We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kelly Reaves a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kelly , thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout
I just quit my job! I’m very frugal, probably to a fault, so I’ve saved enough money that I was able to give myself a couple months off as a sort of self-imposed sabbatical. I became pretty burnt out at art handling after doing it full time for almost ten years, and I saw online that UPS was looking for seasonal package car drivers. That job has appealed to me since I started art handling because the quick pickup and delivery aspect of art handling was always my favorite part of the job. I like moving around out in the world. I like the *light* physicality of it… driving and walking around all day vs. carrying heavy crates and crawling around on my hands and knees… so I applied for the job, and they hired me because of my truck driving experience. I didn’t really realize just how much “moving around in the world” I was going to be doing, though. They had me delivering 300-400 packages a day and walking 12 – 15 miles a day in the process. I was working 12 hour shifts, five days a week, and coming home feeling like I was hit by a train. So when the seasonal position ended I found myself very relieved — I didn’t pursue a full-time position because I felt like I would’ve had to abandon art making if I’d gone for it. Or, very possibly, simply keeled over and died.
Anyway, I have a solo show coming up at the University of St. Francis’ art gallery in Joliet, IL, so I needed some time off to work on that. Long story short, to avoid burnout, I think we just need to take breaks. Veg out. Go for hikes. And sometimes that means quitting your job. Or abandoning your social life or other obligations for a little while. Stop saying “yes” to everything. If I’m burnt out in the studio, which I rarely am because I don’t get in there as much as I’d like, I’ll just start a new drawing. Or experiment with a new material. Or switch from scrolling Instagram to perusing art books. Ingesting art content is important for inspiration and context but we have to remember that there was a way to do it, a healthier way probably, before phones. When I was in college, when I would get tired of working on paintings, I would play music. I loved jamming with friends over beers. I miss that. But yea, just mix it up! Don’t forget to have fun!
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve always been super creative. My path as a visual artist has been pretty clear since I first picked up a crayon, but figuring out how to fund it has been the tricky part. I went to magnet art high school in Florida, then a fancy art school in Chicago, then focused on saving up money while working in bars for most of my twenties. During that time I also got a somewhat useless masters degree in arts journalism and opened a little artist-run project space with friends for fun. Eventually I got tired of all that stuff so I pivoted to art handling, and did that for about a decade before getting tired of that, too. Painting is really the only thing I haven’t gotten tired of. Nothing feels better than resolving a tricky painting. So, right now I’m kind of cosplaying as a full-time artist while I figure out my next move. I have my second solo show coming up (the first one took about 23 years of trying, and now I feel like I’m on a roll!) at the University of St. Francis’ art gallery in Joliet, IL. It’ll be up February 8 through March 19, so that’s very exciting. I’m very lucky that people do buy my paintings, I just don’t pump them out fast enough to make ends meet through sales… yet.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
In the arts, you have to make connections with people if you want your work to be seen. That can be tricky for those of us who are introverts. When I realized that going to all the parties and openings and impressing people with my winning personality isn’t gonna be my ticket to stardom, I made connections by writing about art and promoting other artists. I’m a little awkward socially but I’m a good writer and a decent hype-man, so I used my strengths. I rented a space with my bartending money and showed the work of other emerging artists whose work I liked. We became like a social club – we had casual little salon-type drawing parties… all sorts of workshops… it was really fun and I met a ton of different types of people through that who I still have meaningful connections with now. We need to support each other. That’s how we’ll all thrive. So my advice is to figure out what your strengths are and use them to connect with people you admire.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
Generally, it makes more sense to focus on or invest in your strengths. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you can’t get better. Why not try to be the best? BUT if there’s something you’re bad at and you’re interested in getting better, for any reason, go for it! Life experiences can create a ripple effect and even if one pursuit doesn’t work out the way you’d hoped, it’ll often cause unexpected positive side-effects.
In high school and college and for many years after that, I considered myself a painter, first and foremost. I made representational oil paintings based on digital collages of video stills. After a while, and maybe without even realizing it, I kind of got stuck in a rut. People weren’t responding to my work the way I wanted them to, and in hindsight now I think it’s because I was over-conceptualizing and over-planning the paintings so they were coming out a little stale. Art school will do that to you. But then a boss/mentor of mine forwarded an email to me about a hotel that was looking to buy drawings and paintings that were made on their stationary, and it was just thin white regular copy paper-type stuff so my mind went to pen and ink instead of my usual go to, oil paint. It still ended up puckering like crazy from the ink but that’s not the point. In fact, I ended up liking the puckers. But simply using black ink instead of oil paint just broke open my mind in a way. I only had one color and I was limited by the shape of the nib of the pen. So I made it my goal to make as many different marks as I could possibly make with it, and that limitation was astoundingly inspiring, and fun! I ended up completely changing my artistic style, my methodology, everything, after that small series of drawings. I make intuitive abstract drawings and paintings now. And it’s basically because I stepped out of my comfort zone (paint) and made some (in hindsight) really bad drawings. Now, whenever I’m going through some heavy personal stuff, I revert back to only using black ink and it takes months to work my way back to paint. It’s kind of bizarre. But it works for me right now. It almost feels like baptizing myself and wiping clean the slate every time. It certainly gets me out of ruts.
Contact Info:
- Website: kellyreaves.com
- Instagram: @9_inch_snails
