Follow your bliss
I’m thrilled to be back on Kathy Temean’s Writing and Illustrating today for Illustrator Saturday featuring an interview, and some artwork made long before the internet was born.
Read the whole feature here.
I’ve included some highlights below.
Kathy Temean: How long have you been illustrating?
Lucky: I drew all the time as a child, and I made up stories for a lot of the drawings. There was an old shed next to our house with just enough pavement for hitting a tennis ball. I’d play for hours and tell myself stories. The shed also provided my first big abstract drawing – the muddied ball left a dense pattern that I remember thinking was beautiful. I felt like I’d had something to do with creating it, but I was also really delighted by the accidental magic of it.
Kathy Temean: Since listed all three for what you studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, did you major in only one of those studies?
Lucky: I did a one year post bacc at SAIC in painting and drawing, and created a drawing-based installation about nostalgia and longing for my thesis project.
Kathy Temean: Did you move back to the states after you graduated from the Complutense/University of Madrid?
Lucky: No, I stayed for three years! I was living in the neighborhood of Lavapies, in easy walking distance from the Reina Sofia Museum and a film center where I ended up working as a subtitle projectionist. I did shows with classmates from the university and made a lot of work in my little studio apartment. – giant graphite drawings, drawings on discarded furniture, that sort of thing.
Kathy Temean: What type of work did you do when you started your career?
Lucky: I always had this idea that whatever work I did would support my studio practice, until my studio practice could be my full time job. But I didn’t seek out illustration or writing work specifically, the way you would early on if you wanted to make a career of it. In that sense, I haven’t followed a traditional path, and I think that means I have a lot of catching up to do.
Kathy Temean: What inspired you to decide you wanted to illustrate children’s books?
Lucky: I fell in love with the picture book as an art form in the process of creating Imagine a Wolf. I’ve always loved picture books, and always been interested in creating artwork with children as an intended audience, but the initial inspiration was actually a story idea about a wolf that came into my head a couple years ago and I had to chase it.
Kathy Temean: What do you think is your biggest success?
Lucky: Since the book came out I’ve been receiving all these amazing pictures of children reading Imagine a Wolf. Children really respond to this book and that feels like the biggest success.
Kathy Temean: Do you have any career dreams that you want to fulfill?
Lucky: That creative life my husband and I committed to is still taking shape – I’m excited to see what we make of it. I also have this question – what can a picture book do? A picture book as an art form is relatively accessible, made for my favorite audience (children) and can be a force for the good. I think about that a lot.
