We were lucky to catch up with Greg Volker recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Greg, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

I realized that if I was going to make it as an artist or musician I had to be all-in. No compromise. I was well on my way and then I got chose the wrong partner. A great mom to our son and a great person, just not the person for me if I was going to be able to go all-in. RISK, as it is seen, was not what she wanted. So when our son was born I slowly but surely let my creative work slip away. Totally my choice. All-in for the family. But, I basically imploded under the weight of trying to be someone I wasn’t. The marriage fell apart. I was living in a place that had no real music or art scene happening and found myself stuck. Waiting for my son to get older and go to college so I could leave there and move to a place where I could get back into my creative life again. Now I am perusing both my artwork and music. For me, to do this effectively, I have to be all-in. All my energy, funds, time, and effort goes towards the goal of being a “professional”. Meaning, making my living and achieving my goals with my work. To do this, RISK cannot exist. If there are materials, tools, the studio I need, an instrument, musicians, anything I need to get me there, I have to invest in those things. If there is a “money job” i get offered that doesn’t line up with the end goal I need to pass. To not do so hinders my ability to move forward. In this way, there is no such thing as RISK. In fact, TO NOT DO SO IS THE RISK.

In grad-school at SFAI, I had a professor for seminar one semester, Sam Tchakalian. I found him an incredibly supportive person albeit, a very gruff and direct one! He pulled no punches when it came to his critique (which was exactly why I went to grad-school). One class a woman had her work on the wall and when asked a question. I forget the exact question now but I’ll never forget his reaction! With the residue from probably his 6th espresso of the day coating his tongue dark chocolate brown and spit flying across the room he shouted, “RISK?!!! RISK? There’s no such thing as RISK if you’re an artist! That’s your job. There is only RISK!!! Or there is nothing at all.” I remember it like it was yesterday and I remind myself of it when I am faced with an expensive or difficult decision.

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

I am a sculptor and musician based in the California Building in the Northeast Arts District. I started in the arts late. Through high school I was into sports but my mother’s side of the family had a lot of art in it. My grandfather, Ted Ptashne was the concert master for the Minnesota Orchestra and started the House of Note Music Store. My grandmother was an opera singer whose career ended short as it did for many women of her generation when they started a family. She filled their home with art ind design of impeccable taste. Her mother and father, Sophie and Henry Supak where also supporters of the arts and together they collected a small but amazing collection of work mostly from local Minnesota leftist artists of the mid 20th century. Their collection had a huge effect on me but I didn’t realize it until much later.

Once I got interested in art attending the University of Minnesota, I realized the power art could have when I revisited a painting in my grandparents collection. A small painting by Hans Groper, mostly a cartoonist, is an image of women peasant farmworkers marching with wooden farm implements over their shoulders bathed in this beautiful orange sunset kind of light, It wasn’t terribly well painted but as a child I knew there was something there in the imagery I couldn’t figure out. But I stared at it often. Then as my art education developed I started to understand the symbolism. That is what hooked my in. I continued my education at The San Francisco Art Institute in 1990 for grad school. And while I was there started playing guitar and writing songs forming my first band, Deer. My new band Greg Volker and The River play around the Twin City area and are going on our first tour in April of 2024. I moved back home to Minneapolis in 2018.

I do sculpture of various medium including clay, cast metal(iron and bronze), etc… and have started a new series of work I call Clay Paintings. In my sculptural work I use a very basic almost generic human form as a starting point for most pieces. In the clay paintings I make a small figure, 3-5 inches tall and set in on a flat, stretched piece of paper, size is up to 48″ x 48″, and rig a system so water drips on the figure melting it and the water carries the clay across the paper depositing it in some pretty amazing ways making a semi-perminent image on the paper. I have started going with the semi-perminent aspect of these works by putting copper filings in the clay. They are dispersed across the paper as well and over time will change color to its oxidized blue-green color.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

First of all, non-creatives is a term I wish would go away. Creativity is everywhere. Whether someone is throwing paint at a canvas, developing new software, new physics, new accounting ideas, new ways to grow better crops, these are all the same creative process and I don’t really see a difference in their inherent creative nature from one to another.

I think this notion that only artists are creative is problematic for non-studio art-creative people. I think there is so much romanticized thinking about what it means to be an artist. The depictions of artists in movies, media, and by most of the art community itself give a very unreal portrayal of most artists. Not all of course but most working artists I know don’t have time, money or energy to look and act like the cliche artist. Creativity is everywhere.

Too much is made of “talent” as well. Yes to have some, even a lot of natural ability is necessary but it’s only the first step. Once you’ve walked through that door, it’s about working as hard as you can to develop that talent. I would much rather someone says,” oh you’ve worked so hard and come so far” than, “you’re so talented”. I thought as a young artist that there was always enough room for a talented artist. Some gallery owner will find you and the talent would get you there. But, there are so many talented people out there, I mean a lot!! And with the decline of the old school gallery system, we no longer have the people who are out there searching for talent in that way. So we have to self-promote and to me this is a fundamental problem in the arts today. We no longer have the Gertrude Stein type people out there curating, explaining and presenting the work to the public and collectors. It has been left to the artists themselves to promote and show and it seems to me that, in most cases, artists are not the best at doing this. Many artists do not have the skills or connections to execute the business side of the art world. And if one does, the time to do all that work takes away from their time developing the work itself.

It’s not really a romantic thing to be a working artist from my viewpoint. It’s hard work, rejection on an almost daily basis, frustrating, grueling, and often lonely. But when the little victories come along, the payoff is pretty huge. But, again that describes most challenges someone with a vision for something goes through. Artist or not.

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

A big part of me thinks that the studio artist scene is over, or at least in a major decline that I don’t see a way out of. In Minneapolis and other cities who have had major art scenes in the past, the loss of a centrally located gallery scene is a serious blow to local artist survival. With the loss of the downtown, 1st Avenue galleries to development, that scene was lost, much as it has been in other cities like San Francisco. The vibe a scene like that puts out feeds all parts of what is needed for a studio artists to survive. Gallery crawls have a massive effect on visibility and publicity for a city’s artists. It is so much harder to promote a show and actually creates a competition between events that is not constructive. One major location where the city can go on a Thursday night to see a bunch of galleries at one time creates a more cooperative environment. The big party aspect of it creates a fun vibe for the general public. We have Art-A-Whirl here but honestly, it’s not so much about the top studio artists showing their work anymore. More about food and music. Many of the top artists don’t even open their studios for it.

Other issues such as the loss of so much art education in the schools, social media attention spans, blockbuster exhibition mentality in big museums, and the advent of AI. You can call me a luddite, (which I would not take as an insult knowing who they where and what they stood for) and it has been said of many advances in technology over the last couple centuries like photography, but the images AI will be putting out in a couple generations with one giant brain the size of the planet will be so much more advanced and interesting than what one artists brain can put out that the actual nature of what art is will change in an unprecedented way and in my view it’s a tragedy.

What can society do about it? Well, it has to want to do something about it. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. So, we’re hooped! But, please, keep banging away at it. The best thing an artists can do is to keep working. Working hard. Challenge yourself. Be uncomfortable. Push hard.The odds are stacked against you but you certainly aren’t going to get anywhere if you quit.

Contact Info:

• Website: gregvolkermusic.com and coming soon: gregvolkerarts.com
• Instagram: @gregvolkermusic, @gregvolkerarts
• Facebook: Greg Volker, Greg Volker Arts, Greg Volker Music

Image Credits
Photo of me on the steps with guitar is by Ilia Stockert The rest are by me so no credit necessary