We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kuzana Ogg a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kuzana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I’m an admirer of ordinary beauty; in people, landscapes, language, poetry, architecture, and such. I remix new observations with my own truths, distilling form and color into a vocabulary unique to me.

For example, when I was about 5-I was told not to play on the marble steps of my grandparents’ home. One day I carried my sister piggy-back up the stairs and we were laughing so hard, I fell over and chipped my tooth! If you look at some of my work, you’ll see teeth portrayed, and in other paintings, you’ll see stairs.

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

My early years in India were flooded with noise, color, and fragrance. My grandparents’ home in Bombay was somewhat buffered from the outside chaos of people and cars by lush gardens. This paradise of quietly growing coconut trees, exotic lilies, and always newly turned wet red earth was invaded hourly by squalling parrots and barbarous crows. Their cries filtered through the foliage as though they were the softened echoes of the havoc on the streets.

Going anywhere in Bombay requires infinite patience and time. A simple errand to get a plastic bucket devolves into an all-day affair involving epic traffic jams and monsoon-huge waves crashing over the seawall. But, even as a very small child—I was easily distracted by the lurid Bollywood billboards rushing past the car window and promises of notebooks with endpapers of fuchsia block-printed flowers and new erasers in the shape of rabbits or fried eggs.

Bombay is steeped in perfume—from yards of jasmine and roses garlanding doors, to sandalwood burning at the fire temple, to a hundred different lunches cooking at the same time—there is always fragrance in the air. It might be ordinary, like freshly watered concrete walls or the starched muslin saris of nursery school teachers; or extraordinary, like the scent of raw silk stored in the recesses of a teak wardrobe. Its presence everywhere instilled the conviction in me that just as fragrance occupies a stratum deeper than sight or sound, majesty is also hidden beneath the surface of things, and majesty is an anchor that restrains and balances the chaos of experience. It is the primordial root that underlies even the most discordant things.

The general pandemonium of Bombay in the early 1970s serves as a visual alphabet. Through my travels and migrations, this alphabet continues to recombine, developing into a painterly language. In any form of communication, I have found the principles of restraint and balance to be the most formidable and eloquent.

In 2021, I completed a 4 year residency at El Zaguan on Canyon Road, and moved to Los Alamos. I have participated in seven residencies: in Minnesota, Sri Lanka, China, Scotland and Latvia. In February of 2020, I was in residence at The Old School House in Hrisey, Iceland. My paintings have been included on the sets of both television shows and feature films—the most recent of which are Sprung, Where’d You Go Bernadette, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Southpaw and My All-American. My first solo museum exhibition was Oil at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art in 2014. A second solo followed shortly thereafter, Rev Zero at the Bakersfield Museum of Art in 2015. My work continues to be exhibited, published, and collected both privately and publicly, nationally and internationally.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

learning about others, communicating with self,

: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I love it when people see things in my work that are either based on a shared experience or something completely different from what I had intended. The dialog is enriching and thrilling to me.

Contact Info:

• Website: KuzanaOgg.com
• Instagram: @kuzanaogg
• Other: Representing Galleries https://gebertcontemporary.com/artists/132/ https://kcontemporaryart.com/artist/?id=71665&artist=Kuzana%20Ogg https://www.tinneycontemporary.com/represented-artists/kuzana-ogg http://www.weinbergerfineart.com/kuzana-ogg-1 https://boxheartgallery.com/art-artists/all-exhibiting-artists/kuzana-ogg/ https://www.artsy.net/partner/8th-ave-gallery/artists/kuzana-ogg