Kimo Minton
Interview, September 2006
- Jules Bekker
You have had a long and productive career as an artist. How many years have you been exhibiting?
I had my first show in a little gallery in Washington DC. in 1975.
What are your earliest recollections of creating art and when did your artistic interests begin to develop?
My first art memory is of looking at painting reproductions with my mother when I was five; she let me pick one out for myself. I chose Matisse's painting "Tabac Royal" which I still have on my wall. I was proud because my modern art loving mom was impressed by my choice. At seven, inspired by my grandmother's love of Abraham Lincoln, I drew pictures of him and sold them for a penny-a-piece and, with the proceeds, bought donuts off the bakery truck on my way to school.
When I was ten, I would sit on the front porch in Missouri watching my great grandfather whittling, this began my fascination with wood and sculpture.
Early in your art career you worked on construction. Do you feel that this experience in any way impacted your art - whether through developing discipline, or even developing your ability as an artist?
I can't say enough about building as part of my art 
education. I'm still doing it. I was in Lyndon Johnson's job corps at twenty, but what really honed my carpentry skills, was restoring old houses in the historic neighborhoods of downtown Atlanta. My wife and I have also built two houses in New Mexico that we designed together.
In carpentry, as in art, you have to show up-everyday. Carpentry is about balance, proportion and patience. It teaches you the ways a piece of wood can fight or surprise you. Carpenters have a great eye for proportion. My partner, Don Boldt, loved art and we would often discuss art, music and philosophy while we worked. Don, my wife and the guys on the job were some of my first art critics.
Carpentry allowed me to make a living as a young, vulnerable artist and enabled me to develop from my own vision and to ignore the trendy whims of the art world.
You lived and worked in Atlanta for a number of years. How long were you here and why did you decide to leave?
In Atlanta we lived for fourteen years on Euclid Avenue, Little Five Points, in a beautiful 100 year old house we renovated. In 1989 we took a cross-country camping trip to New Mexico where I lived in the fifties, from age five to ten. My wife Dolores fell in love with the desert. Atlanta was getting too congested for us and we started craving country living. We looked in Georgia and North Carolina, but I think the desert, the dry air and the big, blue sky of New Mexico, put us on the road.
Many of us have a romantic view of the desert southwest. Why did this area call to you - what is it that gives it power and draws so many artists to the region?
Having lived in New Mexico as a child automatically gave it romance and nostalgia for me. When I saw how much Dolores fell in love with it, we started planning.
The air in the morning in the high desert is soft and fresh and the lack of humidity causes everything to have a crystalline quality. From a high spot in New Mexico it feels like you can see the entire state; this gives you an unbelievable, soaring sense of freedom. I am a sun worshipper and the sun is incredibly intense here, in winter it warms you through your bones, and in the summer to escape it, you simply step into the shade and the temperature drops twenty degrees. I like to work outside mostly, and when I get too hot I just stand under the hose.
I love the ever present mountains and the rock formations. They look so improbable, so sculptural, because the land is being scoured and carved all the time. 
Also, the four cultures of New Mexico, Anglo, Spanish, Mexican and Indian, form a strange and fascinating partnership. They are often at odds with each other, don't homogenize and have been clashing for a long time, this can get serious at times but is more often humorous. In the end, they make it work. As a half-breed, this appeals to me.
You asked why artists have been drawn here for so many years. For the same reasons I was. The lack of rules and regulations has drawn people to the west throughout history and there are so many places in New Mexico that are sacred refuges. This place is a mystery: The huge sky, the emptiness and vast spaces-the way the air feels and smells-it's spooky and familiar at the same time. The various colors of dirt and rock in soft gradation are restful to your eyes and in the late afternoon, the light can only be compared to the golden light of Tuscany. You feel part of a glorious tableau when it catches you; whatever you are doing.
Do other aspects of life such as environment, music, or literature have impact on, or influence you work? What is it that gets you up and working?
I read history or novels; I'm much attached to Southern, Russian and Eastern European writers. Poetry has a special place. I'm always listening to music and books while I work. I lean toward music without words Jazz, Classical, or trance, anything inspired. Something in the angularity of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, a particular emotion in them, will make me want to try things in my sculpture-it's a moment of lift, you feel your soul lifted.
I try to pick up the spirit of the things - I'm very big on spirits. I know some people don't believe in the concept of a soul, if there isn't, then consider me wrong. I try to be logical and reasonable, but childlike, magical thinking is never far from me-it must be my primitive side-I'm only two generations away from a grass shack.
Your work has undergone a steady evolution and this seems to have been accelerating over the past few years. From the outside it's as if you have been writing a novel or creating a symphony and suddenly the drafts are complete and you have only the finishing touches to apply to your masterpiece. Where do you feel you are on this journey? Please give us some insight into what you have been exploring over the past few years.
I'm glad you think I'm accelerating; an artist doesn't want to peak too soon. Sculptors do seem to be able to get old without losing it; Rodin was like that, Henry Moore and Noguchi were doing some of their best work shortly before they died. My whole relationship with sculpture has been an evolution of desire, taste, and skill. So many things have provided inspiration for me and I find much within myself by following my instinct. I don't think I will ever be finished with this process.
Often, when I lie down to listen to the news after working on a piece all day, I'll close my eyes and glimpse something else, right there behind my eyes, like a visitation, and I'll try to turn it around and around in my head and feel it in my fingers. I know it will get changed by the piece of wood I choose, by my moods, music I listen to, random thoughts and memories as well as the work process, but I begin the chase right then.
I study art history a lot, not as a scholar, but to find points of desire-things that grab me. I've thought a lot about the difference between art that describes and art that evokes, or calls forth. I find a lot of inspiration in primitive, gothic, and archaic art, also in modernism. I don't think there has been very much realism in all of art history, and somehow that seems right to me.
The last few years I've been refining a yearning for simplicity. I try not to over-think. In carving, once you commit yourself to a contour you can't go back. It's like tricking yourself into being honest. The wood itself will seem to resist and want to look a certain way.
You often refer to "protective figures" and this seems especially pertinent in these new wood sculptures as they seem imbued with an incredible sense of power and monumentality. Please explain the term - what it means to you and how it relates to your work.
I believe that most art is related somehow to religion or spirituality. Carvings especially, have always been used as spirit forms; gods, demigods, sentinels, Bodhisattvas, saints, guardians of gates, etc. It seems we humans want this. I have been creating a temple in my head forever, even though I have no dogma and come from two very different religious traditions. I've always been trying to figure out god's enigmatic moves, all the while hoping there is a use for me in all that. I like to think of my sculpture in collector's homes. These people have helped protect me and my family by giving me a living, and I have given them a spur to contemplation, something to watch over them.
You have begun to reintroduce color in a totally new way. What made you move in this direction?
It's very emotional and personal, there's no real science to it
except that I'm always aware that I want to enhance the forms not obliterate them. In this latest work I've introduced some colors which have a particular symbolism for me - mustard ochre, for its association with the imagination, black with the great void and with comfort, and white and grays with light. The little bits of Chinese red, rust red, indigo and orange just insist. They present themselves. Whatever palette I'm using at a given time has grown on me from experience. Sometimes I'll avoid too much contrast in a piece or perhaps I'll want to accentuate the differences. I'm still learning and I hope to continue to learn more.
Your new woodcuts have provided an interesting and dynamic turn in the road for you. Please give us some background on the influences that led you to develop this concept.
Last winter, my wife Dolores, showed me an article about the Japanese block-print maker Munakata and his work. I was impressed by its freedom. He was self taught and responded to the expressive possibilities in block-printing, a discipline that can be insanely technical and fussy. He worked extremely fast in an unconscious way, allowing his compositions to emerge while working rather than planning them in advance. He was very nearsighted and because of this would work with his head practically on the board. Nothing about his approach was fussy, he would take wood off a crate or a broken piece of door, and he used children's carving tools. He didn't get bogged down with equipment, only inspiration mattered-his spirit was in a hurry to get his vision realized. I've always felt that a teaspoon of inspiration is worth an ocean of technique. Munakata's whirlwind of desire to create what he saw in his mind inspired me immensely and my thought was-I want to do that!
Woodcut has long been the first step in a particular printmaking process. What you have done differently to make this process your own, and why?
I started to see the kind of images that I wanted to make. For a couple of years, I've made abstract paintings that I haven't shown. I've been enamored of the simple wandering line that I love in Ben Nicholson's paintings. It was all about line; the opposite of three dimensional sculpture. I had a desire to be more intuitive. Though I make a lot of spontaneous decisions in the later stages of my sculpture, at the beginning there is a lot of planning in order to get the proportions I want. In my woodcuts I can free myself of this planning and work without a map.
At first, wanting to experiment with Munakata's technique of bleeding color through the back of the rice paper I made some prints from the woodcuts, but soon my attention was drawn to the block itself. That's when I began to paint directly on the block with no print in mind. I was awestruck with the combination of the blackness of the ink, the wood and its grain, and the colors.
Please give us an idea of the mechanics of creating a woodcut.
I never know what each stage is going to look like until it is done. I purposely work flat and avoid the illusion of space or modeling to create three dimensions.
After joining the wood and standing the panels upright, I begin drawing fast using a carpenter's pencil. In this first, intuitive phase, I chisel out some of those lines, deciding which to cut as I go, then paint the grooves with white or a light color. Using a brayer - or roller - I work black all over the board. The original carved lines now form a tracery in the black. At this point the formal process begins and I start choosing the areas I want to reveal by carving, adding texture or cross hatching. The final step in creating a piece is the addition of color.
What are your current interests and concerns when making your two dimensional works?
Right now I'm pursuing a style of working that evolves as I'm doing it. I'm not using any overt representation of objects or symbolism. These woodcuts interest me as a series of pleasing shapes, textures and patterns. Of course, I see things in these pieces, much as you will see recognizable objects in the clouds.
You have introduced a series of bronzes into your work. What was the catalyst for this and how does producing work for casting differ from working in wood?
Last summer, Ron Eichel visited me in and we had a great 
time carving together. I had just carved these pieces in wood and presented the idea to Ron of a partnership to have them cast in bronze. He graciously agreed and made all this possible.
The pieces I chose to cast for this show are skeletal with strong chisel cuts and I thought they would look good in bronze. They were cast by the Adobe Foundry and watching the stages of this process was fascinating, especially seeing the molds being made, and the full pieces in wax, which, because of the venting created to allow gasses to escape, become totally new sculptures. Watching the molten metal being poured was magical and very exciting. One of the sculptures was poured in two pieces then forged back together exactly as it was. I have a lot of admiration for the guys who did this.
Once the vents were ground off, Jim Crane from Adobe gave me a basic patina in the color I wanted. I then rubbed and polished for a couple months. I want to cast more of my pieces in bronze-I've been dreaming of making some garden sculptures.
Does anything stand out for you as being the highlight of your career thus far?
- Studying marble carving in Pietrasanta, Italy, with Silverio Paoli for four months.
- Creating and carving the monumental columns depicting Orpheus and Eurydice for the Embassy Row development in Dunwoody.
- Having Mr. Ackerman put my sculpture "keeper of dance magic" in the Swisshotel.
- The Mattress Factory shows in the eighties, all held in vacant factories in downtown Atlanta.
- Hooking up with TEW Galleries.
- The people I've met and the relationships I have with them.
- Adding painting, my bronzes and woodcuts to my repertoire.
- Having a career that allows me to spend time with my family and new grandson.
What do you want your collectors to take away from viewing your work?
I believe that what goes into a work of art eventually comes out. A lot goes on in my mind emotionally, philosophically and spiritually in the months it takes to make these pieces. I like to think that my own intent and experience of creating will mingle with the collectors' ideas and feelings as my work becomes part of their lives.
What do you feel makes a strong relationship between an artist and gallery? What do you look for in gallery representation?
The most important quality for an artist to share with his dealer is honesty. I have had such a long, honest relationship with Timothy and the gallery. An artist needs an advocate. Few artists are natural born self-promoters though we all believe in what we do. Artist/gallery relationships can be adversarial, but the ongoing conversation between Timothy and I has always been valuable and important. As Timothy's gallery has grown in stature, it has meant a lot to know that he continues to believe in me.
