We recently connected with Kevin Dera and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kevin, thanks for joining us today. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

As an artist, vacations come as you want them to. As enticing as that may sound, I find my friends and fellow artists in the realm of art making either never taking a break, or knowing exactly how to. I found my vacations to be ones that allow me to connect to my senses properly again, be it at a residency or on a walk in the neighborhood, a vacation can have so many opportunities to present itself.

When it comes to how I keep things going it comes down to giving myself the proper time and space to execute my thoughts and ideas in my studio practice. So when it comes to taking a vacation I know I can let go of my studio. My recommendation for artists who are struggling to find themselves in their practice or in their life in general would be to slow down either in the image they are making or in the things they are pursuing, they might realize something about themselves and take the time off to focus on that instead.

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 Kevin Dera, born and raised in Adana, Turkey, I’m a Turkish-American artist who completed his BA in Studio Art and Environmental Studies at Knox College in 2024.

I took my leap into my identity as an artist as I was finishing high school. I was educated in classical fine art and Baroque drawing techniques focusing on the figure during my high school years. I was in the ateliers of Ilgin Erdem and Ulku Kaya Karabiber from 2016 to 2019.

During my time at Knox College, concept and abstraction were introduced to me as a way of making and thinking. The landscape became unavoidable and with my painting professor Lynette Lombard and my mentor Tony Gant’s rigor and compassion, I was able to reach a new space to construct images and experiences.

After the 2023 earthquake in the southern region of Turkey I was devastated. Not only because of the destruction and loss, but my proximity to it. During the creation of my exhibit Corrupt Optimism came together as a means of reconstructing Adana from my memory. The place once so known became so distant, the streets in which I lived through were changed forever. Installation captured the physical, political and cultural shattering as an art form in these memory landscapes (memoryscapes).

The scale with which I worked in this exhibition allowed me to see the potential of what a drawing can be and it drives my work to this day. Nowadays what I make ebbs and flows between inwards investigation and the larger questions of humanity in our political landscape. Questions of identity and landscape coexist in my studio as I hope to dig into questions I’ve not yet asked.

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

At the beginning of my journey to become an artist I was told to not care about the studies that I had made. I found myself throwing out pages and pages of drawings. The idea of letting go so furiously was so vital to learning at the time that I didn’t even think what I was getting rid of. However during my final year in college my friend and mentor Owen Laurion said “sometimes the sketch is the work,” and that was profound coming from a potter.

I think about the drawings I threw out as I was learning how to draw the figure, and the many sketches I got rid of as I was conceptualizing a different piece. Some of those were probably directions I could have taken.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

The first time I was commissioned I asked for $250. I asked the client if they could pay via venmo, so I sent him my venmo account information. I was a number off in my user name. The money went to someone else. As a student artist that was a lot of money at the time. I learned to be careful that day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kevinderastudio.squarespace.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hi.its.kev/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5nB1HW9tfIWP19xfRPBXEQ