TRANSCRIPT

Interview with Kathy Bogan 12/9/2024

Polly:

Hello everyone, this is Polly Wood-Holland and we're doing another one of our Zoom interviews. Today we're turning the tables on Kathy Bogan who has been instrumental in producing and collecting the Zooms as well as being the person who came up with the whole idea of  “75 Creates," and I thought I'd like to ask how you came up with that.

Kathy:

 Well, “75 creates” is five years old and you may recall that five years ago we were in the throes of COVID and we were supposed to have our 45th reunion. And we didn’t because everything was cancelled. But in preparation for that reunion I had been trying to put together a kind of venue where we could share people's books and a little of people’s artwork and maybe some music and stuff, at the reunion itself. When that didn't happen I thought, you know, I can put together a pretty basic website and how would it be if I asked the class “if you have a creative practice do you want to share some of your work with the class? It could be anything; it could be crochet, it could be Zen Tangle it could be music, whatever.”: And so that's how “75 Creates” got started, and  it took off a little bit; we have 35 class members who contributed things from all media, and occasionally some people call me up or send me an e-mail and say Hey how do I get on this? So there's some new stuff over the past five years, and other people have updated their things before the 50th reunion.

I'm really interested in creativity but truly I think my motive was shameless self-promotion because I had started painting and I thought this would be fun to maybe share some of my paintings with our class.

Polly:

It's a terrific page; I'm  really enjoying going through and seeing what everybody's doing. You know you mentioned that you really have just started painting. What prompted that and how long have you been painting?

Kathy:

I started to work half-time, and I was interested in pursuing more self-expression; my own painting rather than the kind of work I'd been doing as a graphic designer and a publication designer. There was a woman up the street who has a studio and teaches abstracted landscape painting. I was very interested in that because I wanted to wrap my head around landscapes, so I started taking a couple of classes from her and it just kind of took off from there. In fact, now I share a studio with her and we paint together a lot. I do a very small amount of teaching but it's been a really productive collaboration and I have really enjoyed doing landscape painting in Colorado indoors and out, but now  I have started to move more in the direction of abstraction.

Polly: You said you had some interesting reactions to your paintings, and if you would elaborate on that.

Kathy:

Yeah, I have a friend who bought a painting from me a while back and she told me, “Well, you know people: they're either portrait people or they’re landscape people and I'm a landscape person so I'm going to buy this landscape painting.” I was, like, OK cool, but of course my head's going, there’s more to it than that. I had been moving more and more and more into the abstract world and as it happened another friend of mine asked me to do a very large painting for her. I hadn't done anything this size; she wanted something 4 by 4 or 4 by 5 feet.

I am lazy and I buy pre-stretched canvases because I want to get right to work, and the first obstacle that I encountered was that the canvases would not fit in my car because because I drive a Prius. I had to call my friend Gary to move the canvases from the store to the studio and and then get going there. So I had six of these canvases because doing a commission is a lot of pressure, and Polly, you know this from having to do work to satisfy someone else’s demands, right?

Polly:

...and in someone else’s style!

Kathy:

Right, yeah I admire that in your work frankly because I don't think I could do that. Anyway, this friend wanted completely abstract paintings and the thing that made me really wonder about it was because all the art in her house is “Western” art; so it's like wagon wheels and cowboys and horses and things like that. But I thought, “OK,” and my friend said just do your thing, let her rip, and I was like this is great!

I had these six canvases but meanwhile there's this little voice in the back of my head saying, OK, western art, western art, western; how am I going to do this completely abstract? and so I kind of started with the palette that was sort of southwestern; reds for sandstone and cedar greens and things like that. Got going and the first one that I did was 4 feet by 5 feet, and I kind of chickened out and turned it into a landscape. I'll  share a picture of this canvas on the website or something so you can get an idea [see image above]. I did that one and then I had five more canvases so I did the the other five.

Polly:

 And which one did she pick?

Kathy:

She picked a completely abstract one that, oddly ,had a lot of purple in it. It wasn't it wasn't the one I would have predicted that she pick. I think that's it's really interesting that, you know, what I see in the work and what other people see in the work can appeal on a completely different level.

Polly:

That's a great story about a particular painting and I always think that's interesting. I look forward to coming to visit you and see your studio since I have family in Denver. So I think we'll probably leave it there to keep these nice and short and sweet and yes, post a picture, that would be great along with this. I'll see you at reunion yes?

Kathy:

Yes, you will, I'll be there.

Polly:

Good and hopefully we'll have good weather and all will have a good time. Thank you so much for doing this interview, and this time I believe I have recorded it!