by ECHO staff
Kieran Kelly (they/them), graduated with their Bachelor of Fine Arts with minors in creative writing and art history from Steven’s Point. After graduating, they went between jobs, like at the Art Center, and then saw RCTC was offering classes that might fill the gaps in their skillset, namely digital art and graphic design. They were then offered a position as a TA. Their professional interest in comic books led to a guided studio opportunity on sequential art with Daniel Vedamuthu. Our conversation with Kelly has been edited for length and clarity.
How long have you been an active artist?
I wouldn’t know. I’ve been drawing pretty much forever. I mean, I have artists in the family. My grandfather was an art professor at Bemidji State, but it was kind of my own interest.
I liked the idea of being able to have a physical record of my ideas, whether they were very silly or very, very serious. I think it started from back when I was like a child. It was hard to feel listened to, I think, so I ended up just asking for sketchbooks and stuff like that.
That really blossomed when I started getting into comics, which I got from my dad, and he had this huge collection, I ended up going through it, and that’s the first time I ever considered that I can tell a story [beyond] just writing a novel, and have it be fun and serious and campy and have a weird, quirky sense of humor. I like that a lot.
Then I got into painting, and I got into expressing more serious thoughts.
What were some of your initial favorite comics? And what has held your interest?
I got into graphic novels first. I can’t think of a specific one that started that. In the library of my grade school, there’s a few different graphic novels for kids that I got really into. [My dad] loved Spider Man, so I love Spider Man. I actually ended up getting into the Punisher, weirdly enough. That was me when I was, like, a 12 year old girl being like, ‘Yeah, let’s shoot these guys, yeah.’
Right now I’m really into the Absolute Series. So I love Batman and Robin. Robin, I really got into, and I collect. So I started collecting Tim Drake, his run from the 90s. And, you know, Chuck Dixon is not the most woke of voices in comics, but he told very, very good stories in the 90s with Stephanie Brown. I really got into Bat Girl through the No Man’s Land arc, and Cassie Cane and Wonder Woman.
One of my favorite comics that made me think about doing it was Matt Fraction’s “My Life as a Weapon” for Hawkeye. That is definitely a comic I recommend to everybody.
Did you ever read Spawn at all?
No, no, I’ve been wanting to. For a long time, before I started my own collection, my dad was like, ‘Spider Man, Spider Man, Spider Man,’ which, Todd McFarlane. Spawn is definitely on my list to check out.
So is that your favorite Spider-Man?
Todd McFarlane, yeah. He’s my favorite Spider-Man writer. I think his art really, really changed how people like think of Spider-Man. How he moves and and his perspective, I mean, Todd McFarlane is an incredible penciler and inker, because the depth of focus in a lot of his panels is, like, it’s so specific. So people started thinking about, like, ‘How does he look from a distance? How does he move up close? How flexible even, is he?’
His ability to manipulate bodies in space was really, really inspiring to me.
Talk to us about the piece we are going to feature in the center spread.
It was a little bit after I graduated. I had been hit with, first of all, a really huge traffic ticket that I did not know how to avoid, and it felt like I couldn’t find a job.
Again, I think it goes I didn’t feel listened to, because it was a lot of like COVID and Gaza and I had been doing a lot of self portraits at the time, too.
There’s like six people living in my house right now, none of them have anything in common. We’ve managed to kind of smooth that over, but at the time, it was like everything is happening all at once, and it didn’t feel like I had anywhere to kind of stand up in the middle of that.
A lot of the articles and stuff are just taken from other places in the newspaper or input somewhere else. So none of the articles, besides, like, maybe, like a few that that I do give a little space, have, like, any coherency, because it’s just different sections from different articles.
Then after I was able to finish this, and I didn’t get it into a show at the Public Theater, I got the charges dropped. It felt like, this is a little bit of catharsis for myself. To be like, ‘Everything is happening and I can’t do anything about it, and there’s children in this house, and I can’t stand children. It’s like, a six and a four year old, and it’s all of us living under one roof, and and I only have this little bit of space to carve out for myself.’
So it’s kind of like I’m thinking of myself as trying to get a little bit of my head above water.
How does the RCTC art department compare to your last school’s?
Art departments are chaotic, beautiful places. I think they’re the same no matter where you go, especially on a college campus.
This one is actually very similar to the one that I went to in Stevens Point. It’s the kind of brutalist architecture, there’s so much blank space, but there’s so much chaos. I can set something down and people will look at it and say something about it to me, and I know that they’re doing it with a genuine interest in the process and what I’m doing, rather than maybe in public, where it’s like, ‘So what is this even for?’
Yeah, I’ve always really liked that environment.
Is there anything you’ve always wanted to be asked as an artist, but have never gotten to talk about?
Personally, I’m always ready to talk about art. I can’t think of anything specific, as we speak, but asking about in art in general is a good thing. There’s a really weird vibe in what is happening right now, where people are tired of thinking deeper about stuff. They kind of want to be, like, given the results, you know? So being asked about art is always a treat. There’s stuff that I’m really passionate or angry about.If you’d asked me, like, ‘So what do you think about AI?’ I would have probably put some things in there that you probably [wouldn’t] print.
If you’ve got something negative to say about AI we’ll print it.
I think it’s a danger to society. It’s a poison. It’s really, really important when people are willing to look deeper and ask questions about things. I think it’s very frustrating when somebody is like, ‘Oh my God, who even cares? Like, why are you thinking so hard about it?’ And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…
Besides all the environmental stuff and the the fact that MIT did a study that was like, ‘This is literally killing your brain cells when you use AI…’
When people are so obsessed with the end result, they forget that the point is the journey, the process is why people love it. The process of making art, making a movie, writing a book, writing a newspaper.
The point is that somebody wanted to do those things. AI, to me, gives the impression of, like, these people see art and anything that is like, quote, unquote “consumable” as like, “The point is the end product.” And that just makes it a piece of capital that you sell. Sometimes art is not to be sold. It is to show and give. I think that any creative process is a gift, no matter where it comes from.