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Photograph courtesy of Ken Wood
Ken Wood pulling an oversized print at Pele Prints
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Photograph courtesy of Ken Wood
Recent work by Ken Wood
With two openings this weekend—one in St. Louis, one in Kansas City—printmaker Ken Wood would be forgiven for not having time for a lengthy, digital Q & A. Instead, Wood’s been kind enough to provide a great set of thoughtful responses to our every-other-week, seven-questions-based conversations with St. Louis-based visual artists.
By way of introduction, Wood’s impressive resume reads as follows: “He has a professional degree in Architecture from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and an MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia/Rome. He has exhibited his paintings, drawings and prints in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Missouri, Mississippi and in Italy. He has curated shows in Italy and Missouri, has been a contributing author for Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (a trade journal), and has collaborated with and had his prints published by Pele Prints in St Louis, Missouri. He has taught drawing and design at the Rhode Island School of Design, Wesleyan University, Temple University in Rome, Virginia Tech, and Washington University, and is currently Associate Professor of Printmaking at St. Louis Community College-Meramec.”
Information on Wood’s two cross-Missouri shows, both opening tomorrow, Friday, September 5, can be found at the end of the piece.
Art school? Self-taught? Some variety of both? Or none of the above?
I did not initially go to art school. I went to Architecture school (Rice University) for five years and practiced a while in architecture before shifting my focus to printmaking and painting. As it turns out, my architecture background was partly based on a Bauhaus model of foundation studies, which made it a pretty good beginning for art studies, as well. I studied Printmaking at Tyler School of art (in Philadelphia and in their satellite campus in Rome) and got my MFA there.
Regarding your creative habits, are you a night owl or an early bird?
I used to be a night owl, but once I realized how I was missing all the great light by working at night, I switched. Also, I have kids, which makes it impossible to stay up late and still be productive.
In basic terms, can you describe the set up and vibe of your studio?
My studio is part of a large space on the fourth floor of the City Museum building. I share it with two other artists, and there are a number of other artists on the same floor, so the atmosphere is conducive to creating and concentrating. The sounds of the Wurlitzer and of people running around the Museum below us come up through a couple of little holes in the floor, making a nice ambient background noise, but otherwise it is relatively quiet. I have two big windows facing north, and in the spirit of Bob Cassilly, the broken windowpanes have all been replaced by found glass of various thicknesses and textures, making a nice hodgepodge pattern for the light to filter through. My ideal vision is me sitting in this space in a meditative state making ink drawings for hours on end, but the reality is that my time is much more fractured: I do some work here, sometimes painting, but often just prep work for large scale prints (projecting drawings onto trace paper, cutting relief plates on my drafting table), and I also do work at Pele Prints (where the large works are printed), at St Louis Community College Meramec (where I often work on collaborative projects with my students), and at home, where I work some nights (but not too late!) doing gouache studies for larger works.
I'm really lucky in that I have two great artists who I like a lot as studio mates: Sage Dawson, a printmaker (who also does art writing), and Edo Rosenblith, a painter and printmaker. Like me, they both also teach. On occasion, we will all be in the studio at the same time, and sometimes we've done impromptu critiques or gone out for a quick beer. But, for the most part, because time is so limited for all of us, we keep to our own spaces and work. There are other terrific artists on our floor, and we've hosted a couple of open studios as a group. It's a beautiful space, especially the light, and the City Museum folks are great to work with.
What are your thoughts on crowdfunding for the arts? And is that option any part of your own approach to creating and selling work?
I have not used crowdsourcing for my own projects yet, but I have supported other artists that way and I think it's a great idea. It's a possibility for the future.
Do you have a dream project that lacks only funding (or time)?
A longstanding goal is to change the scale of my prints, which I was able to realize recently: I was approached by Amanda Verbeck of Pele Prints, a local fine art press and one that I've worked with frequently in the last four years, and asked to do a collaborative project wherein they published my prints. We were able to work much larger than before, and are in the process this summer of creating a suite of eight 44"x40" prints. So, that has been my dream project... and now my dream project is to do more of the same and larger! Time is the biggest factor in realizing this project, as I teach full-time, but securing funding to go even larger is also necessary.
To what degree do you enjoy having public contact, whether that means selling your work at a fair, a gallery opening, etc.?
I do enjoy having open studios and attending openings of exhibitions (my own and other artists'), but time is a major factor and I haven't been able to do this as much recently. My first goal is to get to studio and make art.
What other St. Louis artists inspire or motivate you?
I have a lot of friends here that I can talk about art with, which is great. What's most amazing to me is seeing all the different ways that people succeed in making art while juggling all sorts of other things simultaneously, like teaching, families, curating, writing, running artists' colonies or art galleries. That is the biggest inspiration: seeing how people can incorporate artmaking into their lives. In other places I've lived, I feel like I saw a lot of people letting their art sit on the sidelines while tackling their careers, but here people have found a way to make it integral.
“Running Writing:” Recent Prints by Ken Wood (and work that leads up to them) opens at Space Architecture + Design (4168 Manchester) Friday, September 5 with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibit runs through September 26. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
“Structure, Story & Flow,” a group exhibition of collaborative works from Pele Prints curated by Heather Lustfeldt, opens September 5 in the Opie Gallery at Leeedy-Voulkos Art Center (2012 Baltimore, Kansas City, Missouri), with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. The show also features works by Laura Berman, Jessie Van der Laan, Amanda Verbeck, Sarah Hinckley, and Benjamin Pierce. The exhibit runs through October 24; gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 816-474-1919 or visit the center's website.
