Meet Connor Kay | Painter and Ceramicist

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

Hi Connor, we’d love to hear what makes you happy.
Attending to my work and life at my own pace, admittedly a slow one
brings me the most joy. This includes using my hands to push and pull
paint, work clay in and out of forms, and reconfigure objects. It also
extends to simply walking around and considering my environment on
foot. This activation of my body makes me feel present with myself.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I love making. To work with my hands is all I want. I’m very excited
about working with clay as its connection to Earth’s natural
processes, and ability to hold the memory of its movement is
incredibly engaging. I’m eager to combine sights from my movements in
LA with textures of the clay body.
My time with ceramics has changed the way I approach a painted
surface. Now, I work oil with my hands, molding a texture I let sit
for a while. Learning to allow materials to develop in their own time,
like watching clay shrink as the water escapes, has forced patience.
I’ve learned to work persistently but slowly. The more time I devote
to one medium, the more I yearn to give to the other. For me, this
produces a generative cycle of making. One that isn’t forced or
determined on an outcome. To better understand the cycle of ceramics,
I will be building a small wood-fire kiln.

I like to make work that appears like it’s from another time. In this
way, my work exists as a relic. A fragment of an emotional and
physical landscape I know to have existed. My grainy, sodden,
sometimes unbound surfaces become sunburnt, oxidized, and withered
husks thick with subject matter.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Ideally, we’d walk from place to place, but that’s a challenge in LA.
I’d recommend a morning hike in the Verdugo Mountains. On a clear day,
Its peak has the best views of the Valley to downtown LA, and you can
even see the Pacific Ocean. It’s a good primer for the sheer scale of
Los Angeles. I’d take them on a tour through the Arts District,
stopping at galleries and Hennessey and Ingalls to view their massive
inventory of artist monographs. I’d continue the tour south to Vernon,
the exclusively industrial city comprised of warehouses where artists’
studios exist alongside textiles manufacturing, meatpacking, and tons
of semi trucks. It’s a wild sight that’s only 5 miles square but
provides so much output for this city that it has to be seen. I’d
recommend Rahel Ethiopian on Fairfax or Masa of Echo Park and this
cool raw vegan cheesecake shop called Solar Return for food. In the
evening, I’d watch a screening of whatever’s on at the Academy Museum,
then finish the night line dancing at Stud Country.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Much credit is due to my parents always encouraging my artistic
desires. I also had a very formative art teacher in middle school
named Gary Leveque, who demonstrated confidence in his expression and
openness to his students, which felt liberating. He was always a
positive presence at school, filling his classroom with murals painted
by former students and friends. Working here made me excited about
making! He had me come back years later and paint a mural of the
Golden Gate Bridge right next to the whiteboard.

Instagram: @connor_kay

Image Credits
Broadus Mobbs