We recently connected with Kuzana Ogg and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kuzana, so excited to have you with us today, particularly to get your insight on a topic that comes up constantly in the community – overcoming creativity blocks. Any thoughts you can share with us?
If you’re immersed and observant of your surroundings; the shape of a car’s headlights, the rhythm of someone’s fingers as they text while waiting for the cashier at the supermarket, the new roots on your house plants; then you have a consistent supply of varying material, specific and available to you.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I was born in Bombay.
The first years of my life were divided between the ancestral home of my grandfather, surrounded by lush gardens and groves of coconut trees, and my grandmother’s exquisite Worli sea face residence.
It was as an art student at SUNY Purchase that I met my husband and began the work in love and paint of revisiting the garden of my childhood.
In addition to painting, I work with vintage and exotic textiles. I like to study the origin and development of textile decoration and manipulation; blockprint, shibori, sashiko and pleating for example. At the moment, I’m very interested in jogakbo; the Korean form of patchwork using flat felled seams and ramie (a fabric created from nettles). I saw it when we were in South Korea teaching English in the 1990s, and found it uniquely beautiful.
I love travelling; especially to cloudy, rainy countries. I’ve participated in eight residencies: national and international. My paintings have been included on sets of both television shows and feature films—the most recent of which are Sprung, Bloodline, 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.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Daily studio practice, organization, and perseverance.
Find a way to be creative on a daily basis. This could be collecting images on your phone of shapes and colors you like, cooking and presenting a meal beautifully, or noticing a leaf turning color on the tree outside your window. Every act of observation and documentation renders your creativity more flexible and fluid.
Learn to organize your studio materials, your finished pieces, and supporting documents. Do this on a daily basis and it will save you both time and effort. Prepare yourself for successful interactions with gallerists and collectors by knowing your inventory and pricing.
Perseverance is absolutely the most necessary quality for any creative. It takes dedication and supreme amounts of effort to train your hands to produce what you see in your mind. It takes constant introspection and huge reserves of patience to develop as an artist. Do what is authentic to you.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I’d welcome an opportunity to collaborate with clothing or interior designers. I’d love to see my paintings as textiles for the fashion industry or as luxury wallpapers for example. Please contact me via my website KuzanaOgg.com with your projects,
Contact Info:
- Website: KuzanaOgg.com
- Instagram: @kuzanaogg
