Interview by Jimon

1-Where do you currently reside and work?  Chicago

2-How would you describe Urszula Gogol?  A Minimalist in a lifetime art collaboration with a Maximalist.

3-Did you attend an art school or is it inherent?  Both. My bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Arts provided the time and resources necessary for continuing my early,  perhaps inherent, interest in art.

4-How long have you been making art and what lead you to start?  As long as I can remember: I used to draw on the wallpaper of my childhood apartment.  When I ran out of wall space my parents began buying me drawing pads and started to place their art books within my reach.  During my sophomore year in high school we immigrated to USA, from Poland, and my new American high school just happened to have an amazing art department.

5-How did you acquire your style?  Lots of experimentation in 2D Fine Art, 3D Fine Art, Installation and Graphic Design. I have extensive background in Fiber Art with two art degrees. Being a Fiber major allowed me to try out a lot of different approaches to materials.

6-What is the first step before you start painting?  My studio day begins with Google Maps: devising my daily route, between two and five miles. I ride the bus one-way for forty-five minutes. After I exit the bus I begin walking back, along the bus route, occasionally turning to side streets, exploring each neighborhood while walking, taking photographs along the way.  Then, finding a coffee shop in each neighborhood, I begin to draw and paint, referencing shapes and colors from the photographs and integrating patterns and textures into my digital painting, on my laptop.

7-Have you ever come across a piece of art that you could not or did not want to stop looking at?  My first autobiographical art memory is Kandinsky’s “Composition VIII” (1923). As a child, I always wanted to live in that painting. I still do. In this way, being a Digital Artist allows me to freely move around separate components of my painting as I move around layers on the screen and rearrange them as I see it fit.

8-Tell us something about the art world that you want to see changed?  I am living the change as we speak. I am now able to license my artwork for site specific projects, globally, and negotiate my own contracts.

9-Why make art?  As an artist I have the ability to pick up many details that would normally escape everyday passersby and study it with an obsessive nature, making many almost identical versions of the same thing. Then comparing and asking questions, not always fully solving the original question that I started with, but the process always leads to many more questions. So sometimes it is a painstaking problem solving tool and sometimes it is just playing around, having some joy.

10-The future is _________?  Here

11-What is your thought on the following statement; Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable!  I resonated with the statement during undergraduate college days.  However, I now think that one can have a socially responsible art practice and also apply oneself elsewhere. The ability to contribute your time elsewhere outside of transactional economy is important to me. I volunteer twice a month and donate my artwork to nonprofit organization annually.

12-What advice would you give putative collectors?  At this time, I seldom work with private collectors. My work involves working globally with Art Consultancies/Agencies that provide artwork for public facilities and hospitality projects.

13-What’s the best advice you’ve ever received in regards to your art?  “The personal is political”

14-How do you define success?  I am going to use a quote that perfectly illustrates my process. “Success is the ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm.” (Winston Churchill)

15-Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration?  I live right across Lake Michigan. So to my left, just across the street, I have amazing open area that looks and acts like the sea and to the right a city grid. The left fulfills my minimalist art side, the right fulfills my maximalist art size. I guess it depends how I decide to cross the street in the morning.

16-If you could have dinner with 3 artists living/dead who would be at your table?  Magdalena Abakanowicz, Eva Hesse and Guerrilla Girls.

17-Name three things you can’t live without in your studio?  Comfortable shoes, Camera, Smartphone.  I don’t have a physical space that I call an art studio. I work remotely.  As referenced above, I walk 2 to 3 miles a day, taking pictures, collecting visual references.   As I track the grid my whole city becomes my studio; it is more an art practice.  There’s a freedom about not having a physical studio space. I have created a compact, non-invasive-to-the-environment art practice that fits into my backpack. I enjoy exploring my immediate eco-system and having my work outputted/printed, to order.  I don’t miss the material-manipulation aspect of art-making. The physical, labor-intensive component of art making that I always enjoyed is present in the form of the walking through the neighborhoods and during the hours spent in front of computer screen.

18-How would someone find you on Social Media?  INSTAGRAM urszulagogol.artstudio