I first met this month’s featured artist, Ann Karp, as I was planning my four month internship at Koinonia Partners in 2006. She was welcome source of calm and serenity during my time as a part of the community, always able to put things into perspective by taking me out for a run through the pecan orchards or keeping me laughing with her covert “vegeterrorist” actions. Maybe we will cover vegeterrorism in the podcast interview!
I had planned on starting the new year with an interview discussing her work, but had to reschedule when I came home to find my trusty mixer has apparently bitten the dust. Instead, I offer you this, a look at some of her artwork accompanied by her own comments about her work. Enjoy! (please note that clicking on the images will take you to a full size version.)
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‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ was the line famously lettered by the old folk singer and wanderer Woody Guthrie on the front of his guitar. In this design I wanted to give my own generation a sense of his vagabond, subversive, uncertain freedom.
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This ink-on-paper was drawn from an arresting photo from the book A Day in the Life of America. The caption: “Lizzy Mack, 12, lives with her mother, brother and sister in a single room on Manhattan’s West Side. The room is paid for by New York’s Emergency Assistance for Families program. Photographer Letizia Battaglia says, ‘Lizzy is like a First Lady, a star of society. She is intelligent, good and beautiful–but she is poor. That is the only difference.'” With both the photo and the drawing, I felt almost as if I should say “Good night, Lizzy” before shutting the book–she’s so tangibly there. The photo is from 1986. I wonder where she is now.
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These fallen leaves were gathered from trees at Koinonia, the community where I live, and dried, lettered, gilt-edged, and glazed by hand. I like the idea of small, portable totems that remind the bearer of a truth. Usually, though, the truth is cliched. I’m not challenged by a stone that says “Love”–I too easily reduce it to an easy ideal. I’d rather have words that magnify and complicate a leaf’s simultaneous qualities of miraculousness and commonness, power and frailty, structure and decay–qualities we humans also embody.
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This creature “grew” out of an ottoman in my friend Jo’s cozy living room one morning. I was in a daydreamy stupor, vaguely worrying about wrapping a lot of Christmas presents, and my pet rats were romping over the furniture. I’d like to do a whole series of spooky children’s furniture beings sometime.
All of these (and most of the others on my flickr site) are available either in the original or as prints. I also adore commissions; you dream it, I dream it onto paper (or leaves, wood, etc.)
-Ann Karp