We were lucky to catch up with Kate Glasheen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kate, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

One of my entries into the Graphic Canon series was a comic adaptation of William Faulkner’s lesser known short story, The Hill. It was the fusion of my two loves, literature and comics. It also linked me to a hero of mine in Faulkner. As I Lay Dying was an incredibly pivotal book for me. The story was told through a myriad of voices, stream of conscious at times, and in defiance of the confines of punctuation as I was drilled to understand it. It was my first full encounter with a book that used every part of itself to tell its story and bucked what I had always been told proper writing looked like. The Hill was hard enough to find that my editor on the project (Russ Kick, RIP) had to dig for the collection that contained it in university libraries, and once found, sent me cell phone pictures on his flip phone of the each page of the story. Artists had free rein in our interpretations in the Graphic Canon series, but because of The Hill’s rarity at the time it was important to me to transcribe it in full. So now, through my adaptation, William Faulkner’s story is much more accessible than it was before. This project made me feel like I was a link in the chain of literature through time. It made me feel like I was a part of this thing that so enriched me, and now I was hopefully passing that torch on to some reader somewhere in some small way.

Another was with my exploration of my Dead Kings gallery work. In a nutshell, the Kings are ink drawings of rulers real and fabricated throughout the world and the centuries. Their purpose is to illustrate how bottomless the drive for power is, how weak it really is at its core, and how fully insane it is from the perspective of planetary survival. How no amount of wealth or power grants superiority to time, and as such, time is the only true king. My connection with art and my mother, an artist herself, was always there. My father though, as supportive as he was in my art making, it just wasn’t his world. However, history very much was. And with my Dead Kings work, it was a bridge between historical investigation and conceptual creation, and it felt so awesome to connect with my dad on this.

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

My mother was an artist herself, so I had the privilege of growing up in a home that valued the arts. While my father was not a visual guy, he was and is a voracious reader of literature and history and that influence has stuck with me every bit as much. I’ve been writing and drawing since the get-go thanks to them, and my brother, Sean, as well, who is like-minded and offered someone who was doing all these things better than me to chase after.

I was torn between pursuing literature and visual arts, but finally landed on pursuing a fine arts degree. I was accepted into Pratt Institute, and did my foundation years in their Utica, New York campus of Munson William Proctor. That was an amazing time with friends that are family to this day, and as someone who spent high school having art class one or two periods a week, it was crucially also my first experience being fully immersed in the arts, making stuff all day every day while surrounded by others doing the same.

The next step was finishing my education at Pratt’s Brooklyn campus which was a really excellent conceptual compliment to the technical education Utica drilled into me. From there I stayed in Brooklyn, walking dogs and handing out audio tours at MOMA to pay rent while I hatchet-jobbed my way in to the field. I had a few interests between comics, gallery shows, and illustration and tried get whatever work I could in all these things to varying degrees of success. I did get my first book published in this time, but it was all very trial-by-fire; as valuable as my education was towards art-making, I had very little idea of what to do with what was made once I was out of school. I do wonder how much easier things might have been if that was not the case.

I spent another decade trying to make these any of these things work while my location changed from Brooklyn, back up to my hometown of Troy, NY, and then eventually to Philadelphia, PA where I still live now. During this time, I contributed to several Star Wars collectors card series through Lucasfilm and Topps, Inc., I contributed to multiple volumes of the Graphic Canon series (Seven Stories Press) A Radical Shift of Gravity was published by Top Shelf (co-created by Nick Tapalansky), did some cover work with BOOM! Studios on their Adventure Time books, and had a handful of gallery exhibitions, including my Dead Kings collections with Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia PA.

I was still making too little money to reasonably survive on. I had less energy to work a full time creative job and work whatever other job on top of that to get by. Barely scraping by was one thing when I was young, but it started to hit me how bleak it was looking to get older this way. So I made the decision to try and get into tattooing. As I was starting my apprenticeship, I had given up on comics in general and specifically my latest proposal for a YA graphic novel called Constellations. My agent (Anjali Singh), however, had not and Holiday House Publishing wanted it where forty other publishers did not. So I juggled finishing that book and my apprenticeship– probably a high score on the “Most Stressful Periods of My Life” list. Constellations went on to garner several starred reviews and make a few Best Books of 2023 lists, while A Radical Shift of Gravity has been optioned for a feature film by Hidden Pictures. That’s given me the ability to keep going in comics, not because of any income that provides (comics are a brutal labor/wage trade), but far more because I finally got some of the professional affirmation I’d been chasing since I started out in this field. So now I tattoo while I work on my next graphic novel.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

If you think about the act of air pressure needing to find balance, like high pressure and low pressure areas exchanging until an equilibrium is found, I feel like that’s the mechanism at play with my art. I feel the drive to keep creating until enough of me exists outside of myself to fully explain myself. And that explanation is just as much for me as it is for those looking at my art; figuring out what I want to make and why is an act of internal processing. And when I say that, I don’t say it in the way where I think this information matters to most people or the arts at large or whatever, I just mean that on the micro level, in the small contained universe of myself, it matters to me. And I think I just keep going with this until I feel some sense of completion, that I know who I am and anyone who wants to know has all they need to know who I am should they care to look. And maybe I never feel that completion, but its pursuit is what’s driving my creation.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m actually currently trying to unlearn the past two decades of my art making. From my earliest memories up until I finished my BFA, art for me was an ally and an escape, it was therapy, entertainment, it was a lifeline in communicating the abstract and intangible, the feelings that exist in between the lines of verbal and written words. But attaching the yolk of survival to it bastardized the relationship. It muddied the purity of its function and changed my thought process in regards to what I make and why on levels I’m sure I’m not even fully aware of yet. This loss is profound for me, and it took a long time to even realize that’s what has happened. Now that tattooing is affording me some breathing room, I’m on a mission to try to turn the clock back on this, repave over some of the ruts in my brain and see if it’s not too late to get back to where I started with art.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.katiecrimespree.com
• Instagram: @katiecrimespree @katie_glash_tattoo
• Other: https://www.paradigmarts.org/collections/kate-glasheen
  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722028/constellations-by-kate-glasheen/
  https://www.topshelfcomix.com/mobile/catalog/a-radical-shift-of-gravity/1030
  https://variety.com/2022/film/news/a-radical-shift-of-gravity-movie-adaptation-1235451903/

Image Credits

Sarah Smothers
Jason Chen