(tape ripping) - [Keith] That's a good, satisfying one.

(groovy music) - Keith Pitts, where are we?

Where have you brought us, here in Kalamazoo?

- I have brought you over to the Edison neighborhood to what is known as the wax factory.

It is a building owned by a gentleman here that has creative space.

Right now, there's two of us in here.

At one point there was up to four or five of us in here.

- Describe the art of Keith Pitts.

- I see myself as a painter, and I'm trying to find different ways to approach painting, so I'm trying to find a way to create paintings, but make specific objects out of paint, that it's not about trying to create a false reality of something through paint.

It's using paint, then just letting paint do what paint does best.

- When did this artistic bug bite you?

- When I was 13, my mom died of cancer, and so what I discovered was, art was kind of a way for me to process and deal with a lot of the trauma and the negative emotions I was going through, and not go through other avenues that often can not end up for the best.

And so it really was something that I often say, saved my life.

And so that really kicked it in gear, if that makes sense.

Like I knew that this was something I was gonna pursue, because it brought so much positivity into my life.

- All right, let's talk current times.

What is your art?

And let's start with this.

- I'm a huge fan of an artist named Robert Rauschenberg, and during the fifties, I believe, created this whole series of red paintings.

So I decided I wanted to kind of do my own version of a red painting.

It's really all about the mark making.

I'm not trying to paint a portrait or a landscape or something that someone can look at, and they can be like, "Oh, that's exactly what that is."

It's more about how can I put together interesting things about paint.

Like this big mark right here is oil paint mixed with marble powder, applied with a palette knife, just put on really thick.

This is a pure paint that I poured in a mold and let it dry over months, and then took it out and painted it with oil paint and then took canvas and created this netting system that hangs down in front of the paint.

Even on the bottom, this is a quote from Rauschenberg that says, "Begin with the possibilities of the material."

And that's kind of what it is.

Again, I'm just trying to see what I could do with the materials.

And so it's just trying to find different approaches to painting.

- Did you know what this would be when you made your first stroke?

- No, no, and I think that's one of the most exciting things about creation and art practice.

Like what I'm researching for my PhD is creativity and how we teach other people to think differently.

And for me, it's seeing where the materials take me.

It kind of becomes a conversation at some point.

Like, I'll do something, the materials will kind of respond in a way, and so I have to adjust to it, and so it really is a journey.

Each painting becomes a journey.

Like sometimes I have ideas of where I want to go, but I never end up exactly where that idea was in my head.

- Describe the work behind you.

- This is a painting that I'm doing.

I like the illusions.

I've always loved kind of the play with the eyes and tricking you where, you're in those moments where you kind of think you're seeing something, you kind of don't.

This image, I ran across it online, the red circle, kind of, if you stare at it long enough, it's supposed to move.

So this is my attempt at doing that.

And so I brought it up to this point, but I have a lot more to work on it, because I don't know if it's working the same.

And I have another one over here that I'm working on because I wanted to see if the blue or the red vibrated more.

So after I cut this, I have to go back, and I want to press all this down, so that the paint doesn't run up underneath and create leaks.

White's an interesting color because we think that it's all the same, but every different white has a different shade.

I like this chalk paint white.

It's really nice because how matte it finishes, but I do like titanium white.

It's just a nice bright white, it's kind of like the white of the art world.

it seems like.

It's spray paint.

The nice thing about that is it dries so fast.

- Gotcha, yeah.

- You know?

But it does kill brain cells, and I'm responsible for my brain cells, not yours.

I wish it would be magical and just everything fall off at once, but... And you can see kind of where it ran underneath and so I'll have to go back in and touch all that up with the black.

(tape ripping) That's a good, satisfying one.

(tape ripping) (upbeat instrumental music) All right, so this should be the last, okay.

So you can see it needs touch up, but I mean, this is basically the thing, and when it goes on the diagonal, so I'll touch up all these load pieces, I'll scrape it off and then paint over it with black and then I'll see what I want to do next.

It bounces?

Good.

- And how important is it for an artist to find his or her niche, to find the true you, stick with it and believe in it.

- Discovering your voice, for me, has been one of the biggest challenges for artists.

Like, for so many years, I thought that I needed to improve myself technically, which, I've always had the technical skills.

I've been building those and I'm constantly building those, but what I didn't have was, I didn't have the theory behind it, not just like artistic theory.

I'm talking about like social theory, theory about what it means to exist, theories about what this is that all of us are a part of.

When I started finding these theories that kind of opened up my way of thinking, it allowed me to discover more of my voice.

What is it that I have to say about the world?

Because if I'm just making art to hang on a wall for... To be pretty, not that that's bad, that serves a function, but I can use art for a much more interesting approach.

Like what is it?

What am I saying?

Like for this, so much of it is just trying to get people to stop.

Like I think about walking through a museum.

When I walk through a museum, there's a lot of art that I see and I'm like, "Okay, I understand what that is.

I understand what that is, I understand what that is."

But the pieces that make me stop and pull me in a direction that I wasn't going, across the gallery, to look at it, actually does something different, because it makes me pause in my assumptions.

It makes me pause in my rushing through my daily life, and I actually have to be there in the moment and look at what is actually in front of my face.

And that to me is so much more powerful.

This type of art doesn't exist elsewhere.

It's not a mimicry, and all it's doing for me is asking you to stop, look at it, and consider painting in a different way.

- [Shelley] Talk more about the process itself.

- I'm a very process oriented person, but the process isn't always the same.

and I think that that comes out of my theater background.

Theater is the only place that you'll find people who are developing a process and they stick to it, then they throw it out, and they start from scratch again.

And so my process kind of sometimes acts that way, like a painting like this, the illusion painting, I have kind of an understanding, like I'm finding some kind of visual illusion that I find interested, and so I build towards it.

So that's one process.

A process like this is, I build a canvas, I put the canvas up on it, I look at it, I paint it red, then I put another thing of red down, I look at it some more.

Then I draw a square in there with pencil, and I'm like, what?

How do I wanna paint this?

This is a completely different process.

I became interested in this color.

There's this color called Yves Klein blue.

So Yves Klein was an artist, and when I add a binder to it, it darkens it and you lose that vibrancy.

So I did a small painting where I drilled a hole and put powder pigment and trapped it behind plexiglass, and then I decided to make a big one, and when we moved to Kalamazoo, all the pigment fell out, right?

And so I was upset at first because I had this beautiful blue dot.

Then I realized what I actually had was a painting that's always constantly changing.

It will never be the same in two locations, because even from moving it from over there to hanging it up just right before our interview, has made micro shifts in the powdered pigment.

So these paintings, I've made a couple of these paintings so far, are always constantly in the process of becoming, they're always shifting.

And so all of these are different processes for me.

- What is it about Kalamazoo that draws artists?

- I think Kalamazoo has a weirdness to it, you know?

Which I really like.

Like just the way Kalamazoo is set up, like it has multiple universities in it, which I always think is good.

It has this great mix, I think, of like different socioeconomic levels.

It's not set up on a grid.

This may seem weird, but I lived in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin and that was very suburban.

Everything was gridded out, everything was clean.

Kalamazoo, it doesn't have that.

It twists, it turns.

I find stuff that I never expected to find.

And I think from an artistic point of view, that to me is so meaningful.

- So someone wants to be a Keith Pitts, where do we start?

What's my resource?

- First thing I would do is, stop trying to be me and start trying to be yourself.

Like, that took me years to learn, years.

I'm 49 and I feel like it's only been since 45 on that I really have settled into who I am.

Find those people that you look towards their work and it speaks to you, and then figure out what it is about that work, and start figuring out how you can do it for yourself.

That's a huge step, and just keep doing it.

And just because you make one thing doesn't mean that it has to be perfect.

Just because you make something that isn't successful doesn't mean that it's not a learning opportunity.

Like, I make more things that I do not like, than things that I like.

You know, one, I don't control what other people see in it, so they may like something that I don't like, but I have to sometimes work through all those things that I don't like, to get to a place where I need to be to make the one thing that I find is successful.

- Thank you for bringing the material to Kalamazoo, Keith.

- Oh yeah, absolutely.