional art with technology.

I like that idea of, you don’t know where the technology starts and stops, and the same thing with the tradition.

You’ll see that organicness that comes with the traditional art, but then using computers and different types of technology to enhance it, to still make it feel organic, but have a different feel of, how is that done?

It’s very fantastical, creative, and really enjoying the combination of art and technology.

Yeah.

So have you always been a creative person?

You know, have you been into art since you were a kid?

My parents said I should be a marine biologist.

I could be anything I wanted as long as it was in the maths and sciences.

And I saw Lion King when I was in high school, and that next day, I went to my honors biology class, and I said, I don’t want to do this anymore.

I wanted to make people feel stuff with illustrations and animation.

So I shifted in high school, actually, to be in the creative world.

So not only do you do, you know, your own individual art, but obviously, also, you’re an educator, here at KVCC.

Can you tell us, kind of, how you fell into the role of teaching this next generation, and what that is kind of like for you.

Yeah.

So I was at art school, thought I wanted to work for Disney.

And I always had this Saturday morning art job, where I was an assistant for Saturday morning programs for kids.

And the executive director of Co Si in Columbus, was the person who ran the program, and he said, You’re really good at this teaching thing.

I said, No, I don’t want to be a teacher.

That’s what my mother is.

I don’t want that.

And he kept pushing.

And he said, I think you really like this aspect.

You really like hoping figuring out other people’s stories versus just going off to make a story, and he was really right.

I give him a lot of credit in that, that I, like, helping other people, figure out how to tell the story that they want to do.

Long story short.

I found myself as a teacher, like my mom.

But doing my own thing.

And so, trying to showcase how you can be an animator, and your goal can be to work for a big company, or you can do it on your own and have your own creative stories and figure out how to do it.

All right.

Hey, character design class.

Bye.

How would you like to sit in my 2D animation?

Um, uh, lesson for today.

So, um, when we’re thinking about environments and we’re thinking about the way that we want to make things move.

A lot of times in our character design class, we’re just dealing with a character on a plain white background.

The next thing that we need to start thinking about is the way that we are planning our environment.

So, I created Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, and I redid it as a digital painting here, and I didn’t try to make it exactly like the original painting.

I wanted to have some fun with it, showcase the parts that I really like.

And then I’m going to open up after effects.

And what After Effects does is remembers everything, all the ways that I have my layers in Photoshop, and then I can go ahead and animate them.

So each of my layers have what’s called a key frame where I have them doing certain things, whether it’s swaying, moving, um, and just playing with the way that it can, uh, adjust on here.

So over here, all my different layers are here.

And I have the moon starting to rise, the sky glowing.

So the idea of a puppet tool is that these are the anchor points that we are going to use to make it move, or to hold its spot.

So I’m going to move this off to six seconds.

And then I’m going to grab this one, and you can see how this stretches and bends and moves and sways.

And this is so that I can make it sway and give it a little bit of movement here.

And this is giving that organic feel of it.

If you stretch it out too much, it becomes weird, but you can kind of see how this works.

The thing with animation is that, yes, you can make things really exaggerated and have them move lots and lots of ways.

But sometimes the subtleties are the things that are really neat.

And this is a simple way to do some motion graphics.

So, you’ve mentioned you like to break stereotypes in art.

Why is that so important for you?

There wasn’t anyone that looked like me, sounded like me out there, and it was really lonely, and I don’t think it’s because I’m a black female.

I think everyone feels that way, and whatever kind of story they’re going through, they don’t see themselves reflected, and now that I’m in this bigger role, not just here, but being a mom, making sure my kid sees herself and everything, and that this is not a world for her, that this is a world for her, and that she’s invited to play along, and play with others, and that’s really important.

So how has Kalamazoo’s arts community maybe influenced your creative approach, or what do you just think of the art scene in the city?

I feel like Kalamazoo really cares about the arts, um, with the arts council and all the different things that we do in our Kalamazoo community.

It’s a really fun place that respects the arts.

So, in your 18 years that you’ve been at just that KVCC, correct?

What do you feel like has been the most interesting part of your journey in those years?

Watching how the gatekeepers are shifting and changing.

And I’m not talking about necessarily people, I’m talking about the software and the hardware, when, way back when, you’d have to go to a big studio to make an animation, and that maybe in your senior year of grad school, you would get to be able to do an animation.

But now we have iPads, we have these computers, so that can help build your own games.

So watching all that technology change, to make the gatekeeping, kind of disintegrate, and fall apart, has been my favorite part of watching how technology and art has changed over these years.

All right, so we got a little tour before we started.

Can you kind of tell us about some of the KVCC, what is applied arts and media technologies programs that you guys offer?

Yeah, it’s a really great series of programs that are trying to help people who are interested in the creative world to have a job in the creative world?

So there’s graphic design, illustration, animation, game, art, multimedia, video, and web design.

So each of those are different types of concentrations.

And the great thing about Kalamazoo Valley is that, I think, with a community college, this is a really great place for, I don’t know what, what I want to do.

And there’s some who they already know.

I’m like, Well, great, get those foundations done, and then go out to that four year school.

But I like to always think of this place as a place where they can try, and that you don’t have to be perfect.

You don’t have to have all the best drawing skills.

That’s my job, is to try to have you build the best kind of portfolio you can for the types of stories you want to tell.

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