We were lucky to catch up with Anya Kotler recently and have shared our conversation below.

Anya , appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

There are many instances in our lives when we are faced with a consequential decision, where we make a choice between a great, but uncertain benefit, accompanied by the possibility of a significant loss, OR the continuance of the current state, the known state. However, risk is also an integral part of daily life, accumulated from the multitude of miniscule choices we make every moment. Making art today is an activity that is permeated with a vast freedom – anything can be done, in any way, nothing is prescribed. This freedom implies an activity entirely consisting of making decisions,– should this brushstroke be thick or thin, fast and energetic or slow and focused, red or yellow..? Risk is often a decision between the comfort of the known, and the insecurity of the unknown. The unknown can paralyze our movement from the overwhelm of speculations, while the known has the assurance of the familiar and habitual, even if it is not great. I am fascinated with how our minds perceive risk taking, learning and repetition, the uncharted, and how familiarity often trumps possibility.

I began understanding this in my own work around 2015. I remember looking at a several of my paintings hanging on the wall and feeling a monotony and sterility about them. I felt their superficiality, the reliance of my process on familiar methods and habitual decisions. I saw that I was not having a whole lot of fun either. Sometimes there is just no more escaping, and the sense of security we were clinging to loses the grasp that it had. The illusion fades and an immense freedom becomes available. The sense of risk converts into the sense of adventure. Perhaps these two words are somewhat synonymous, but our experience of them is completely different.

Risk taking in general has become an increasingly integral part of my work over the years. I now picture my studio as the secret basement laboratory of some scientist or alchemist who is mixing one thing with another, playing with various strange machines, and observing unpredictable processes. At times everything explodes, at other times she makes a great discovery, and sometimes she makes a great discovery BECAUSE her experiment explodes.

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

I began painting in college, while I was studying for my undergraduate degree in molecular biology. My painting professor, mentor and later great friend George Dugan introduced me not only to the baffling medium of paint, but to the whole world of being able to be an artist. Only in retrospect I can see that the way I thought and looked at the world in my childhood was incredibly close to my work now. I feel that painting had legitimized some way of seeing that I always carried with me, but did not know how to acknowledge, especially in the context of society.

Since then, I have gone on to receive my MFA in painting, have also studied woodworking, and have been teaching at various institutions around the US and in Ireland. Currently, I build sculptural paintings at my studio in Hoboken, NJ, show my work around the country, am a professor at Hofstra University, and teach occasional workshops such as my upcoming Summer Painting Workshop in Dingle, Ireland.

My work explores the blurring between pictorial and physical space, figuration and abstraction, clarity and doubt. Bodies are always central in the work, however, it is also very important for me to create a space of ambiguity in which definitions escape the confines of certainty and exist in a world in which images hover namelessly in a state of multiplicity. I accomplish that by pushing my images, surfaces and narratives both towards intense specificity, and an unsettling strangeness.

The works are often constructed from separate sections, often carved and shaped panels, and other mixed media, some of which are adjacent to the wall, while others protrude or stand on the floor, and sometimes block each other from the viewer. The sections coalesce into a detailed object with multiple interconnected dimensions and layers. My experimentation with dimensionality stems from my interest in how we interact with objects spatially and viscerally. Painting of any sort has the mystical quality of revealing to us a parallel reality – one that captivates us and feels discontinuous with our own space. Sculpture on the other hand, tends to exist right here, sharing our own floor and air. I am fascinated when these “mystical” and “real” spaces mingle, when objects seem to flicker between worlds. To explore this, I intertwine illusionistic, flat, sculptural, overlapping, and bas-relief elements, inspecting the gap between the elusiveness of thought, memory and emotion, and the hard physicality of the world.
My work happens intuitively, addressing an aspect of human experience that seems pressing to me at the time. I discover the piece as it comes together, and listen to what it has to tell me, much like thinking out loud.

As an educator, my objective is twofold: to provide the students with a toolkit of techniques and understanding of materials and methods, AND to put this practical knowledge to use by focusing on what is true and significant about their own vision, leaning all the way in to what belongs to them. I encourage my students to take themselves seriously even if they are beginners, to shed their ideas of how their art is supposed to look or be made, and focus on what feels interesting and significant.

In my upcoming workshop on the beautiful Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, I am excited to guide a small group of practicing artists to strengthening their creative practice. The course tackles painting exercises and challenges out on the hills and rocky shores, as well as daily critiques, discussions and readings, both in class and at the pubs. The workshop uses the Irish landscape as the vehicle through which to explore the challenges of artmaking. The landscape is vast and ancient, but also existing in a perpetual flux. When we experience it, we touch on something so much grander than ourselves, something everlasting, that simultaneously comforts us by connecting us to something bigger than ourselves, and terrifies our temporal nature. Its constant mutability requires us to truly stay in the present moment in order to witness it, much like listening to music. It is a challenge to anchor ourselves in time, and seek our own personal perception and meaning in something so grand, while making it our own through painting. I think that this is a struggle of artmaking in general, no matter what the subject is.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

What devastates me the most about the current role of the arts in general society is that it is often perceived as a confusing world that one is unable to experience, let alone understand if one is not directly a part of it. That results in too many people never stepping foot in a gallery, spending more time reading the blurb describing the painting than looking at the painting itself in a museum, and mistaking paint and sip venues for art classes. I know for a fact that every single person has at least some degree of sensitivity towards the arts, and society as a whole benefits tremendously when art is an integral part of life, because it is a necessity, not a luxury.

I think that the most significant thing that society can do to support the arts, is make art education as essential as education in mathematics and history. We spend years of school studying the ins and outs of the behavior of numbers. For most, it is knowledge that never gets utilized in our adult life, however, it does form in our minds an ability to conceive of abstract concepts, and solve problems, which is a wonderful benefit. Same applies to art education. Even if someone has no interest in pursuing this field further and does not apply it directly in their daily life, it forms our mind’s ability to create, to think outside the box, appreciate, value and empathize. Sadly, our capacity to observe images intelligently, experience the existential reassurance that comes with leaving a mark, and have a grasp on the human capital of art made through the ages is limited for many to some paint splattering in elementary school, which most of us greatly enjoyed, but then quickly fell into the self-critical age of teenagerhood, from which most never recover their visual and creative wisdom.

Education in art is necessary not just in the form of making it, as that is not for everyone, and also not just in the form of memorizing art historical facts, but mostly in developing a sensitivity to form, subject, materials, meanings, narratives, colors, beauty, and connection. I wish that looking, making and talking about art, was a fundamental part of school education.

The second, more insidious issue that we struggle with when it comes to experiencing art, is that as a society we are trained to not trust ourselves, not look through our own eyes, and not develop our own opinions. Much of education trains us to absorb the facts we are told, assume their truth, and then answer questions “correctly” on an exam. This framework teaches us that we receive a reward as a result of blind acceptance and regurgitation of fact, rather than any personal thinking process, and we get a punishment if we get it wrong, in the form of a bad grade. Any sense of trust in our actual experiences and thoughts gets shaken out of us from the first multiple choice exam, where the panic of trying to circle the correct answer trumps the complexity and variety of human thought. As we are continuously taught that there has to be a “right” answer, and as our “wrong” answers cause us repeated painful experiences, it is no surprise that when one approaches the open-endedness of a painting, a sense of confusion washes over, as one part of the mind begins to intuitively perceive and perhaps enjoy the work, while the other part of the mind is terrified that our understanding is “incorrect”. This thinking impedes any ability to trust, to appreciate, and to see, as there is no single right answer in art (and in much of life). I want to see society embracing the fact that each individual perceives the world through their own lens, to remember that there is no one right way of being or thinking, and that each of us has a wisdom that has never left us.

I think that making art education an essential part of school, and practicing trust in our own perceptions, would be the biggest way to support the arts, as it would create a society that values and requires art for its own well being.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

(Almost) every single day I am immensely thankful that circumstances have led me to being able to be an artist. Although the challenges are much bigger than I could have ever imagined, the rewards are as well. I have the opportunity to process my experience of being in the world and make something about it, a necessity that I suspect many people barely get the chance to partake in. I am able to lock myself in my studio, and play, do anything that feels right at that moment without having to please anyone, without having the right answer, I can stumble and explore, and follow my curiosity. When I teach, I get to encourage others to do so as well, and I get to experience their work and insight. Of course, all that is on my good days. There are plenty of bad days when my mind fabricates a series of expectations, that hurt my ability to do so, which is ok. The good days, when they happen, are more than worth it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://anyakotler.com
• Instagram: @anyakotler
• Other: Upcoming Workshop: https://anyakotler.com/ireland-workshop