In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with watercolor and pop culture artist Kelly Inouye.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with watercolor artist Kelly Inouye.
About Artist Kelly Inouye:
Kelly Falzone Inouye uses watercolor to explore contemporary culture.
She has presented solo exhibitions at venues including Marrow Gallery in San Francisco, SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA in Culver City, and Interface Gallery in Oakland. Notable group exhibitions include “The de Young Open” at The de Young Museum and “Contemporary Watercolor” at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York City. Kelly has been awarded public art projects by the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Kelly also founded and ran Irving Street Projects, a San Francisco-based residency program that provided project development and exhibition opportunities to fellow Bay Area artists from 2015-2020.
She is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2008) and UC San Diego (BA 1998). She lives and works in San Francisco with her family and tiny dog.
Her work is represented by Marrow Gallery in San Francisco.
Visit Kelly's Website: www.KellyInouye.com
Follow Kelly on Instagram: @KellyInouye
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-08-15 - AIA - EP007 - Kelly Inouye
[00:00:00] Artist Kelly Inouye: I would paint in my free time and, you know, kind of pursue art. I didn't feel that serious to me at the time, but I just always really enjoyed it and looked forward to doing it. Like I'd come back from work trips and have jet lag and like the thing I would do at 3 a. m. is get out my watercolors.
[00:00:24] Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Kelly Inouye talking about how she couldn't stop painting even with a full time job.
Welcome to Art is Awesome. The show where we talk with an artist, or artworker, with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco, covering the arts, I see so many hard working artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area. And I wanted people to know about them.So I came up with Art is Awesome!.[00:01:00]
Kelly Inouye paints watercolors about pop culture subjects, like women's wrestling and MTV. She received the San Francisco Artist Award from the San Francisco Arts Commission and has had solo shows at the Merrill Gallery in San Francisco and Interface Gallery in Oakland. Her work has also been in group shows, like the de Young Open at San Francisco's de Young Museum and contemporary watercolor at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York City.
Kelly, who got her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, founded a residency program for women artists, Irving Street Projects. She ran it for five years until the pandemic shut it down in 2020. The residency supported 14 artists, including Cathy Lu, a [00:02:00] ceramicist, and the first guest on this podcast.
Artists who took part in the program went on to have their work shown at institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I talked with Kelly at her studio in San Francisco's Mission District, which has watercolors of Boy George, Madonna, and Prince on the wall.
She told me her interest in art began when she was a little kid.
[00:02:37] Artist Kelly Inouye: when I was very young, my mother worked at an art center and I went with her to work. There were all kinds of classes going on I was too young to take, but they let me participate anyway. So... I just always enjoyed it a lot, and it always felt very welcoming to me. So it was one of my favorite things to do in my free time.[00:03:00]
[00:03:02] Host Emily Wilson: In high school, Kelly took an advanced placement art class where all the students created a portfolio of their work.
[00:03:09] Artist Kelly Inouye: I had a great art teacher in high school, Chuck Warner. He was a kind of a task master. He was not a warm and fuzzy art teacher. He would stand behind us and yell at us if we weren't working hard enough.
He made it very clear that art class was not a place to kind of mess around and socialize. There was important work to be done. And if we were not in it for that reason, then we had to get out. So, yeah, he was not totally popular on campus, but those of us who clicked with that mentality really loved him.
[00:03:44] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly is known for her watercolors. She recently found the first watercolor she did in her parents house, an image of a girl with a baseball mitt from a Nike ad. Later, she returned to watercolors for practical reasons.
[00:03:59] Artist Kelly Inouye: When I was in my [00:04:00] 20s, I'd moved to New York right after college, and I did a residency program at the School of Visual Arts, and I was painting in oil and acrylic, and I had, you know, studio that I could dedicate to that that was outside of my apartment.
But then after the residency program ended, I had no space to paint and I didn't want to paint in oils in my apartment because I know how toxic that is. And so I bought myself a set of watercolors just kind of on a lark.
[00:04:27] Host Emily Wilson: Many of Kelly's subjects come from pop culture.
[00:04:32] Artist Kelly Inouye: I was having funny conversations and at work about remembering ridiculous things about television I watched as a kid versus important things like deadlines or, you know, your social security number. And I just started making paintings of the Jeffersons, because I loved that show growing up.
[00:04:53] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly had a job in fashion, working as a shoe designer, but she was always painting.
[00:04:57] Artist Kelly Inouye: Like, I would [00:05:00] paint in my free time and, you know, kind of pursue art. It didn't feel that serious to me at the time, but I just always really enjoyed it and looked forward to doing it.
Like, I'd come back from work trips and have jet lag, and the thing I would do at 3 a. m. is, like, get out my watercolors. And... Um, and make some paintings and some of them like worked and some of them didn't. And I just kind of, I really enjoyed the watercolor because it was so challenging to paint figuratively with watercolor in a loose way. So it took me a long time to get and get a handle on that and it just has not lost its fascination for me.
[00:05:39] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly says watercolor is a demanding medium.
[00:05:42] Artist Kelly Inouye: I think one of the reasons I really like watercolor is because I have to focus completely on it. Because if you mess up, you can't really start over.
And then to, to like, expand the scale of the work is also very challenging. You know, figuring out, you know, How to treat the paper before [00:06:00] you paint it on it and, you know, what colors you're going to use because you really have one chance to kind of touch the the pool of color in the right way to a lot of prep work.
I've learned over the years that I have to set my studio up the night before so I can come in first thing in the morning and have the colors mixed and like do a quick draft and just to like get my my hands into it and then that same day I have to do the final because there's so much information that I'm not totally conscious of.
I couldn't like tell you exactly, I couldn't like write a list of like steps. Um, it's kind of, I think it's like playing the piano or playing an instrument where there's so much muscle memory involved that if I wait another day, like if I do the draft, One morning, and I wait overnight and try to do the final the next day it doesn't ever work.
[00:06:56] Host Emily Wilson: It's not just work in the studio. Kelly spends hours and hours [00:07:00] researching her subjects.
[00:07:02] Artist Kelly Inouye: Before the pandemic, I did a show about feminism and women's wrestling. And I really was interested in reading everything I could about rage and how women are kind of prevented by society from expressing anger.
Our emotional range is limited and how that might affect us, um, psychologically. And I just found that topic super fascinating. And there's a lot of really great writing out there about that topic. It was very cathartic to read all of that. And it changed like the subject matter of what I was painting and it changed how I thought about, uh, what I was doing.
[00:07:42] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly also did research for her next body of work. MTV Generation at San Francisco's Marrow Gallery. A book of oral history, I Want My MTV, by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, helped a lot.
[00:07:57] Artist Kelly Inouye: It's this amazing [00:08:00] compilation of, I'm forgetting the author's name, I'm terrible with names. This compilation of quotes first hand, um, Testimonies about their, people's, all kinds of, hundreds of people's experience at MTV.
Everyone from the founders, to acts that performed, to the VJs, to the Secretary, um, administrative people, um, They all were kind of telling their tale in this pastiche of quotes. Um, so it is, it's also very I mean, that was the thing about MTV. It was like rapid fire imagery that didn't make, it wasn't, there wasn't a linear narrative there.
And so it was a perfect, the book is a perfect format to reflect that.
[00:08:41] Host Emily Wilson: She also read books by feminist scholar bell hooks and the musician Questlove.
[00:08:47] Artist Kelly Inouye: I also read bell hooks’ outlaw culture which is a phenomenal set of essays very very insightful and I I had read a lot of her work for my previous project [00:09:00] on feminism and anger and I didn't realize that she was also such an advocate for teaching political awareness through pop culture.
With like all these concepts, um, that can seem kind of bland in a textbook are very relatable and, and um, understandable when you see them acted out on a, on a screen. So that was, that was a great. A great read. And then I read Music is History by Amir Questlove Thompson. And, uh, which was kind of drawing a relationship between, um, what was happening politically and music of, of the time throughout, uh, I think, I can't, uh, Started in the 60s and like it was in his lifetime. All of those books were like tremendously helpful and interesting.
[00:09:53] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly decided on painting the musical evolution of the channel, beginning with Duran Duran up to Public [00:10:00] Enemy. From Britpop to Hip Hop. One of the paintings is of Michael Jackson wearing the red leather jacket he wore in the 1983 video Thriller.
[00:10:11] Artist Kelly Inouye: And then all of a sudden it was Michael Jackson. And that was like, it changed the world. And I had no idea, you know, I sensed it, but until I read this book about, you know, how hard he had to fight to get his videos made and have his music distributed through MTV, I took it all for granted, right? And if he hadn't done that, because MTV was kind of languishing at the time, but I don't think we would have had that MTV experience that really changed the 80s and all the acts that came after him. Like, maybe we wouldn't have seen Prince in the same, you know, massive star capacity. That it's just weird. Maybe we wouldn't have seen Madonna in that capacity. It's so, so strange to think about because there's such, I don't know, pop culture staples.
[00:10:56] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly has never taken a watercolor class. And to make her [00:11:00] large, beautiful, detailed paintings of stars like Prince and Boy George, she developed her own method.
[00:11:06] Artist Kelly Inouye: At first I was trying to use light tables, and I would paint in sections, and that, that was limiting, um, and then as technology evolved. I was able to not only, because, uh, you know, use, like, screen grabs for, for references, um, I found this tiny little projector just, like, right up there, a little cube by the light.
It's, like, it's, like, three inches by a three inch cube. I, I actually, uh, Take, I'll take images and kind of manipulate them in Photoshop, uh, and, uh, you know, boost color, pull out, replace things, like, just make the compo composition kind of on the computer. And then I can put it on a, like a little microchip that I plug into the, the uh, projector and then it will project it as large as I want [00:12:00] depending on, you know, the height of the projector. And so I'm basically to make these large paintings kind of crawling around on the floor and like making these big pools of color and figuring out when to touch them at the right time as they're drying so that they look like, you know, Michael Jackson or Dee Snyder.
[00:12:18] Host Emily Wilson: Kelly started her residency when she was looking for a studio near her daughter's school. She wanted to help women artists by giving them space to work and publicity. The first artist in the residency program was Leah Rosenberg, who worked on something that went on to be a show at SFMoMA.
[00:12:37] Artist Kelly Inouye: I found a storefront in the Outer Sunset on Irving street near 45th Avenue that was sort of affordable. And I had just, I had just been awarded a project by the Arts Commission that made me kind of be able to think about renting a studio outside of our home, um, for the first time. And I just went for it. Like, [00:13:00] I decided that because there was a storefront space and there was some space in the back, I would split it and I would take the back space as my studio and I would invite other artists to work in the, uh, the storefront and in the windows.
I had also been writing a little bit for, um, art, the art magazine, San Francisco Arts Quarterly. Um, and so I had, you know, met a lot of really fantastic artists and, but yeah, in 2015 it felt like, I don't know, it was, it just, it felt, Like the art world, there were lots of galleries closing and you know, everyone was like, you know, we normally, it was a cycle of angst that we were going through that I can now recognize since I've lived here a lot longer.
Um, and it just, especially for women artists, it just seemed like, like they were not getting solo shows and galleries and museums and the same number. I knew so So many women artists that I went to grad school with that, [00:14:00] and so many women artists whose work I wrote about for the magazines that like, I didn't see them like getting the same kind of opportunities to be ambitious that male artists were getting that I went to school with.
And I thought, Oh, well maybe, maybe if, you know, just give them some space and time and you know, what the proper format of a press release is and you know, how to kind of promote shows through other projects that I did with other artists. Um, Maybe that combination would be beneficial to people. And it was.
The first project we did was Leah Rosenberg's Every Day a Color. And it was just so phenomenal to have that going on in the storefront space. And then every project after brought another flavor of, you know, ambition and community involvement.[00:15:00]
[00:15:02] Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, Three Questions, where I end every conversation with the same three questions to learn a little more about the artist. When did you know you were an artist? What was a work of art that made an impression on you? And what is the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
[00:15:25] Artist Kelly Inouye: I struggled with calling myself an artist as a young person. And there aren't any other artists in my family. So it, I do feel like it was a real journey to kind of embrace that identity. I always joke that I tried everything I could not to be an artist, but it's just what I am. Like, everything good that's happened in my life has happened when I've, you know, put the other baggage aside and just focused on that work.
But I would say... [00:16:00] I didn't, I wasn't comfortable with the label until I got my master's degree and even then it took maybe like five years to really like, and I know people, I actually now have several artist friends who do not tell strangers they're artists because it sparks, it just, it's an unpredictable reaction.And sometimes they just don't feel like expending that energy to explain. For my own mental health, I stopped doing that.
A show that I saw recently that really made an impression on me, that is kind of still with me all the time, is the Joan Mitchell retrospective at SFMOMA. Listened to Ninth Street Women on, um, audiobooks when I saw it. And so if, I feel like that gave me, uh, a different appreciation for the work. I'd always [00:17:00] loved her work, and I'd only seen maybe one or two paintings in person. And so to see it all there and that, you know, amazing interview with her and kind of feel her energy was incredible. And to understand the struggle that her life was to make that work was, you know, really impactful and powerful.
The most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area for me is the beach. There's something about being close to the water and the ocean's power and whatever the ions in the air are that helps me think clearly.
[00:17:50] Host Emily Wilson: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Art is Awesome. And thanks to our guest, artist Kelly Inouye. You can get more [00:18:00] information and link to her work in our show notes. Please subscribe and rate us wherever you get your podcasts.
In our next episode, we'll have a conversation with Oakland artist, Esteban Rahim Abdul Rahim Samayoa. He has a show at Pt2 Gallery in Oakland, Ain't No Dogs in Heaven, on view through September 9th. The show is in three rooms of the gallery, with black and white charcoal drawings from Esteban's time growing up in Sacramento. Paintings in color that explore his Mexican and Guatemalan heritage, and in the final section, prayer rugs and plaster casts of hands in praying positions, referencing his conversion to Islam.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. [00:19:00] It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Goto Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod. With Incompetech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.[00:20:00]