Transcription of Daniel Minter for the show Art, Crossing Cultures #252
It is my great pleasure today to speak with Daniel Minter who along with his wife Marcia was featured in the Art of Style in the April issue of Old Port Magazine. Born in Ellaville, a small rural community in southern Georgia, Daniel Minter has illustrated nine children’s books including Ellen’s Broom written by Kelly Starling Lyons, Seven Spools of Thread: A Kwanzaa Story by Angela Shelf Medearis and The Riches of Oseola McCarty by Evelyn Coleman. Minter’s paintings and sculptures have been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums including the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College, Hammond’s House Museum and the Meridian International Center. Thanks so much for coming in today Daniel.
You’re welcome. Thank you.
I’m interested in the work that you do because it’s something that we don’t have as much of here in Maine. We have a lot of focus on Maine centered themes but your books are so beautiful in a very different way and they talk a lot more about an aspect of life that maybe we don’t get to look into that much.
If you notice a lot of my books are about place. Even though they may not be directly about Maine, they are about communities of people, groups of people. People are creating culture. Most of my books deal with African-American themes, though not all because that’s where I’m from and that is the language that I use to tell my story, but I’m also telling a story of smaller Maine communities within those stories.
I’m interested in how as an artist you decided what your story was. What was it that you wanted to focus on and why was community important to you?
Where I grew up, there were no artists. You could not work as an artist. It didn’t exist. You could be a sign painter, you could be a carpenter, you could fix things, you could build things with your hands, you could make sculptures and things and put in your backyard and fill your yard with all these things and stuff but you were not an artist. You weren’t called an artist. You did those things and people expected you to do these things and recognize you for those things but they did not necessarily call you an artist so much and you didn’t make a living from it.
I always wanted to make a living from my artwork when I learned that that was a possibility. I did graphic arts and illustration and that seemed to take me away from that community. It took me away from thinking about the community and the people who I grew up with and who influenced me so much. I began to think more, I want to integrate more of that into my actual illustration work. I began to do the children’s book work. I also began to do more fine art painting and those kinds of and more expressive work on my own but really it was trying to get back to that from the purely graphic arts.
About where in your life timeline did that happen?
I worked for a corporation doing lots of types of books, magazines, promotional material, slide presentations, annual reports, those kinds of things. I started doing that very early on and did it for maybe about seven or eight years. I guess I must have been about 25, 26 when I started to really want to have something of myself within my work work.
As you were working and making money from your art through working with this corporation, did you start … I guess I’m interested in the process because many people talk about being artists but can’t … They still have to have a day job. They still have to do the things that puts the food on the table. Were you able to simultaneously start doing the types of things that showed more of your own self and also continue to work with this corporation?
Yes I was but I would mostly just show my artwork in galleries. That’s what I was mostly doing then. I began showing my artwork but I didn’t feel like it was the same. I didn’t feel like I could merge the two. I still don’t feel like I can really merge the works, just like the artwork that I do in the children’s books is different from the artwork that I do for the galleries but I feel like there’s a similarity now I think that I’m beginning to make more of a connection between those types of works.
How did that happen? How did that evolution occur?
Slowly. Very slowly. It’s the kind of thing that all artists struggle with and it’s just part of being an artist in this society.
Going back to describing where you were raised and the fact that you could be a sign painter, you could be a maker of things but you weren’t described as an artist and you couldn’t necessarily make a living. Tell me how it is that there was some way that you felt supported enough that you could actually go to art school, you could actually pursue this dream because sometimes when you’re in a community where everybody has a certain rule, growing up you feel as if you need to take on one of those roles rather than find one for yourself.
That was not difficult at all. It was a natural thing for me today because it was really important that … Education was always really important. Education in whatever endeavors you choose was seen as a very positive thing. It would not even occur to anyone to discourage you from pursuing education in an area that interested you.
Once you decided that art was where you wanted to go, people just said “Go for it.”
Yes. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Do you find that that’s true in the students that you are instructing at the Maine College of Art?
I feel like that it’s a lot different now because when I went to school, there was not this huge, huge, huge family commitment to get that student through into and through school. I feel like I did a lot of it on my own. There was pressure to pay for it but that pressure was on me and I did not see it as overwhelming. The commitment that you put into paying for school is the biggest thing about school now and I think that burden limits the students’ creativity a lot and freedom and sense that they are on a journey. It’s almost like they are not free to fly yet because they still have this great weight that they know is going to crash down on them as soon as they get out of school. I find that a lot of students have a really hard time looking at the world today and seeing how am I going to fit into it.
It must be for you a funny place to be because you’re also the father of a student who is finishing his first year of college and is an art student.
Yes. Mm-hmm. Yes.
You bend this person yourself, you are teaching these people yourself, and now you have a child who is experiencing this. What types of conversations do you have with your son about this?
The types of things that I feel like are valuable in being an artist is the flexibility and the ability to create yourself, create what it is that you are. You can’t limit yourself to I’m going to be just this. When you are an artist, you begin to realize that you cannot be just this in a lot of times. You can be a very technical type person, you can be ephemeral type person that pulls things together but those things are valuable in a lot of different situations and if you are an artist, you can find where your value is in those situations and if other people are smart, they will realize that value that you bring to these areas.
The reason I keep talking about this is because it’s something that I think that we all deal with as creative beings. Most humans have some spark of creativity, I would say all humans have a spark of creativity in them whether they self-identify as artists or not. It’s almost a different mindset that’s required in some ways to say work for a corporation and do that sort of creativity versus the type of creativity that one would need to purely paint or create something from nothing.
You don’t have to be creative to be an artist. Not today because you can imitate and be a successful artist if that’s what you want to do. You don’t have to be an artist to be creative. To be creative, you have to be able to take situations from one area and apply them to another area and then apply that to another area and still understand the functionality of that thing. That’s creativity. You can do that in a lot of different areas. A lot of times you think that artists are creative. A lot of times artists are not creative. A lot of times people think that if you are not an artist, you are not creative. That’s not true. It’s dealing with things that are different and applying those things. That’s creativity.
That makes sense, the way that you’re describing it and thinking about the work that you have done, because not only do you create art work that is really all around the country in places like Seattle and Bates College but you also do these beautiful illustrations so you’re working with authors to put a visual … To co-create a book, visual and words. I think you’ve created two stamps. That’s a very utilitarian and also …
Mm-hmm. Yes. I enjoyed the utilitarian function of that. I enjoyed doing utilitarian type work. There is a place for that and I enjoy doing things for other people. I enjoy clarifying an idea that another person has and then bringing imagery to that and releasing ownership. It’s not mine, it’s yours. I did this for you. I get satisfaction from that part of it. Like I say, there is a place to that. That is the service part of being an artist I think and I think every artist should be able to do that for another person. To me that’s our function. In a way, we interpret the world for other people a lot of times. If you want to call yourself an artist, you should be able to function as an artist for other people.
You have a strong inclination towards the understanding of memory and the ways in which memory is embedded into our past, present and future. Is this part of that interpretive aspect that you’re talking about?
In a way the memory is the biggest part of our world. It’s what we live with the longest. It’s what with us most times and it’s also the most fluid. Just because we remember something doesn’t mean that it happened or it happened the way … It changes or whatever. Your memories have been with you as long as you have been alive whereas each day is a brief thing. It’s flowing right into memory and we have only a concept of the future. Things that we want to express, ideas and things, has to come from our memory. You have to farm your memory. You have to actively put things into your memory. That means you have to actively observe, observe the world around you, things, and then you go back to your memory and see how these things actually work. Memory is very important to me.
It’s also important in a larger sense. There’s the personal memory but then there’s also more of a collective memory that you’re interested in. I know that the books that I have, Ellen’s Broom, I have The Riches of Oseola McCarty and Seven Spools of Thread. There’s a lot of memory in here. There’s a lot of memory of culture and of self and of place and of community.
When I grew up, those types of books didn’t really exist. The memory of these types of stories were … A lot of them were oral. The stories were told and not necessarily written in books. I feel like there’s an urgency in making them into books, getting them down and also taking those memories before they turn into something else, before they are no longer accessible.
You’ve been a board member with the Underground Railroad here in Maine. You’ve had an interest in African American culture. This is something that I think we don’t know as much about. We’re increasingly I believe more aware of this very rich culture and how it has been interwoven with the history of our state but it’s not as evident as some of the other things that we’re aware of in our history. Tell me what that’s been like for you.
That’s been one of the things that helped me to find a place here in Portland and that just being able to see that these places existed, that there has been a community here of color for a long time, since it became a state on its own. Finding that it was not widely known and that people were actually curious. In finding a way to share that with people while discovering it for myself, I feel like that helped tie me to the community.
Were you surprised by what you found?
Surprised? No.
Surprised to know that there was so much that was in existence?
No, I wasn’t surprised. African American history or the African American aspect of American history has been understated, it’s been ignored for a long time. It’s because it’s complicated. It complicates a lot of the ideas of this country. Rather than explain those complicated ideas it’s usually left out. I wasn’t surprised, no.
I agree with you that it’s complicated and I think that even people who would like to have a conversation about it, there is almost a reticence because there’s an uncertainty as to which direction we can actually go into comfortably and I think there are a lot of people who really would like to explore it more but don’t really know how.
Right because they haven’t been given the language to talk about it openly. They haven’t trained themselves to talk about it openly because they haven’t had to. You may think you feel one way about people or whatever but if you are not encountering that person each day or on a regular basis, you have no way of knowing how you feel or how you actually respond to this person. Ideas of oneself and realities of oneself meet when you meet people who are different from you and you learn how to talk about those things. You learn how to communicate your ideas about other people and yourself and exchange ideas with other people and yourself and find where the truth actually is.
I appreciate your willingness to come in and to talk about your art and to talk about some of these bigger ideas. It’s interesting for me as I’m looking at the books that you’ve helped illustrate and having seen some of the work online that you’ve done, it’s quite varied. There are some underlying themes and techniques but you seem like there is an expansiveness to the way that you approach your art, that you don’t have to have a single focus or a single way of doing it.
I guess initially I am a painter. I like painting. I love painting. I love drawing, that sort of thing. I also like carving, working with wood and other materials. The printmaking allows me to do both of those. It allows me to carve and it allows me to paint. That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy that though I’m not a printmaker, I always say I’m not a printmaker though it turns out all of the children’s books that I do end up being print. They really print. To me, they’re carvings. That was one of the things that I grew up doing. We did a lot of carving. Relief type carving. I guess it was a folk art way of doing this but I don’t see the art being an artist as being about the stuff you use. The stuff you use is not as important as what you do with it. Sometimes I paint, sometimes I make things, sometimes I carve, sometimes I use the computer. I’ll also design things for people sometimes. It is varied. I can’t say I do a single type of thing.
Daniel, how can people find out about the work that you do?
You know, really the way I like for people to find out about the work that I do is through talking to me. That’s really my preferred way but I’m easy to find online. It’s easy to find the children’s books that I do, you can find those and then the other types of art, the painting and work that I do, you can find that online as well at danielminter.net.
It’s been a pleasure. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you today. I’ve enjoyed our conversation about art in general but community, memory. I encourage people to learn about Daniel Minter. We’ve been speaking with Daniel Minter who is an artist based here in Maine now but who has been really all over the country and has done many different things and can be found along with his wife Marcia in the April issue of Old Port Magazine. Thanks for coming in today.
You’re very welcome.