Mapping the Artist: The First Year

It has been a pleasure for me to interview these amazing artists and poets, to set my “scientific tools” on their work, and to feel our hearts and minds grow closer in understanding and celebration of beauty. Every Saturday we have been able to say “Here Come the Poets.” And they have arrived with all their individual voices and splendor. We look forward to continuing our tradition in 2015.

By Kathabela Wilson

In order of appearance, thanks to the 15 artists/poets of 2014.

Susan Dobay

I listen to my intuition. An inside voice from deep within which tells me to use my talent and share my observations sometimes joyful, sometimes sad, and sometimes social in hope to wake up the positive constructive conscience…Full interview.

Lois P. Jones

There is a certain empathetic quality to being a poet which is both exquisite and painful. There is no day you are not a poet, even if you do not write for years…All artists are poets rendering the ineffable into different forms – painting, sculpture, dance or music. This for me is the essence of poetry…Full interview.

Just Kibbe

Mark my words. I am marking my territory. With each poem, I claim something as mine. Staking a claim is just the beginning. Will I fight for it? Will I ‘win’?…My thoughts are within a space; my poems are an attempt to map them…Full interview.

Sharon Hawley

I find inferences to human situations not directly related to the scene presented. On the surface of poems you see a distant mountain, a rock beside a stream…which most of you will never visit. If you do, I feel happy and gratified to have led you there. But if you also see a glimmer behind my mask…then I feel like the bridge builder and communicator I fantasize being…Full interview.

Alice Pero

Poetry is always a performance for me, a dance of words. I do not consciously combine art forms. I feel them as flowing from one to the next… If something is musical to my ears, it will come to me and I will write it down. There is no reason to be a writer. One just is…Full interview.

Chris Wesley

We are ghost chasers exploring the things that haunt us most…I’ve tried to walk away from being an artist multiple times because it can be a cruel and isolating way to live, but I couldn’t stay away. It felt like I was living the song Hotel California, being able to check out, but never leave…Full interview.

Ron Pettie

An artist can save what might disappear, that moment when a subject is at its best…like when I painted the sweeping meadow at the Huntington Library now under water as the new Chinese Garden…my early art was ​lost when all of my possessions were burnt by medical authorities as an overzealous precaution when I contracted polio at the age of twelve…Full interview.

Jean Sudbury

The plants and animals seem to communicate with me. I communicate back to them…I, like them, claim no ownership of anything I have created; I share the universal inspiration through my music, through my art, through my garden, and through my everyday life…From the beginning of my life, I have lived to share the living culture of artistry…Full interview.

Toti O’Brien

Our chance to survive is…to…value one another, listen to one another…My grandmother, a simple housewife, gave me the earliest art lessons. She liked writing letters. She always said: if the writer is crying, then the reader will cry…Full interview.

Elsa Frausto

…sometimes I am a night bird… at 4 am… am I a poet at such an early hour? I’ve been awakened by a line or gone to sleep with one and even if not written, the poem is there like an unfinished dream…Full interview.

Maja Trochimczyk

With poetry, first we prove our own existence, then we document the “real” world inside and around us – that has nothing to do with the “reality” created and perpetuated in the media – and then we share the joy of words creating worlds with other poets, listeners and readers…Full interview.

Mina Kirby

When I play the guitar and sing, notes add a dimension that cannot be experienced in any other way. I speak through art and photography to send a wordless message, and often to illustrate my poems…When I was teaching, I sang songs I wrote for my students about mathematics, opening their minds to doing new and unexpected things…Full interview.

Don Baird

Poets, artists, and musicians are…the ear to the railroad tracks listening to the thunder of humanity tromping on the earth — they are key to raising general awareness of humanity while connecting individuals to a greater and higher-self expression of life…Full interview.

Teresa Mei Chuc

When I am reading my poetry about my family’s experiences immigrating to the U.S. from Vietnam, or about the Vietnam War, it is deeply healing for me when I feel the audience listening. I realized this when I began to feel a physical change in my body…Full interview.

Robert Stewart

Robert Stewart is an inspiration and support to the artistic community here in Pasadena, at the Colonnade Gallery, and beyond…When I asked him my questions I did so knowing he would be inventive, rebellious and strong. He has not disappointed me. Full interview.

The tradition continues…

Happy New Year,

From Kathabela