We were lucky to catch up with Percy Kleinops recently and have shared our conversation below.
Percy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. 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.
I became an artist because 10 years ago during a long business conference call, I drew a face of a sad man on a sheet of notebook paper. Later that afternoon, my wife holding that sheet asked me who drew the face. I told her I had. She looked at me with astonishment and said questioningly, “You’re an artist.” I had in fact drawn many faces, but drawing faces did not make an artist.
Her comment, though, got me thinking maybe I should use the idle time during my weekly business air travels to draw. I had an iPad, found an app, ArtSet, learned how to use it and started to draw and “paint”. I have drawn and painted over a hundred “paintings” with my finger as my brush. I learned, and I loved it. But I was not yet an artist.
I joined a community art club, Tarpon Cove Art Club. I began to paint with acrylics, learning from observation, trial and error and a lot of help from fellow members. I won first prize place with my very first painting at the annual club art show. There were three judges, all artists, and 70 paintings. I was pleased and encouraged, and I kept my day job. But I was still not an artist.
A fellow artist and neighbor invited me to join him in taking a weekly art class in oil painting offered by the City of Tarpon Springs. After several classes, I recognized I needed more individual attention. Our instructor also offered semi private classes in her studio and gallery. I signed up. Once I began these classes, I progressed rapidly. I still did not consider myself an artist.
After almost two years of professional classes, visiting art museums, reading art books and speaking art to artists, I realized there was a component to art that cannot be taught or copied. It is interpreting and releasing the creative compositions deep within you and transferring them to your canvas. Once released, it becomes a passion to get it all out.
That passion is unique to everyone, yet it supplies the needed component to make art your art.. The passion travels from deep inside me to my heart to my mind to my brushes to my palette onto my canvas. I became a tool executing what was arranged within me . When I saw it on my canvas, finished for the first time I knew I was an artist.
I soon retired from my day job and started another, working 6 days a week at our Open Sky Studio and Gallery in Tarpon Springs, FL. My art teacher had invited me to join her in the studio as her studio partner. I continue learn each day guided by my creative spirits and energized by my passion.
I became a poet 4 years later after I started painting with “Art Set” on my iPad. I had never before written a poem. I didn’t like most poetry. I often felt I needed a dictionary when I had read it. Discovering that I could write poetry happened by surprise.
One day, alone in the studio (that soon became the home to my art) that was loaned to me for three weeks by its owner and my art teacher of two years while she and her husband were on vacation, IT happened!
It was in July of 2017, I was sitting at The desk in the studio in front of my laptop with a blank Word document page staring back at me. I had been staring at it for a time when I just began to type without knowing what I was typing until I stopped. I felt as if I had been in a dream like place. A place not known to me where I was just an observer and finding myself back to where I am staring at the Word document but now there were words on it. I looked at the words, they were organized in stanzas. I began to read, my eyes teared my breathing deep and slow. The words spoke about taking journeys.
I just sat there, unable to move tears still flowing but feeling like a great weight had been lifted from me. That the weight of these words had escaped from me on the page. I reread the words over and over. I had become a poet.
I named the poem “Journey”.
This is my first poem:
“Every day brings the opportunity for a new journey to begin.
Not casting away our journey of life but adding to it.
A chance to see and touch some things not planned or expected.
Discovery requires open eyes and heart.
Listening to the voice within, often silenced by the fear above.
The journey we take each day can pass the time away
or lead us places not known to us,
perhaps to find what we have lost.
Look and take a journey not planned yesterday.
Find it, or let it find you.
For there are always new journeys to take each day.
You never know when you will find the end in sight
with no more journeys left to choose.
Until then, take many journeys and be aware.
Feel, See, Smell, Love,
Enjoy and breathe what comes your way each journey day.
So at journey’s end,
your journey will have been worth your light.”
(a) Percy Kleinops 2017
“Journey” and 9 other poems along with 10 of my early digital “paintings” “painted” on my iPad all come together in my first book “To Keep Us Human” in January 2018.
And so it was that in July of 2017, I became a Poet. My poetry joined my art, and I began my Journey as an artist and poet. And each day thereafter, I find a new poem or two. Each day in front of the canvas, I become aware of a brush stroke prompted from somewhere within. I feel I have been given the responsibility of using my talent as a poet and an artist to bring attention to the reality of our humanity and make it better.
I love my Journey as an Artist and a Poet.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My work as painter and poet follows the tradition of activism and pursues the humanist quest for equality and understanding. This quest flows from my heart into my work. In human history, there comes a time when each person is struck and shocked by the reality of the actions of another human or humans. We have seen it before. We have heard it before. Too many were silent then. I was silent. Now, I don’t want to be silent. I can’t be silent. My soul will not let me, and I don’t want to be.
No one can verify what another human feels. What influences their actions or inactions. Often it is easier not to think about things and hope they will go away; they always do or at least have. But I can tell you how I feel through my art and with the words that accompany my paintings.
Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Thomas Paine in 1796, in which he wrote: “Go on doing with your pen [brush] what in other times was done with the “sword.”
The lens through which I see is forged within from materials gathered over a lifetime, with all the baggage accumulated during my unique journey; first as a child in Latvia, carried by my Mother in search of safety during World War Il, not unlike what many witness in Ukraine and other areas of war and conflict; then as a child immigrant to America facing challenges of a new language and acclimating to a new land and its culture, experiencing the failures, accomplishments and successes and discovering, observing, learning the realities of the world we now live. I became a volunteer fireman, a cop, a lawyer, an entrepreneur and a pioneer in the natural & organic food service industry. All have added richness to my work as an artist and poet. However, all my previous experiences also add to the many questions about we humans.
These questions are not of the young and untested or unchallenged by life but rather of those who survived life’s tests despite their scars and regrets. Yet not all questions have answers, some questions remain questions.
Examples of are:
1. Why is much of discrimination over that which the human has no control such as: color of skin, sex, who is loved, gender, ethnicity, and looks?
2. Why do we seek differences to separate instead of commonalities to bring about inclusion? Why not search for more insight to empower ourselves and others, realizing that within our uniqueness, we have shared aspirations.
3. Who is the human that we are?
4. What is a relationship?
I believe we cannot escape the political bubble in which we live. All questions about humanity, from birth to death and in between, have been made political. Being political, they are often placed in a pot to be boiled with partisanship, falsity, and deception overpowering truth until it boils over. My art is not political, it mirrors the reality I see, feel, breathe, agonize and cry over.
I capture the reality of our humanity with paint and words. I paint symbols. Some are recognized, but often I create symbols that will capture the essences of the reality communicated.
In “Systemic Racism Hurts”, I depict a dagger representing the application laws and institutional actions that are thrust into the lives of people of color to control and marginalize. Blood droplets become the visualization that systemic racism hurts.
“Affirmation Now” addresses the demands of the LGBTQI+ community for recognition of individual uniqueness and freedom from confinement to live authentically.
Loving oneself first leads to the rich experience of loving others.
“May Your Marriage Be Strong” submits that for any relationship to survive and thrive, growing side by side in support of each other through times of wind and rain of life but not to smother the other is necessary.
“Capitol Rights Taken” uses flags sewn together to represent the makeup of the fabric of who we claim to be as Americans showing that our fabric has been ripped from us by the laws passed by those who occupy the Capitol.
‘Activism is my rent for living on the plant” — Alice Walker I am paying my rent. I hope it’s on time.
“All Parts Matter” I address the need for the individual to be whole and able to love oneself with joy to discover one’s true potential.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
That I had to find my own perfection. It was not to paint a perfect landscape, a portrait, a seascape, flower arrangement, an animal, or anything else as judged by others. While we humans all have eyes, we do not all see the same things in the same way.
My art has to come from my feelings. There is so much that I want to scream, plead, cry, say, and speak about. I want to paint my visuals of the human reality, the wrongs, the rights, the joys and the laughter. I do this using the language of symbols.
Constructing a painting with symbols as the main ingredient and incorporating color, words and images to complete it. There are symbols that are easily recognized and those until created that are new. Sometimes my entire painting is one symbol like “Systemic Racism – It Hurts”. I painted white and black diagonally across a vertical canvas, with more white than black, and a dagger shape of white penetrating the black color with red blood droplets coming from its point.
What I visualize in the abstract and subjective is put on canvas as a symbol. Perhaps not understood by all, therefore not perfect at first. can become perfect once the viewer close to subject of the work sees it or when the accompanying narrative is read.
It was only at a local exhibition of art relating to the black experience that I received the confirmation of the symbolic message of my painting. In my presence, I observed two people of color crying while looking at the painting. When I identified myself as the artist, their hugs told me the perfection and the power of my painting.
I never know if I have achieved in communicating the objective of my painting until the viewer responds or of my poetry until the reader reacts to my words.
My poetry too is not written for an academic or critic review for its form or words. My choice of words and their message express what I see and feel. Clever words and strict form often distort the message. Perfection comes from the reader’s response.
I needed to stop listening to other voices to find mine.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Late in life I started a journey to discover who I truly am. We all have many parts, some we know and some we don’t and may not want to know. I was ready to accept all parts that make me me. We are, after all, unique.
While on this journey I came upon a door to a room within me. I knew what was hiding in this room. It was fear. Not just one fear but many. One of those fears was openly speaking out about the injustice inflicted by we humans on other humans. Before proclaiming myself an artist and poet, I had of course spoken out about those injustices but not in a public way.
A painting or poem about these injustices once displayed invites everyone to view. My work would be speaking publicly. Well-designed work can deliver powerful messages that resonate for years to come. Having declared that I want to make a positive difference in the world we humans occupy, I opened the door to paint and write what my creative spirits demanded and face whatever happens. Without change, nothing happens.
Through my art, I have spoken out about the injustice of systemic racism and to LGBTQI+ humans, women’s rights, free speech, voting rights, and to others..
Before I paint or write, I do my homework on the issues. I try to find visuals to paint that can capture that which is the heart of the issue. When I write, I feel the injustice and then write what I feel. For both painting and writing, I am open to the creative spirits’ guidance.
My goal is to bring about a reaction that leads to awareness, conversation and improvement of the issues of our time through the medium of visual art and written words. Once I opened the door, it can’t be closed.
I am on this journey so that it will have been worth my light.
PS:
When I need a break from my advocacy/protest art, I populate my other series of works. My newest is “KITCHEN ART” with 3 recent works: “Fish Under Plank”, “Charbroiled Octopus” and “Fresh Eggs”.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.percykleinops.com
- Instagram: percistyle
- Facebook: percikleinops
Image Credits
Percy Kleinops