#49. TESSA HULLS - "Someone with a gallery showing of their art."

Monday, June 6, 2011

#49. TESSA HULLS - “Someone with a gallery showing of their art.”

Tessa Hulls

In March, Tessa Hulls broke up with her boyfriend in Seattle. With no immediate future plans and nothing holding her to the city anymore, she took off on her pink and white bike to cross the country she’d been born in but never really seen.

Starting in San Diego, she skirted the Mexican border, went through Texas and Alabama and turned up to New York, stopping for a week to visit with friends here. On average, she bikes 90 miles a day.

“I’ve got this horrendous glove tan,” she says, shaking her wrists at me.

Tessa is originally from Northern California, where Mary Schmich warned to “live just once, but to leave before it makes you soft.” Tessa doesn’t seem soft, which I’ll get to in a bit. She attended UCLA for a year, but hated it and transferred to Reed College in Portland to study art. As a kid, she tells me, she was always drawing.

“Growing up, I was pretty isolated because I had no friends that lived within 20 miles of me,” she says. “I did a lot of hiking and I read my way through the public library. I drew. I knew I could always entertain myself with a piece of paper.”

In a way that’s what she’s doing now. She tells me the bike trip is mostly just “talking to myself for seven hours a day.” She’s spent four months essentially alone.

We meet up, after exchanging emails for a while, at a bar called Commonwealth in Park Slope. Tessa, aside from her hands, has a dark tan evident of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors. Her dangling blue, metal earrings are hand-made. She’s in her mid-20s and has dark hair too and a sort of Native American/’Where The Wild Things Are’/effortlessly natural coolness about her. It’s like she could go camping and still wake up with nice hair. But it’s not annoying or false.

“You’re catching me at a really weird point in my life,” she says when I try to describe the vibe I’m getting from her. She’s been in constant motion for too long and mostly isolated. New York City is throwing her off, she says, because it’s “somewhere big again.”

There’s a charm about her that makes me feel like I’ve just stepped into someone else’s adventure, the way Kerouac must have felt writing about Neal Cassady to borrow a grandiose analogy. Tessa calls what she’s on “a vagabond romance.” “People have been attracted to it, and me, moreso lately because it’s like I’m carrying this epic story, I’m carrying it with me and living this crazy gypsy life,” she says, kind of brushing it off as if she finds it a little ridiculous and embarrassing. But like all those other moths in the lamplight, I’m finding it magnetic.

Her work, as I see it on her website, is very influenced by nature, featuring wolves and owls and bulls. Tessa says she works on multiple pieces at once when she gets going, clocking in and out for short spans. She mentions wanting to set up clocks by each piece to start and stop and see how long each takes to create.

In high school, Tessa got her start as a “professional” artist when she and another kid were chosen to participate in a juried exhibition with adult artists. “I was way in over my head,” she says. “I had no idea what I was doing and I was this dog-collared, blue-haired stereotype talking to these serious art patrons.” But she must have been doing something right; her paintings sold at the exhibit. It was the first inkling Tessa had that her art could make money.

In the beginning, people told her how impossible it was to make a living in a creative field. “We all kind of internalize that as artists, but I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna try and catch this unicorn,” she laughs.

“The scariest part is when you start introducing yourself as an artist instead of as a ‘waitress who paints’,” she says. “You have to say, ‘Oh I’m a painter in every aspect of my life.’”

In college, Tessa laments learning post-modern theory over the business side of art, which she finds vital. “They teach you how to talk about your work but not how to send a press release,” she says. She also believes art schools should have mandatory graphic design classes, just so students have some practical skill when they graduate.

“They don’t prepare you for being an artist as a career,” she says. “It’s not just rejection, it’s complete silence when you throw yourself out there.” She’s referring to pitching shows to galleries. It took some time for Tessa to immerse herself in the Pacific Northwest’s art scene.

“My advice to other young artists would be to find people doing what you want to do and pick their brains, be their friend,” she says. “Find out where the galleries are and try to get on group shows where you just have one or two pieces. Be responsible and get your pieces in on time so you can cultivate a relationship with that gallery and do it again.”

Other parts of being an artist that Tessa finds reluctantly important are networking, which she calls a “necessary evil” in the insular art world, and using technology to maintain an online presence through Facebook and Twitter. She also writes about art for a Seattle magazine as a way to meet famous artists. “It’s so hard to approach an artist you admire without being a blubbering wreck,” she says. “I’m just learning how to sit down with a person I’m in awe of and talk normally.”

Some artists she says she loves are Stacy Rozich, Tim Karpinski, Theo Ellsworth (all from the Pacific Northwest) and Austrian painter Gustav Klimt (the only one I’d heard of).

When I tell her I’ve seen her work online, she’s demure. She tells me she has a big solo show coming up when she gets back to Seattle in August but that she doesn’t plan on staying in the city now that her relationship ended. Her plans after the solo show include (for real) moving to Antarctica for five months to work as a cook on a science research facility.

One other place she may go back to is a commune she unexpectedly ran across near Marathon, Texas called La Loma Del Chivo, which she describes as a “year-round Burning Man.” It’s full of travelers and crazy-looking architecture. Some of the travelers stay for good, some move on. It was listed as a hostel on a couch-surfing website Tessa’s using on her trip, but it didn’t prepare her for the hippie commune feel of the town. She ended up taking four days and painting a 20 ft. mural there as an unexpected tangent. (The man in charge told her to “pick a wall, any wall.”) She describes painting murals as one of her favorite things; often she’ll set up some beers and James Brown music and have a mini-party on the ladder.

Usually, she tells me, she doesn’t plan too much when it comes to her art, but the hours alone have caused her to dream up exact details of what she wants this next solo show to be. She hopes to explore the never-ending contradiction between wanderlust and needing your roots.

She’s going to call it “Oh, The Sweet Unrest,” a quote from the swallows in the book ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ It’s part of their response to Ratty asking why they fly south every winter and something that’s stuck with Tessa on her journey. “I’m like a magpie,” she says. “I keep phrases around.”

She’s shy about her own work, but not insecure. She tells me she rarely has a show where nothing sells and that some have sold out completely. Her work is within the 200 to 600 dollar price range though the prints on her website are 20 dollars. She tells me she has some trouble with seeing art as a commodity, but she’s making peace with it. It troubles her that success as an artist is categorized by sales. Once you become well-known, your art is marked by how unattainable it is; the more expensive, the more it is only seen or owned by the highest echelons of society. It’s hard to avoid if you want to work as an artist.

“To me, art is like pooping,” she smirks. “It’s something you have to do, but it’s also very private and it’s weird to put it in a frame and up on a white wall and to have a conversation with a stranger about it,” she says. “The more successful I get, the more surreal it is.”

On her trip, aside from the mural, the only art she’s been able to create has been in her small sketchbook. It’s black ink doodles of people snuggling and mountains surrounded by swirling words — some random snippets of poetry, others short diary entries.

“My friends are like, ‘God, what am I supposed to with my life?’ and I’m glad I don’t have that problem,” she says, thumbing through the sketches. “I don’t do well if I’m not active.”

We wrap up where we’ve been sitting outside in the bar’s backyard and go inside, where we talk a bit more by a table and then again, out front by her bike. Every time I think the conversation’s about to be over, we bring up something else. She says she loves hearing people’s interpretations of her work, particularly if it’s vastly different from her original intention. Like I am with 100 Interviews, Tessa says she’s always confused by which pieces end up as crowd favorites.

“For example, I could set up a stall in Seattle or Portland with art with bicycles and birds and comfortably make a living,” she says. “But it’s art for yourself vs. art for a market.”

The sun’s setting outside Commonwealth and Tessa’s bike (with a little Japanese lucky cat on the front) is between us as she straps on her helmet. “I’m itching for my paints at this point,” she’d said earlier. “I’ll be disappointed if my stuff doesn’t look different after this experience.”

She asks about 100 Interviews, which she’s been reading. I tell her I’m almost done and that I won’t know how I really feel about it until it’s over. Tessa nods, “It sounds like you’re on a great adventure,” she says.

It seems we’ve both caught each other at a very weird time in our lives.

I smile and gesture to her bike, “You too,” I say. “Good luck.”

If you want to support Tessa on her bike ride and in her upcoming show at Evo’s TimesInfinity Gallery, buy some of her artwork here.