We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ke Francis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ke, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

There are two ways to teach a person a craft. The first way is to offer a very limited task and offer a very detailed, step-by-step learning sequence that can be repeated over and over until a level of competency is reached. The second way is to teach a person a process that can be followed to learn anything. This is true education. That is a more difficult task but is, in the long run, the shortest route to learning. That process involves teaching a person how to determine quality. This is more about philosophy than skillsets. If one understands a quality output (this is an aesthetic assessment and applies to all of the arts; literature, music, visual art and culinary skills and is the result of passion, determination, curiosity, creativity and love), then one CAN clearly understand the goal of any task and very simple instructions will set them on the path to achieving a quality outcome. I was very lucky. I was introduced to the true process of education very early in my life. I understand how to gather pertinent information from a wide and varied group of sources and apply that information to the task at hand.

The goal of craft is to produce a quality experience. If the experience has to do with the making of a functional object then the craftsman determines the senses that are relevant and employs those senses with loving patience and practiced skills. For instance; if a craftsman is making a violin the senses employed are tactile, visual and auditory. The goal is to make a violin that feels good to embrace, is made of beautiful wood and carved and finished (delete IT) with sensitivity, and designed and shaped so that it emits a beautiful sound. However, whether this instrument will produce art depends finally on the musician.
Visual Art and its relationship to craft is more complicated. If the goal of the artist (like the musician) is to communicate feelings directly to the heart and soul of the viewer then the crafting of the artwork must not steal the show and interrupt the line of communication with the heart. If the first response to a work of art is that the craftsman has done an exquisite job and not the instant heartfelt communication intended by the artist then the complete combination of craft and art has failed. If a giant screen appeared during a solo violin performance of a Mozart concert with a close up of the beautiful Stradivarius violin then the performance would be ruined.
The essential craft skill is to determine how to make craft invisible in the first viewing experience in any work of art.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I settled on a career in art because it is among the most open ended, poorly defined, wide – ranging professions and it, therefore, placed less constraints on what I might spend my time doing for the rest of my life. I have produced artwork under more flags than a pirate ship. The goal was to reach as broad an audience with my interdisciplinary work as possible. I am far more interested in communication than I am interested in ART. I began my career as a trained sculptor, and over the years I have produced artwork as a ceramicist, a  sculptor, a painter, a printmaker, a writer, and finally as a book artist. I could easily be considered a dilettante except for the quality of my works ( verified by my exhibition record, purchases chosen for major collections, successful grant applications , and awards that include the term “excellence”.)
I have been a Narrative Artist for more than fifty years. the current work centers around the production of books. The core of these current works are books that contain my own short stories and poems. The books are written, combined with my own imagery, designed, printed and bound at my studio in Tupelo, Mississippi by me. Images used in the books are often images of my own sculptural works, photographs, paintings and woodcuts and engravings.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I believe that the arts (visual art, music, and literature) give us insights into other cultures and help us understand that we, as human beings, share the same concerns and struggle to address the same issues concerning man, woman, birth, death, and infinity. The questions raised by these five topics are the questions that humans have struggled to understand since the beginning of recorded history. My work is an honest reflection of my experience. The stories that I write involving my environment and the people and animals that inhabit that space raise questions about our interdependence. I often write and create images to discover my own feelings about the subjects that are addressed in my work.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Producing creative work is its own reward. I think it is very rewarding to watch an idea that existed only in my mind become a reality and be shared by other people. I work in a very intuitive fashion and I am of the opinion that work produced by artists that move from conception to conclusion without mistakes and inventive solutions to those mistakes are most often the product of unintentional  plagiarism. I think it is almost impossible to have a singular completely original idea. History has shown that even the most inventive work was built on the shoulders of the concepts and creative ideas that preceded it. The challenge for a creative person is how one might take a creative concept that was generated by another artist in another time and understand how that particular artist took that particular concept and applied it to that particular culture and time then take the concept and apply one’s own experience to images and events from their current time and their particular culture. Then, after the inevitable shortfalls and mistakes that have been corrected using the contemporary artist’s unique tools and each artist’s distinct skillsets and vocabulary the work will have morphed itself into a whole new creative art experience. I have made quite a lot of work over the years and as I look at that work in retrospect it falls into three categories; works related to the Cosmos/ The Firmament, works related to Pangaia (Greek word for surface of the earth, land and sea and the inhabitants that populate it) and works related to the Subterranean/ The Underworld-Hades.
I will send images divided into these three catagories.

Contact Info:

• Website: kefrancisart.com
• Facebook: Ke Francis art

Image Credits
All photos by the artist.