Artists Need Other Artists-Welcome to Season Nine

0:00Enjoy big savings with Red Hot deals at Vons and Albertsons. This week at Vons and Albertsons, baby back pork ribs are 299 per pound with membership where applicable limit 3 racks, and ballpark hot dogs or hamburger buns 8 count are 299 with digital coupon. Plus personal seedless watermelons or canelope are 199 each with digital coupon. Enjoy fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry in, these deals won't last. Visit vonsoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. Welcome to I Like Your Work, a podcast dedicated to interviewing creative people from painters and artists to collectors and curators. People who are involved in a creative lifestyle and also in building community within the arts. Hi everyone and welcome back to I Like Your Work and amazingly season 9.

1:06I've always loved the beginning of a new season because it gives me a chance to think about why I started I like your work in the first place and why 9 seasons later I still believe so strongly in what we're doing. At this core I like your work as always been about supporting artists. It's about connecting, hearing how other artists build their lives and practices. It's about learning from one another and also creating opportunities for artists to get their work out into the world. And over the years I'm amazed at how this podcast has grown. We started out with just interviews. I shouldn't say just interviews. We started out with interviews and it was amazing to hear about people's lives because our lives and making are so intertwined. And we now have exhibitions, publications, studio visit artists that you can see on YouTube. And also this incredible community of artists who have found one another through I Like Your Work

2:13or have gotten their work into new spaces because of I Like Your Work. And so I just want to say at the beginning of this season, if you've been listening for years, thank you. Seriously, listening, sharing an episode with another artist following the artist we interview, supporting us on Patreon, applying to our exhibitions, all of these things help us continue doing this. And we have a lot happening this season. One thing I am incredibly excited about is our upcoming I Like Your Work exhibition at Eckhart Art Gallery at Miller'sville University in Pennsylvania. The exhibition is being curated by artist and gallery director Heidi Letsky and will be up October 22nd through December 10th. The planned reception is November 12th. We will be sharing that and I'm really excited to be at that opening. So if you're anywhere near the area or coming out

3:15for the opening, I really look forward to meeting you and connecting. As I was mentioning, one of the things I wanted to do with I Like Your Work is create more opportunities for artists to move beyond the screen and into physical spaces. So I'm excited that this exhibition is coming together and that we're continuing to build partnerships like this. I mean, that's also why we started creating the catalogs and I can express how happy it makes me when I talk to an artist who got picked up by a gallery, has a solo show coming up or has somebody purchased their works because of the catalogs. That just completely makes my day and I'm excited to continue creating opportunities for artists in keeping with opportunities for artists. I am really excited to talk to you and share a little bit more about the class I taught at Umbria Contemporary Arts this past summer, the symbolic landscape. It was such a wonderful experience. I just I'm still dreaming about it and thinking

4:19about it and the wonderful people I met, Michelle, Meg, Liz, Kevin, Tracy, so many people that really made the experience. So I spent two weeks in Monte Castello de Vibio, which is in Umbria and there you have a wonderful place to stay and shared meals. That's a huge part of it because for me as an artist who's also a mom and juggling lots of things to not have to pick up after anyone, to have incredible meals and wine that I could share with other artists and talk about painting was incredible. That's just the tip of the iceberg though because you're in a medieval town overlooking incredible Italian landscape. I mean it was amazing to look at every day. I'd walk out and be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm here and we can respond to what is around us. So we also had studios that we got to work in and every day we met. We had class where I provide

5:20prompts to help kind of unquirk new ways of thinking about your work and what's beautiful is that we're thinking about how you as an artist take an experience of a place. So like the color, the light, the shapes, the history, even your own memories and associations and allow those things to become material for a painting. So we had like people bringing their own practice and taking these prompts and ideas in place and allowing it to co-mingle in their work. Of course I also had to do a straight-up planar painting of the landscape because I had the privilege of going to Italy when I was in my early 20s to study painting and this was kind of my reaching back into time to touch on that person I was, you know, I was 20, a lifetime ago. And so by sitting there and painting the landscape I was really able to have this conversation with who I was, who I am, the journey

6:28since then visually in my paintings and it was just really, really special personally as well. We also were able to travel so we were in a CC and other areas that really rounded out the experience of place, of the symbolic landscape of looking and just really being entrenched in making. And I think that's the big, the big takeaways. If you are looking for time, space to be just surrounded by other artists in an area that is so historically filled with painting and with artists, this is such a great class and I'm excited to say I'll be teaching it again in Italy next summer. So if you've ever thought I would love to go to Italy and make art or hey I need two weeks to get away from everything so I can just concentrate and paint and kind of enrich yourself again. I would absolutely love to work with you. Later this season I'm going to have Kevin Wicks who is running

7:35this program on to talk about his life, his paintings and also about Umbria contemporary arts and the classes that are happening over there. So feel free to DM me, reach out and you can find more information about that class in the show notes in the Instagram link and I can also just Google Erica B has symbolic landscape Italy and find out more about it. Some of you may have noticed that I've transitioned away from having online memberships to more in-person shows, in-person meetups and I think it's just become very important to me personally to have in-person conversations and connections. It's what I'm interested in, it's what I want to do more of. I think running the Shataku visual arts residency has opened my eyes to just the power of in-person conversations and being around others which is why I feel really passionate about the classes, the workshops and

8:41in-person events. And so these classes are really connected to what I want in the season of I Like Your Work and really what I want more of my life to be about. It's about sustaining an artistic life, about staying curious, about nurturing relationships with other artists and creating new connections and you know at the heart of it our practice isn't just what happens when we're in front of a canvas or sitting at a desk drawing. It really truly is built through what we look at, where we go, who we talk to, what we read and what we're also willing to try. So this season I'm going to continue bringing you conversations with artists, curators, galleries and other people who are building interesting creative lives and I'm really happy that you're a part of it. I hope you enjoy I Like Your Work. If so please feel free to always reach out to share the podcast with

9:42any friends, studio mates. Also follow the artists that you hear on the show, they're all really wonderful and I feel really honored that I get to ask some questions about what they're doing and why they're doing it. So thank you all for being here and whether this is your first episode or you've been listening since the beginning. I'm excited about where we're going to go this season. Thank you for being part of I Like Your Work and I hope you have a great week in the studio.