Tom Plummer employed a circuitous route to his current station as a professional artist. Not many of the artists profiled on The Krakens boast a Harvard Ph.D. or published works with titles like German Realism of the Twenties or Film and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Plummer lives in Utah.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. My career as an artist began about four years ago. I had previously had a career in academia, obtaining a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard. From graduate school I took a faculty position in German at the University of Minnesota and was almost immediately drawn into early German cinema. When I saw the film, Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, I was stunned. Nothing I had ever read or seen twisted my mind like that film, the story of a mad psychiatrist and his somnambulist patient. The painted sets of the film in black and white, with oblique angles, ill-fitting costumes, angled lighting, and stylized gestures just blew my mind. Both my teaching and research crisscrossed with expressionism a number of times. When I began painting after retirement, I returned to my roots in early 20th century German art, where I had first encountered the collages of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield and the colorful paintings of the Bridge and the Blue Rider. My paining style, consequently, inclines to strong colors and abstraction.

Describe your latest work. More recently I have tried to expand my painting style, taking German New Objectivity of the Weimar era as a model. While it is more realistic than German expressionism, it shares a passion for color and distortion. I have begun expanding my painting from watercolor into acrylics, which I like for the brilliant colors that are possible and experimented with applying paint to glassine and fabrics to change the quality of the paint itself.

You have written, “I have struggled to paint with emotion.” Explain. My entire training, from my earliest years, was toward academics in the sense of research and critical writing. I lived in a rational, logical world. Yes, I worked with German Expressionism and New Objectivity in my early career, but as an academic, not as an artist. My parents were educators, but creating art was not part of their world. I learned to appreciate art, but as an observer and as an academic, not as an artist. When I began painting I had breakthroughs into expressionist style right away, but I always tried to retreat to a coloring-book style. Approaching art in an irrational way frightened me. Readers who have spent their life as artists may not understand what I’m saying. Letting go of control, just sloshing paint onto a canvas or paper scared me. Marian Dunn, my teacher, recognized that I was struggling, and one night in class, as I was trying to paint “inside the lines,” she said, “That’s not what you do.” She snatched the brush from my hand, smooshed it into a gob of green paint, and sloshed a wide swath across my paper. “That’s what you do,” she said. My real breakthrough into the irrational side came when I was hypnotized in a comedy show in Las Vegas. I did not plan to be hypnotized, I just wanted to watch a crazy show with 2000 other people. Without disclosing details, that’s where I learned to trash boundaries, rules, inhibitions, and anxieties. I learned to take mental journeys to dead artists, to talk to them about my struggles, what to do when I was stuck. They always gave me hell and sent me back to my canvas with new ideas.

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Laura Gunn is an artist who paints, “a lot of flowers and other stuff, too”. Gunn also creates quilting weight cotton with her artwork that she licenses with and sells through Michael Miller Fabrics. Her work has been featured at West Elm, Design Sponge, and on Fox’s New Girl. She lives with her husband and three kids in the Washington, D.C. area.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. I’ve been painting and making things since I could hold a crayon. My mother is an artist, and our brightly colored walls were always covered with art. She was always very generous with her art supplies. As a child, I spent endless hours in her studio. I would paint or decoupage any blank surface I could find–a lampshade, a fireplace screen, whatever. Even then, it was all about color. I was fascinated by the power of color to transform a space. After leaving for college, I developed my skills through art classes, even as I worked toward my degree in sociocultural anthropology. Later, as a young, sleep-deprived mother, I would always carve away a section of my dining room for a studio. Art supplies were as much of a staple as groceries. Over the years my creative interest focused more and more on painting. I found that of all my creative pursuits, painting gave me the closest relationship with color. Now I am always contemplating my next painting, and when inspiration hits I have to go with it.

Talk about color. I’ve always been a bit obsessed with color. When I paint, I play with color. I create just the right amount of contrast and harmony. All it takes is a few strokes of the right color to change the mood of an entire piece. I love the spontaneity of the process. I love bringing colors together through layering. After developing a texture on the canvas, I layer color over color in ways that catch the eye. Before I even start on the main subject of the painting, I create a rich background that is full of little surprises. I then focus on the subject, which is usually something that offers a lot of flexibility, such as a flower or a skyscape. I change the shade, shape, and composition, as I feel moved.

Where did you grow up? I grew up in Hayward, California, near San Francisco. I now live in the Washington D.C. area with my husband and three children. I try to bring a bit of warm, artistic California here to the Capitol Region. Although I miss California, I love our home here. And I find plenty of inspiration for my paintings in the natural beauty of this area.

How has the commercial side of your business developed? After initially experimenting with painting, I ended up with a few pieces that could get the attention of collectors. A friend of mine had a boutique and offered to show my art. It was a great opportunity. My artwork was well received, which inspired me to develop my business further. After starting out selling originals on Etsy and through word of mouth, I was approached by an fine art publisher. Since then, I have worked with New Era Portfolio, which sells limited edition prints of my work. Through them, I’ve seen my work featured in some interesting places, such as One Kings Lane and West Elm. I also license my artwork to Michael Miller Fabrics, which uses my paintings on quilting weight cotton. I became acquainted with them through my sister-in-law who is a fabric designer. When I approached them, they were very excited to print my floral paintings on fabric. Most quilting weight cotton is now designed digitally, so my hand-painted designs give my fabric a unique style. In addition to licensing my work, I sell originals and prints of my work on my website and locally. I continue to explore new avenues in my art and in my business. Both processes are demanding and exciting. However, what is most satisfying to me in all of this is to see how others love and appreciate how my creations add life and beauty to their spaces.

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Natalie Wood is an MFA candidate in Digital Art at the University of Oregon and graduated from BYU. Wood lives in Oregon.

Tell us about your evolution as an artist. In my previous work I was interested in memory, specifically how memory is inherently shifting and intangible. I would reflect back on childhood memories such as planting flowers with my mother, or the crystals that hung in our kitchen window casting rainbows, and I wanted so badly to relive these moments through my art. My work revolved around re-creating these memories but the pieces would fall short of how the experience really felt. They lacked in smell, touch, sound and I could not find the right balance of sharpness and blurriness that memories teeter between. So I stopped thinking about re-creation but instead imagined experiences in that might happen in the future, such as what it would be like to travel to space or change my identity. In this way, I did not have an emotional connection to the moments in the same way I did with the memory pieces, because the events I was playing out never really happened. All the while I was experimenting with video, gifs, screenshots, and found objects to convey these experiences. This began to evolve into what I am currently working on, which is embodying elements of those childhood memories and attempting to create immersive spaces that feel magical. I use projectors as a way to cast images of flowers and colors around a dark room, onto objects and viewers as they enter into the space. I have also started to consider scale with these diorama size sculptures that have videos and images projected onto them. With the dioramas, the audience must shrink themselves down to imagine themselves in the space thus activating their imagination. My hope is to create works that place the viewer in a suspended sense of reality where they believe magic might exist.

How are your experience at Oregon contrasted your undergrad at BYU? My experience at the University of Oregon has been a very positive one thus far and is adding to the knowledge I gained at BYU. In Provo, I was fortunate enough to have professors who were highly encouraging while pushing me to experiment with new mediums and develop strong conceptual ideas. I was surrounded by a group of friends in the BFA program where we worked closely, had pop up shows, and an art club. I am grateful that I was able to foster and develop my art practice among people who also helped strengthen my testimony of the gospel. However after six years in Provo, I felt the need to go somewhere new. Here in Oregon I have found a similar community of artists who are welcoming, hard working, and help one another to improve. It is exciting to be apart of a new program that is rigorous, challenging, and exposing me to new ideas. I am meeting new types of people that I have not encountered in my before and it is stretching my ideas about art while also helping me to analyze my work from different perspectives. The amount of work that I am producing has increased and is evolving in ways I did not imagine before starting. I think about video so much differently now. Rather that making a video and then using a TV or a projector to display it, I am now using the projector or screen much like another object or medium, integrating it into the content of the work. I am very excited about the upcoming years that I will spend here and how my work will continue to change.

How do you feel about the arts within the Church these days? When I think of art in the Church the first thing that comes to mind is what is being sold Deseret Bookstores, art that is specifically geared towards a Mormon audience. This work is often narrative, didactic, and representational. While it has its place and is beloved by many, I think we could do a lot to expand the type of artwork we use to represent our faith. Outside of the Desert Book and Ensign arena, there is a lot of art being made that embodies the spirit of Christ without being a direct depiction of Him. The Internet is a great tool for shedding light on the variety of ways members of the church are doing this. We can see that there are Mormons working more conceptually, digitally, and performatively. My hope that that these shifts will soon be reflected in the images we use to represent the church. I also feel excited thinking about a future of more LDS artists who are active in their faith, creating critical dialogues, and expanding ideas of what Mormonism is showing in contemporary galleries and museums.

What are you working on next? Lately I have been thinking a lot about the old theatre technique Pepper’s Ghost, which was used to make apparitions appear on stage or more recently in things such as Hatsune Miku, a Japanese hologram pop star. Pepper’s Ghost is a simple trick that involves reflecting light or video off of glass. I am interested in using this technique to create illusions and to do it in a way that is magical yet also exposes the process to the audience. I have also been taking projectors apart and trying to find cheap ways to display an images or videos that are not reliant on thousands of dollars worth of technology. I think it is easy to make something enchanting with high tech tools, but I am curious to see if I can make magic happen while on a low scale budget.

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