We recently connected with Milan Jilka and have shared our conversation below.

Milan, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I suppose that my act of learning creatively has been in constant motion and progression since I was in middle school. In those years, I remember being enamored by album cover art, and I would dutifully attempt to recreate album covers (from bands like Duran Duran, Erasure, and Depeche Mode) as faithfully as I could. In doing so, I think I was trying to discover how these images were made, as well as trying to pay respectful admiration to them by recreating them as accurately as possible. As I went through high school, and then eventually through both BFA and MFA programs in painting and drawing, I slowly amassed more skills in understanding not only how to technically create forms, but to continually expand on my personal ideas and interests that would take form on a 2D surface. In retrospect, there are two main components that I have continually explored as I’ve developed as an art-maker. First, the act of looking and examining has been an essential component in understanding the world around me. In the last few years, I have attempted to be more consciously aware of the world around me instead of passively letting the world go by. It’s through this looking and examining, that I feel, has contributed much to my development as an artist. Second, being thoughtfully engaged in my practice has been a source of constant progression in the work that I have been able to create. For me, being thoughtfully engaged means to be constantly posing queries, exploring new ideas, and immersing myself without hesitation into the artmaking process. For example, in the last couple of years, I have been examining both patterning and natural flora, and more specifically, how these two components can be conceived and developed on the 2D surface. Through this exploration, I have been able to develop a body of work that is extremely interesting and exciting to me.
As far as obstacles are concerned, I’ve definitely had my fair share of them that would drive me away from my passion of creating art. However, in retrospect, these obstacles also helped push and guide me to the point I am at today in my creative life. I’m glad to have learned what I have learned and the pace at which I’ve learned these things. What is the most important for me, is that I keep learning and expanding as a person and an artist.

Milan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am both an artist and art educator currently practicing and teaching in NW Arkansas.I have lived here for the past six years with my two young children. Prior to this, I had lived in Denton, TX, NYC, Toronto, Edmonton, and Thun, Switzerland (where I was born). My parents are both originally from India, but also have lived in Uganda and Canada. I have a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Windsor, Ontario, an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and a PhD in Art Education from the University of North Texas in Denton. I have been seriously engaged in my creative practice since my time pursuing an MFA, which was coincidentally when I first began my art teaching career. Through the years, I have been actively researching and creating works that reflect my personal interests and explorations of the world around me. In the last couple of years, in particular, I have been interested in exploring ideas and imagery around both patterning and the natural world as the basis for the paintings that I create. Besides having a website and social media platform to showcase the work that I have produced, I also attempt to be involved in art exhibitions as much as I possibly can. Two things that I am most proud of are, that I strive to continually maintain my art practice by being continually curious and excited about what I’m creating, and that I have developed and matured as an art educator in the past 23 years that I have been teaching. My goal as both an artist and art educator are to continually expand and develop, to get better at the things that I’m interested in doing in my life.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

The main goal or mission that I have developed toward in my creative journey involves continually being curious. Curiosity, whether through posing questions to myself, experimenting with medium or ideas, and/or taking chances, involves actively being “in the process.” Process, for me, is like being in constant motion; not settling on finalities and truths, but treating what I do in the act of creating something as an open-ended and ever-expanding activity. I find that the times that I am less creative, are also the times that I am not actively asking questions or immersing myself in the creative practice.

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

I think that it’s a great privilege in being an artist or a creative person. For me, the act of being allowed or feeling compelled to create something (sometimes out of nothing) that extends from oneself into the world and then back again, is a really amazing and wondrous thing. There’s also something special about being allowed to dwell in various spaces, to think abstractly, to look intently, to be actively in the act of creation, etc., that (it could be argued) do not happen in other professional fields. It is through these very things that inventive, creative, and wonderful expressions get to be conceived and reified in the world.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.milanjilka.com
• Instagram: @milanjilka.art