KRISTEN FERRELL
By Sami Montague
‘Delightfully fucked up,’ ‘a jaded giggler’ and ‘a big-hearted sociopath,’ are just a few of the ways California-based Kristen Ferrell has been described. My Name Is? interviews Ferrell – the artist who specialises in painting visions of the macabre in a cutesy way – to discover more about her art’s symbolic meaning and asks why there has to be quite so much blood involved?
Kristen Ferrell was born in Missouri but adopted and raised in Kansas where she lived for the majority of her life, before upping sticks a couple years ago – along with her husband, son and army of cats – to Huntington Beach, California. She now works out of a studio in her home, a place she describes as somewhere ‘an art bomb went off.’ It’s a busy place. ‘There isn't an inch of wall space that isn't covered in photos, illustrations torn from books or shelves filled with books or bottled animals used for drawing reference,’ she explains. ‘You can barely walk through it because of the art supplies scattered everywhere. It's my own highly organised chaos.’ Juggling her many responsibilities means her ‘cluttered nightmare of an office’ is Ferrell’s ‘little sanctuary’ – her place to think.
Making art is a cathartic process for Ferrell but she fully understands the reality of ‘the professional world and the personal one.’ Ferrell has been making art in a ‘personal world’ sense for a long time, mainly to serve as an emotional outlet to cope with all the stresses and frustrations of life, as she candidly confides: ‘I hate talking about feelings, but putting them in a picture is very safe for me. Over the years it's saved my sanity. It keeps me from punching strangers in the grocery store.’ However, after about a year of gallery success in the professional world she’s really started to think of herself as an artist. It’s a success that has surprised her but one she has been able to embrace: ‘I never expected to do anything more with my art than create it and leave it stacked up in my closet so it's been incredibly fun turning my personal art world into my professional art world.’
The FULL interview with KRISTEN FERRELL appears in issue 6 of Mynameis? magazine - click here to purchase your copy www.graphotism.com/Subscribe-Graphotism-or-MyNameIs-Magazine.74.0.html
