We were lucky to catch up with Abby Kasonik recently and have shared our conversation below.

Abby, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

In all my time as a painter, I never did a single collaboration… I always thought I was unsuited to that type of project. Last year a very organic opportunity for a collaboration with an artist friend came up. We were both working outside our primary mediums and looking for a way to solve a problem. The solution was working together, and it turned out to be one of the most fun and enlightening projects I’ve ever worked on. It was so interesting to get to see the inner workings of another artist’s mind. It’s alway fascinating to see the studios and tools other people use and how that can open you up to new ways of making, but in this case it was also her way of seeing…seeing her craft, her job, how she invested in herself and the risks she was willing to take. It was a very inspiring experience.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a full time artist based in Charlottesville VA. I think I always knew I’d be an artist…. I have no memories of myself that don’t involve knowing that’s what I’d do. I was born to parents who were both creative; my dad was always building things, and my mom was a graphic artist and secret interior & garden design genius.

As a kid I was always creating…mud pies and paintings for the neighbors. I turned my club house into a knitted goods store and had big ideas about selling my work. For better or worse, I knew that I wouldn’t ever work at a computer or do traditional business- and so that part made me frustrated with my primary school teachers for not understanding I didn’t need and wouldn’t use all that nasty math.

I went to a very small high school- my art class had maybe 4 people in it, and so we were given a lot of personal attention and allowed to follow our interests. After high school I attended and graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, Department of Sculpture. The sculpture department was very inventive and open ended… anything that wasn’t painting was sculpture they said. I experimented with a lot a materials during that time. There were classes in robotics and welding… a now famous classmate had a studio Overflowing with scraps of soap she’d used and meticulously saved.

After I graduated, I moved back to Charlottesville and after a year of faux painting, catering, house fixing and gardening, a friend offered me a show. I think the thrill of almost going broke and somehow making it though and selling my first big painting was enough to have me hooked. I have been working as a full time painter ever since.

In 2020 after taking a class with a friend, I decided to dedicate the majority of my creative time to ceramics. I’m relying in part on my education in Sculpture, but learning an entirely new set of skills and language in art-making is very exciting. It’s allowed me to bring together my love of furniture and design with painting and interior spaces. I have a new project I’ve been secretly working on for about 6 months, that I will be releasing in mid September of this year…. And I’m excited to see what’s next.

My work in painting has been featured in numerous private and corporate collections including the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, University of Virginia’s Forum Hotel at the Darden School, and the University of Virginia Foundation’s Boar’s Head Resort.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Right at the beginning of the pandemic I made a major pivot in my work life. I’d been a full-time painter for more than 20 years, but had recently been feeling a bit lost in terms of where I wanted to go with painting. The things that had been exciting to me before, had been leaving me underwhelmed. I’d been experimenting with collages and different material applications but hadn’t landed anything I wanted to stay with.

Then, in the course of one week I had 3 friends separately ask me to take the same ceramics class. it seemed like a bit of a nudge. I had always been interested in ceramics, but never invested much time. In my mind I wasn’t into glazes so that limited what future I could see for myself. During the class my instructor mentioned underglaze- which is a fixed colorant- It doesn’t shift and bloom in the same way glazes do; it obeys and is very much like paint- and somehow that was the key for me. It was a way to paint with and on an entirely new material.

My painter friends often talk about the feel of the brush stoke and the texture of the paint- the sound of the canvas- all the visceral experiences involved in the act of painting-. I always felt a little isolated from that feeling – while I liked the mental work, I never especially enjoyed any of the sensory aspects of painting… but the opposite was true of clay. I love the squish of wet clay, carving into a nearly-hard surface and the chalky feel of the underglaze.

With the world closing down, and everyone focusing inward, he pandemic offered me the perfect moment to try and maybe fail at something new. I devoted myself entirely and abandoned painting for more than 3 years. I think I have recently come to a place where I could paint again, but clay may have replaced paint as my primary material in art.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.abbykasonik.com
• Instagram: @abbykasonik

Image Credits
all the painting images are credited to Stacey Evans, the ceramics are Abby Kasonik