PRO FILES: ADONNA KHARE
The master behind the pieces
“I just knew that I had to draw what was in my heart and my story; I had to tell my story.” — Adonna Khare
Adonna Khare — a brilliant and accomplished artist creating out of Burbank, California — has witnessed her artistic dreams come true over the last three years.
After stepping away from her elementary school teacher position in order to dedicate herself to her husband and daughter, Khare won ArtPrize in October 2012 for her thirteen-feet high by-forty-feet long triptych entitled “Elephants” — created in her garage before completed during ArtPrize, which ran from September 19th to October 7th, 2012.
ArtPrize — a 501(c)3 non-profit organization launched in 2009 by Rick DeVos — is considered the preeminent art award in the art community and creative world at large. A three-week public event held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the ensuing judgment, awards and financial prizes associated are completely unique to the competition.
Contestants are juried by the public: artists and venues negotiate and coordinate during a process known as Connections and installations are voted on by the participating public. “Elephants” championed over fifteen-hundred other artists; the top entries were determined by over four hundred thousand votes — a record for the competition.
Since ArtPrize 2012, Khare has achieved new artistic freedoms without burden. At her California home prior to departing for her first-ever residency, Khare took the time to speak about about her ever-changing creative output, her process and appreciating what her talents have brought into her world.
ADONNA KHARE
- Bachelor of the Arts — California State University, Long Beach
- Masters of Fine Art — California State University, Long Beach
- Permanent collection — Long Beach Museum of Art
- Permanent collection — Grand Rapids Art Museum
- Member — The Drawing Center New York
- Award for Distinguished Achievement in Creative Activity — 2007
- Elephants — 1st Place, ArtPrize — 2012
- State of the Art at the Crystal Bridges Art Museum — 2014
ON DUAL STUDIOS
I’m just working on a little drawing at home. I have my large studio a couple blocks from my home, which is where I do a lot of my mural work. Anything over two feet is done in the big studio.
I don’t really have a studio at my house, but I just work a lot in my house. I have a storage space in the garage that I flat-file the stuff I work on at my house. All the small-scale works are done at home, and all the larger works are done in the big studio.
ON PREFERENCE OF STUDIO
It just depends on the mood. When I’m really into one of the big murals, I really want to be in the big space. But I have a family too, so it’s kind of nice that on a hot afternoon, there’s not much to do; we can flip on a movie and I can work on my drawings here. I can still be present in my house.
It gives me a lot of flexibility and then also is a way for me to not really have to ever stop drawing. I can work on stuff here; I can work on stuff there. Say the weather’s terrible or whatever and I don’t want to work in that studio — I can just stay here.
So there’s no excuses why I can’t be drawing.
ON ESTABLISHED ARTISTIC PRESENCE
Oh Gosh, I don’t really necessarily feel that’s the case. I don’t know. I feel that as of the past three years I’ve had so many more opportunities to try new things. So I like to say yes and try new things that come my way, because for so many years I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my work out there. There wasn’t an audience so I couldn’t reach the audience. And now it seems I have a lot more opportunities to do that.
I don’t know if it’s affected my work so much as that now there’s more demand for my work; there’s more reason for me to be drawing more, which is super-exciting. I think I won the Life Lottery to be in a position where I get to draw and people want to show it in different places and things like that.
ON REALISED DREAM
Yeah, it is. It was mine for most of… all my life. And now, it’s a couple years in and I’m still nervous that it might go away or the bubble will burst. I try not to focus on that, and just focus on putting the best artwork possible out there so hopefully the artwork will continue to carry me.
ON BELIEF BEFORE VALIDATION
I don’t know if I felt that way. I felt that the work spoke to me and it was important to me but I didn’t necessarily think that I was the best at it. I just knew that the way that I drew is very personal to me and that people either like it or they don’t like it. But I never really felt I was deserving of any award more than any other artist.
I just knew that I had to draw what was in my heart and my story; I had to tell my story.
I didn’t know how it was going to be received and I didn’t think it would be received as well as it’s been received. I thought I might be looked at even more crazy than an artist tends to be.
I found a lot of connection through people and that can also connect with the effort. But I didn’t think there was anything really that different about my stuff than any other artist.
ON THE PENCIL
We didn’t have a lot of extra money for art materials or anything growing up. But there was always availability with pencils and paper — of course, pens or whatever — I could draw. And I started with that. And I don’t know what begot what, but as I got older and I was exposed to more mediums — I loved painting and drawing and sculpting and all of that. But I always came back to drawing. It felt like home.
And then in grad school, I had the opportunity to do many different things. And I liked them and I enjoyed it and I occasionally will do those things. But the pencil is the thing that — the process, I can trust it to tell my story the best.
It just makes sense to me. And when my work is a lot about these concepts, when I try other mediums I can’t get it across as clearly as the pencil. I keep coming back to the pencil.
ON WALKING AWAY FROM WORK
I’m never really that comfortable walking away. I know it sounds bad, but deadlines are a really good thing for me. And my show deadlines are really good for me. Because I’ll just keep noodling away and adding one more thing until I have to put it up. So I thank goodness for deadlines in shows.
And it’s like one story continues to the next story. It’s like it never stops; it’s all really one long continuous story. So if you look at it that way, you could continue working on it forever. But it’s good to be forced to kind of let it go at certain points.
ON INDIVIDUAL STYLE
I’m not quite sure when it started. I know as a kid that my Mom has brought out like, catalogs of all my art work. She’s saved them all. I’ve always chose to draw animals and they were always doing interesting things. I’d either combine animals together or I’d tether them or I’d tie them and I used to tell my Mom they’re struggling to get away. And I guess I’ve always kind of related to animals and their struggles; just existing.
I think that it’s something that’s always been kind of with me in my personal artwork and then in grad school I had the opportunity to really explore my message. And I took those ideas even from when I was a kid and started to really try to adapt them and have them grow, and that to be my voice.
So not all these little doodles and sketches as a kid but now to really be able to compare them to life and to bring them to life. I’d say grad school it really started to thrive, to be really strong. That style started to really come out.
ON COLOR
That comes around just exploring new mediums and trying different things. Every once in a while I feel like there’s an element that needs to be expressed by color; the story is going to benefit by these elements of color.
It’s just that little thing that pops up in your brain that says, “OK — it’s time to do this.”
I try to listen to myself when those times come up and explore it. If it’s successful, it’s successful and if it’s not — it’s not.
I try to force myself to not only do one thing all the time.
ON TRUSTING VISION v. EXECUTION
I trust it as both. I mean, I have ideas that cook in my brain for sometimes a year before I can even begin to get them onto paper. Or it’s an idea that I think is so important that I have to wait, and I want to do it as large as possible.
But you know, that takes years so they’re just sitting in the back of my head, just waiting to come out. And sometimes I’ll explore them smaller in the smaller version. And sometimes then I’ll go, “OK, well I’m glad I got that out, because I don’t really want to explore that anymore.” So it’s a combination.
Then I do silly things like wait this whole time and then it’s going to be this big event-drawing, and then as soon as I begin drawing, that idea just goes out the window and this whole new thing just came right in. And I have to go with it because that’s what I was feeling when I started it, and that all of a sudden became more important than the thing I was holding onto for a year.
ON SELF-TRUST
At a certain point I realized I’m fighting myself, but the whole point of even doing the drawings was to express this idea and tell this story — why am I fighting the story to tell an older version?
So I have to now at a certain point just accept that that’s the way that it’s going to go and let go of that original vision and just move on.
ON EXTENDING TO BOOKS
The book with my sister and I got kind of lost in the water. It got sent to a rep and then I never really followed up on it and we just kind of let that one fizzle out for a while. I may or may not revisit it in the future. But I’ve been working with some publishers, and I do like a cover here and a cover there. I’m really just focusing on my personal work right now.
The book thing’s going to happen or it’s not. Right now, I’m not kind of following up on it, really. It takes a lot of work. It’s just a lot of more work and dedication to something I’m not feeling like I need to dedicate that much time to right now.
ON SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
My family’s here. I’ve lived here most of my life, so most of my work is done here. But I have been traveling a lot and I do a lot of on-site installation work. Some of my pieces travel with me and I work on them in different locations, then they come here. Or they’re started here and finished on-location where they’re going to be on display.
ON UPCOMING RESIDENCY
I leave on Tuesday for Jackson Hole, Wyoming — I’ll be working there for a few weeks in a residency. I’m excited to see what will come out of working in that environment. Most of my work is done here in my home. It’s going to be different; it’s my first residency. This will be the first time I’ll be traveling just to do art in a different location. Because normally I’m working for a museum or gallery and I’m in that space making the artwork work.
This is like, you go there just to draw and be inspired. So this will be my first time where I’m really going to be able to do that. To start and work on drawings in that location that are not meant for sale or to be shown or anything but just to be worked on.
Residency is something a lot of artists do and I never even tried one, you know? And I was like, wow. So I’m kind of — I’m going forward but I’m also kind of going back a little bit, too.
Trying to experience as many things as I can to help me grow, and to see other things. I’m trying to experience as much as I can.
I don’t usually work on one thing at a time so I’m bringing a big tube with me on the airplane. I’ll have one drawing that’s partially started, one that’s about half-way done and then I’ll be starting a new one there.
I like to work on different stages at once. It helps me focus. And the days that I’m not feeling super inspired, I can work on some of the busy work on some of the others, and then go back to the new one and really put in that super-high energy in the beginning.
ON LIMITING NEW IDEAS
Sometimes that’s my big problem. I have too many things in my head. I sit in my studio and I’m like, “Oh my God, my head’s going to explode. They’re all yelling at me to work on them.” And I do take things down and put them away and just say, “That’s it. You have to go.”
The one that’s in the tube is the one that was making my head explode in my studio that I had took down and put in a tube. So I’m taking it with me to Wyoming to hope that it will do the opposite there.
ON PRE-PLANNING
My drawings aren’t usually planned ahead of time. I kind of start by adding the large figures and work out those main compositional elements. And then I come in with the smaller stories and the little details that kind of add to it.
So there’s a lot of give-and-take in the beginning; I erase a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. Probably more than I draw for the first couple of weeks working on a large-scale drawing. I’m starting now to — I don’t really do sketches but what I do is I write down ideas that I have so they don’t limit me to like a little sketch.
Sometimes my sketches are so messy I can’t even understand what I wrote or I can’t even read my own sketch. It’s more of just ideas. So I’m starting to try to do that a little bit more.
But I’m very impulsive and when I want to do something, I just tend to do it. Even if it means I draw for eight hours and I have to erase it, at least I saw that it didn’t work for sure. If I did it small and tried it that way, I don’t feel like it would’ve given me the same affect.
My poor husband hates coming in the studio because he’ll be like, “Oh my Gosh, you’re drawing’s almost done!” Then he’ll come in and go “Huh?!” — like half of it’s missing. And I’m like, “Sorry” and he’s like, “Why did you do that? Why wouldn’t you just… ?”
ON DAUGHTER
She’s not super-duper impressed with me, at all. This is her life: Mom walks me to school and then she works in her studio and then she picks me up and we hang out all day. The flexibility is fantastic for me as a mom, because she was too young to remember that I used to be a teacher and she would go to my mom’s.
Or she’d go to child care while I was teaching. She doesn’t necessarily remember that because she was pretty young when I won ArtPrize, so I’ve been home with her.
And because I can work when she’s at school — as far as she’s concerned: “When I’m here, Mom’s here. She draws in her studio sometimes and that’s it.” And I do travel a lot so she’s aware that when I travel, I’m working and I’m doing shows and stuff.
She likes to come to art openings. She loves fancy cheese. She’s six, so she always asks where the cheese platter is, which is hilarious. She kind of grew up thinking, “Oh no, this is cool: Mom just draws in her studio, but the rest of the time she’s with me and she’s an artist and that’s it.” There’s not a lot of thought-process past that.
ON BLESSINGS
I do make a point of it every day single when I wake up, and I either drop my daughter off at school or it’s the weekend and … I’m aware of how fortunate I am to be in the position that I’m in, and I try to take that gratitude with me every day that I work in the studio.
This is a gift that I get to do what I love to do and I will never forget that. I hope I get to do it forever, but there’s no guarantees in life.
ON SELF-BELIEF
I do have a very supportive family, and I still do. They supported me through everything. I mean, they would’ve said — financially we couldn’t do it, but if we could’ve, they would’ve said, “Quit your job and start doing art whenever you could.”
I think the time that I did the “Elephants” piece for ArtPrize, I was really at that point in my life where I had to draw; I needed to do it. And I had to say something. And at that point it didn’t matter if anybody had seen it or not.
I was so motivated to just do this piece that was in my head for so long that I just had to believe that if nobody else liked it, at least I did it for myself. And at least my story is in there. It would’ve stung a lot if it never got out of my studio but I did it mostly for me. Just to see that I could do it, to prove that I could do it.
I don’t know. I wish I felt more secure. I’m always worried that this will be my last show; that this will be my last success. I do always carry around a little bit of that with me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad but I never want to take for granted that it’s going to be easy and everybody’s going to like stuff that I do.
I still have the anxiety before every show, especially in a new location because I don’t know how those people are going to think about it. I don’t know how they’re going to take the art work.
That’s just — I think part of the deal. I think if you’re too comfortable, maybe that’s not a good thing, either. Because then maybe you’re not willing to change so much. I’m still trying to figure out that whole part of it.
