The following are snatches of conversation between Shanna Kunz, Shawn Rossiter, Steve Coray,  and Brandon Cook at the Eccles Community Art Center on June 2nd. The occasion is the hanging of Kunz’s one-person show to open that Friday, June 6th. The artists have come together to talk about art; hang pictures; shoot images. Cook, Kunz’s studio partner, is taking his one-man show down while Kunz is bringing hers in. Both take advantage of the opportunity to have Coray shoot slide and digital images of their work.

Setting: Beautiful sunny day, sunlight coming through windows. A mess of paintings, cords and lights fills the Art Center. Staff tries their best to stay out of the way and not rush the artists along.

Enter Kunz, laden with work.

ROSSITER : (offering a hand) So, how do you feel emotionally about this show you’re about to put up?

KUNZ: It’s a pretty big deal. To have a good, solid show in my hometown.

You see, I started out as a watercolorist, a little, almost decorative watercolorist years and years ago. Then I went down to Snow College and took a design workshop and some figure classes and then I thought “No I don’t want to be this decorative painter.” So I went back to school in Logan to study with Adrian Van Suchtelens, juggling that with teaching and kids and grandkids. And it was really hard work. When people have seen your work before and have known you as a certain decorative artist . . . well it was really important to show who I was.

ROSSITER: This is kind of your ten-year reunion and you have to show your classmates what you’ve done?

KUNZ: Yeah, I’ve worked really really hard to try and be substantial. To do something substantial. I’ve worked really hard at it.

COOK: She’s no longer the neighborhood watercolorist (interjected as he passes by, painting in hand).

ROSSITER: So, what’s the time span of this work you’re bringing in?

KUNZ: Most of them were done in the past two or three months.

COOK: Yeah, she’s cranked out a lot of stuff.

KUNZ: It’s been insane.

ROSSITER: So it looks like the majority of these are oil paintings.

KUNZ: Yeah, I’m loving it. I am completely in love with oils. I don’t know if it’s the challenge, or the viscosity, or what, but I never thought I would ever be able to give up my watercolors.
(pointing to one piece propped against the wall) That’s one of my very first oils. Painted real thin. Almost like a watercolor. I work the exact same way in watercolor as I do in oil. Glaze after glaze after glaze.

ROSSITER: Why do you think that is?

KUNZ: I’m not sure. I don’t know what is right and wrong in oils. Chris Terry [oil painter and instructor at Utah State University] never painted in front of us and Adrian [Van Suchtelens] never worked in oils. Through all my studying, no one ever said, “This is how you oil paint.”

ROSSITER: Does that make you nervous or does that make you glad?

KUNZ: It makes my paintings look like my paintings. I don’t know. It could be negative, it could be positive.

Because I’ve watercolored for eleven years, the only thing I know how to do is “oil paint” that way.

When I first started oil painting my objective was to translate the watercolors into the oils. It was really important to me because no one took watercolors seriously and I really think they should.

My watercolors are quite different than a traditional watercolor because they have a lot of color. My objective with watercolor has been to develop the space the same way an oil painter develops space. With watercolor you have to know your pigment, what will go over what, your sediment. Which makes me a very methodical worker. I already have the image assembled in my head before it ever goes to the paper or canvas. I build these parameters before I sit down to paint the painting.

ROSSITER: So you don’t think a change in medium has necessarily changed your work?

KUNZ: Not really. Everything’s about space – and I know you can’t see it with watercolor because you’re dealing with a piece of paper — but even with watercolor I’m thinking of sediment and I’m thinking of actual physical space. When I use my cobalts and my real heavy sediment paints there becomes an actual texture to it and a depth compared to the transparent paints. Now I can do that with oil paints and I can build things up. And I’m just having so much fun with it.

ROSSITER: So here you are, you wanted people to take watercolors seriously and you’re giving them up.

KUNZ: I think that in the long run I won’t give them up. I think I’m more on some little obsession right now. I think I owe that obsession as many years as what I’ve given to watercolors.

ROSSITER: You mentioned that in both cases your process is the same.

KUNZ: Sometimes I despise the fact that I work so methodically . . . but I don’t have it in me to do it another way. Every time I even try to do something different it still comes back.

ROSSITER: Being methodical?

KUNZ: Yes. I don’t think my paintings are formula by any means but I’m very methodical about approach. I run through my thumbnails, look at the notes — “this palette” or “that palette”.

Because even before I go into the painting, I have an idea of what I want the overall feeling to be when you walk into it.

It’s not about each piece. Each piece is really important. They are the places I’ve camped in my whole life – the Uintahs – and I’ve been up there since I was a little girl and each place is important but the final image isn’t. It’s more about putting the whole group together and feeling it.

ROSSITER: You and Brandon both seem to have a strong attachment to place. Brandon has his Huntsville, you have your high Uintahs . . .

KUNZ: Our obsessions.

ROSSITER: Yeah, if you want to call it obsession, that works.

KUNZ: Well I think it’s about pounding it out. It’s pounding a certain series out. Like two years ago it was cottonwoods for me. Everything was about cottonwoods.

I like to take a series and work through them. When I work I always work in a series. High key, low key. High contrast, low contrast. I always work that way. Four to six going at a time. My most recent obsession has been high key.

ROSSITER: Why?

KUNZ: I learned this from Adrian. That’s how we learned in school, working in keys and working in color schemes and studying masters palettes and working that back into whatever your subject matter is. I’m doing the high key things because I feel I need to push things. I’m a relatively normal, traditional kind of person, and I would like to push my paintings farther than my personality is. Working in high key is a matter of getting past that invisible line called traditional. It’s a matter of me pushing something I would normally do in a low key because that’s the way I see it and getting outside of myself and doing the exact same thing — same palette — but in a high key.

ROSSITER: And that’s your goal?

KUNZ: Yeah, because that’s not how it – the scene – is. So I have to develop the skill to make it work as a painting.


CORAY: (turning from his camera for a moment) How does working with someone in the studio – and Brandon specifically — affect you?

KUNZ: We work together really well because we both approach paintings entirely differently. The way we jump into them is entirely different. But he helps me finish pieces all the time and I help him finish pieces.

CORAY: Has it changed your style? Have you evolved in a way you wouldn’t have otherwise?

COOK: I think Shanna and I hit it off really well because our influences were the same influences – both huge George Inness fans. We could tell just by our photography that we have the same eye for composition, our eyes are attracted to the same thing. So there were definitely similarities and that’s why we got to be friends originally. Then we were talking so much and then it became “Hey let’s be studio partners.” As far as an exchange I can’t say if there’s anything consciously going on but I think that you have to affect each other.

KUNZ: Probably someone else can look at our innate sense of design and be able to see crossovers between us where we don’t see it.

CORAY: Is it ever a negative to be working in the studio together?

KUNZ: Not for me.

COOK: There are so many benefits to having a studio partner. Sharing paints, canvas, keeping the ball rolling. I mean, this is her frame here. We’re going to take it off my piece and put it on hers. That’s wonderful.

ROSSITER: Okay, so do you guys ever tell each other “That’s crap!”

KUNZ & COOK: (simultaneously) Yeah.

KUNZ: He tries to do it easy, but we know each other so well that all he has to do is give me a look and I know he doesn’t like it.

ROSSITER: He’s not able to pull punches?

KUNZ: Yeah. He knows what works or doesn’t work and I can see it in him. And I think you (to Cook) know too — without me saying something — when something isn’t working.

COOK: What are you saying? You don’t like some of my stuff?

ROSSITER: How do you feel about changing your stuff, Shanna? Have you marketed yourself as a watercolor painter?

KUNZ: I think that I’ve been marketed as an image and not specifically as a watercolorist.

ROSSITER: The stream with the pines and . . .

KUNZ: Yeah, this year. But last year it was the cottonwoods. No, I just think there’s a feeling about them. They’re uneventful. They’re quiet. They’re quiet pieces.

It’s weird because my life is total chaos. I have six teenagers at my house all the time. I have nine step-grandchildren and any of them can be at my house anytime; and then family, sisters, nieces, nephews. My house is destroyed usually because I’m getting ready for a show and there are paintings everywhere. Total chaos. And you don’t see that in the paintings. They must be therapy.

ROSSITER: As you’re working, do you keep an audience in mind?

KUNZ: No (immediately, and then, almost as quickly). . . . Maybe my dad.

ROSSITER: Because that’s who you go camping with?

KUNZ: Yeah. That’s who matters the most to me. These are places my dad used to take us fishing to all the time.

ROSSITER: So is dad happy? Is he proud?

KUNZ: Oh yeah. (beaming)

(Exeunt all four artists, stomachs growling.  Works by Kunz & Cook intermingle on the gallery floor.  Dismayed staff enter to find the artists gone.)

Scene Two: nearby cafe, artists continue the conversation . . .

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.