Artist Interview: Christy Schwathe
We are so thankful to getting to know Christy and her incredible work. We chat about painting with oils in the least toxic ways, managing multiple creative projects as a multi-disciplinarian, and being all about the failures!
From Christy’s statement: “My art is intrigued and inspired by human emotion and our relationship to our environment, or lack thereof. I find myself drawn to the interconnected nature of balance and contrast in life; softness and sharpness, vulnerability and strength, fear and bravery, sadness and joy, life and death. These themes run through all of my pieces, along with a sense of isolation which is both very personal to me, living in a very isolated environment far away from my peers, as well as being an emotion I feel is beginning to dominate modern society no matter your location.”
We were so thrilled with how our viewers responded to your work during our WWF collaboration. You manage to capture an extremely powerful expression of emotion through your work. How did concentrating on connection to the environment come about?
Growing up in a rural area of southwestern Colorado, I spent most of my childhood outside exploring the fields, parks, rivers and ditches within walking or biking distance from our house or camping and hiking whenever my parents had a day off from the restaurant they owned and ran. I grew a sense of interest and wonder and a deep connection to the environment around me and the plants and animals that inhabited it. I remember from a very early age feeling the sadness and frustration of watching these things struggle and be destroyed and internalizing it. Today, I'm again living in a very rural area with all sorts of wildlife for neighbors and I’m still fascinated with our natural environment. I’m sure if I had not ended up being an artist, I would have gone into some sort of biological or botanical field.
My art happens in a very intuitive way and I’m often surprised myself at what I end up painting. I have always been drawn to the human face and figure in my art and I often use the figure to express emotions. I recently heard someone describe the drive for artists to create as this simple need to see or feel or taste or hear something that maybe doesn’t already exist and I strongly identified with that. Creating is a way for me to speak about things I can’t quite put to words and it’s often therapeutic for me to get those feeling out into the world. It seems natural that I often end up creating something that speaks to our connection to nature or our lack of connection to it because it’s something I'm often thinking about. I’m always blown away by the magic of the natural world and constantly concerned about what’s currently occurring environmentally and socially/culturally and it’s become a theme I keep returning to and exploring emotionally.
You mention figuring out a way to work with oils in a non-toxic way, mind sharing about your process? (unless it's a trade secret of course)
I’ve never been especially sensitive to the chemicals involved with many forms of art-making, but when I think about wanting to continue painting for the rest of what will hopefully be a long life and trying to lessen my environmental impact, combined with the fact that I work in a very small studio in the home I share with my partner and our pets, it just makes sense to limit the toxins I'm exposing us all to. After trying to work with other mediums for years, when I made a return to oil painting, I decided I wanted to do it as non-toxic as I could.
My process is always evolving and I’m always trying new methods to achieve the results I want. For years now I have been using combinations of spike oil (lavender oil), walnut oil, clove oil, and a biobased thinner (for cleaning my brushes), all from a great little company called The Art Treehouse. The spike oil smells lovely, although it can get overpowering at times, and works similar to turps or mineral spirits. I will sometimes use water mixable oils for my underpainting when I don’t want to use a lot of spike oil. The walnut oil and the clove oil help slow down the drying time. It is really, really arid where I live and prefer working wet-on-wet so even with the oil paints I struggle with how fast it dries, especially on my larger, more complex, paintings! None of it quite replicates turpentine or mineral spirits, especially for those lovely thin washy effects, but I’ve learned to accept the compromise. Recently, I’ve been working with less and less medium and just using straight oil paint more and more. I’ve also been experimenting lately with some homemade cold wax medium recipes, using my oils and beeswax. Finally, once everything’s good and dry, I finish up most of my paintings with a thin coat of Gamvar varnish, the only not non-toxic part of my process and the least toxic varnish that I can find that works for me. I have experimented with a homemade damar varnish made by dissolving damar crystals in spike oil, but I’m just not patient enough to wait the six to twelve months required before using a traditional varnish!
Artists usually struggle with the preconceived notion that you must be a certain way to be considered a "real" artist. Being a creative person who dabbed their toes into a number of other artistic outlets, how did you settle on painting? Or how did you manage the desire to partake in every craft out there?
This one made me laugh because I am still very much struggling with these preconceived notions as well as reigning in my crafty desires! I have been through producing many different types of arts and crafts and finally settled my focus on painting because I felt like it was the thing I did most uniquely and was something challenging enough to hold my interest indefinitely. I am constantly curious to try new things and doing something different always inspires my paintings in unexpected ways. Some of the things I mess around with find their way into my “real” art, like bits of hand embroidery on top of a painting or, most recently, I’ve been playing with adding metal leaf into my paintings. I also have an issue of wanting to paint it all, all subjects and all styles, and it’s hard for me to focus on a consistent body of work which, at times unfortunately, is what the art world wants from professional artists. I just try my best to not get too distracted and I try to allow myself an offshoot project, or two or three, to keep things fresh. My more involved paintings require a lot from me and can leave me feeling drained if I do too many of them back to back. Right now, I am working on a little side project of small abstracted landscapes painted with a palette knife, which is a fun change for when I don’t have the energy to work on larger, more involved paintings and I’m also very slowly working on completing the 100 Head Challenge which gives me the freedom to try different approaches to painting portraits without caring too much about the finished product.
Aside from my oil paintings I always have multiple personal creative side projects going, right now it’s mostly drawing, watercolors and gouache, sewing, embroidering, knitting, gardening, trying to write a novel (I have maybe one good page done, it might never be finished), fermenting things, getting creative with some quarantine style cooking and learning a new instrument (ukulele). I try my best to keep them to my off-work hours. There are also so many things I’ve never done or have only dabbled in that I would love to dive headfirst into if I only had the time and space. Sigh… the struggle is both real and constant!
We are strong believers that the more people discuss failure, the less significant the possibility of it becomes. In our society, we are so terrified of possibility of something not working out, that it halts all our efforts to begin with. We ask all of our interviewees if they can share a time where something (a project or opportunity) did not work out and how did you move forward?
I am learning to be all about the failures! I think it’s crazy how our society has us believing that successful people don’t fail. Naturally inclined towards perfectionism myself, it's common for me to drive myself crazy over little things no one else would ever notice, but I’ve come to realize that anyone who’s a doer, anyone who is putting themselves out there and trying to accomplish or make something, is going to fail, a lot, much more than succeed. When it comes to my art, I always feel like each piece has at least a little bit of failure in it. There is always that little nagging part when I look at a painting I just finished that I'm sure could have been done better. Sometimes it’s just one little brushstroke and sometimes it’s the whole damn thing, but there’s always something I wish I would have done differently. What I’ve come to learn is that nothing in this world is perfect and I can’t expect myself or my work to be and those big and little failures are lessons for what to try differently next time and provide me with the motivation to keep making. If I ever made a completely perfect painting, a timeless masterpiece, there would be no reason for me to continue to paint anymore. I would lay down my brushes and move on with my life. I hope to have a long career where I’m always evolving into a smarter and more skilled painter and that means there always has to be at least some room for improvement.
Any events, projects, or exhibits you'd like to share with the audience? Has any of them cancelled due to COVID?
Update: Keep Contemporary has reopened.
I have a solo show scheduled for this coming November at Keep Contemporary Gallery who represents my work in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The current pandemic has so many of our plans up in the air right now, I know I’m not the only one. New Mexico has been a very proactive state in regards to the COVID 19 virus and much of the state has been, and is still, closed down, aside from essential businesses. The gallery is currently closed physically, but is open virtually and offering some great discounts right now. It’s hard to know what the future will hold, but for now, I am hoping for the best and moving ahead according to plan. I was having a hard time focusing enough to be very productive for the first month or so of all this craziness, but I feel like I’m finally getting into a creative flow and I am keeping my fingers crossed that the work I’m producing now will be able to be seen in person sometime in the not so distant future.
Find Christy’s work via:
Website: https://christyschwathe.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/c.schwathe/ or @c.schwathe
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/c.schwathe/ or @c.schwathe
Keep Contemporary Gallery: https://keepcontemporary.com
