Meet Katie Marshall | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Katie Marshall and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Katie, can you tell us about an impactful book you’ve read and why you liked it or what impact it had on you?
A fun fact about me: before becoming an artist, I majored in Russian literature in college and spent several years working as a translator for a university based in St. Petersburg, Russia. I love to read and a lot of my ideas for paintings emerge from things I’ve read.

A few books I’ve been impacted by recently are “Jane” and “The Red Parts” by Maggie Nelson, which are about Nelson’s aunt who was murdered in the late 1960s and the subsequent trial of her killer. I’ve never read anything like them before. They’re neither procedurals nor true crime. Instead, like much of Nelson’s work, they are a mixture of poetry, journal entries, prose, memoir, and even literary criticism. Both books are incredibly honest and human in the way address loss and all the complexity that surrounds it, especially loss that stems from violence. These are themes I think about a lot in my own work, and Nelson’s writing has created a framework in which to approach darkness with nuance and humanity, which is a huge part of what good art does.

I always come back to the short story “Cherry Brandy” from the compilation “Kolyma Tales” by Varlam Shalamov. Shalamov spent 17 years incarcerated in a Soviet Prison camp, and “Cherry Brandy” is about the death of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in a transit camp on route to a Soviet penal colony. It’s one of the most devastating works of literature I have ever read. It begins with a poem by Mandelstam and winds its way lyrically through a poet’s ecstatic recollections and final moments only to be brought back to reality with a truly brutal moment of gallows humor.

I think visual art is very close to literature, poetry and music. It gets to the emotional and bodily truths of things and creates visual form for dreams, connection, cruelty, death, love, confusion, spirit and complexity; things which everyday language cannot easily describe and for which we need poetry. Great work takes up these challenges and gets at some of the darkness and messiness that comes with being human.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My paintings stem from impressions and memories of long drives, often made alone: experiences tinged with wonderment, beauty, boredom, humor, neuroses, and sometimes fear. My semi-abstracted landscapes incorporate text, roadside iconography, and bold uses of color, gesture, and materiality to explore the open road as a complex emotional and psychic space.

I love the road genre and iconic films like Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise and Paris, Texas…there are a million others…as well as literature and visual art that takes the road as its subject (Ed Ruscha is one of my all-time favorite visual artists). My work is filtered through my own experiences being on the road, which have been just as much banal, neurotic, humorous, and creepy as they are epic and transcendent. In my most recent paintings I’m exploring gesture and the materiality of oil paint as analogues for swirling dust, wind, breath, skin, and dirt-smeared windshields in order to evoke an embodied and dreamlike experience of being on the road. As a painter I love how color, light, surface texture, and gesture can be combined with representational imagery to evoke sensation and emotion, and to create visual form for the ineffable.

As I mentioned above, I studied Russian literature in college. Art was never something I thought I could do seriously until a couple of years before starting my MFA, at which point I was making a lot of paper collages and ballpoint pen drawings. I loved graduate school and was lucky to attend a program where I had access to all these great foundational classes if I wanted them. At the very end of my program, I co-taught the Intro Painting and Foundation Drawing classes with full-time faculty. These were first times I actually learned how to mix colors, apply oil paint and paint from life. Having this basic knowledge and skill set opened up a vast world of possibilities that is grounded in observational painting and representing believable form, light, color, and space. I love breaking the rules of observational painting and melding in abstract and gestural elements to pull out the deeper metaphorical and existential resonances of my subject matter.

Where I’m at today as an artist has required a lot of hard work and a lot of luck, and I still have so much farther to go. A lesson I think many artists absorb is the ethos of “It’s a marathon, not a sprint.” This has allowed me to take stock of where I am at any given moment even if it feels less than ideal for making art, such as painting in my bedroom before I could afford a studio. I made some great paintings in my bedroom and then later on in the living room of my first apartment. Now I have a studio in East LA with a great community of other artists. Keeping this marathon mentality and keeping my creative practice as my central focus has helped me make really important decisions in regards to my life and work.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
In all honesty I would probably just make them come to the studio with me! It’s really hard to get me to leave. (My best friend is also an artist, so this is something we’d both enjoy).

But it’s important to take breaks sometimes.

Aside from checking out the many great museums and galleries in LA and the surrounding areas, we would also take long walks around my neighborhood admiring all the beautiful succulents and flowers (which I especially love showing off to visitors from the East Coast). We would stroll to the Village Bakery in Atwater Village for a late breakfast, stop by the Atwater Village Farmer’s Market, and then walk over to Griffith Park. There is a tunnel by the LA River that takes you directly under I-5 and right into the park. This is something I love to share with anyone who visits. My husband and I got married in Griffith Park this past summer and it is one of my favorite places in LA. I love seeing families having barbecues and picnics, seeing musicians practicing and vendors selling toys and ice cream, horseback riders, joggers, hikers, coyotes. I love the train and the Old Zoo. This summer we went to Shakespeare in the Park and it was so much fun. Just recently I realized I can walk to the Autry Museum from my apartment, so I’d love to explore that!

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I want to recognize the community of students, artists, and educators in the School of Art at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). This is where I currently teach as a Lecturer in the Drawing and Painting program, and where I got my MFA. CSULB is one of the largest publicly funded art programs in the United States and it’s where I found an incredibly dedicated and talented community of artists who are doing great things in the world. The MFA program at CSULB doesn’t have a lot of brand-name prestige, but there is so much exciting work being made there and emerging from that program—people should take notice, and I really hope the program achieves the broader recognition it deserves. The people I met through this school truly helped make me the person and artist I am today.

Website: https://www.katie-marshall.net/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiemarshallstudio/

Image Credits
Gene Ogami, Josh Sager, Katie Marshall