Art Hound

Hollie Chastain is a found paper and collage artist who pounds the pavement for the perfect (i.e. stained, ripped, doodle-covered) books and ephemera for her mixed media pieces. Her work is currently for sale at Nahcotta’s ETA 7 (one of her pieces was included in this week’s picks) and through her etsy shop, Dr. Kennedy Jones. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her husband and two children.

AH: Tell us a bit about your artistic process. Do you start with a specific idea for a piece or are you inspired by the found objects you use?

HC: It varies. Sometimes I will have a composition in mind and go scavenging for exactly what I feel is right for that particular piece.  Only about 10% of the time will the end result portray the initial idea exactly but if something has been hanging around in my mind for a long time, never changing, then i stick with it. The composition and subject for some of my pieces were imagined months before I stumbled across the perfect scrap of paper that it required. But most of the time i start with one really great sheet of paper or board and start building up, pulling shapes and ideas and characters from the different scribbles and splotches and colors i find. Some of my favorite pieces have started from nothing but a coffee-stained book cover and an amazing scrap of blue from a geography book that accidentally overlapped in a great way at the bottom of a crate.

HC: It’s a bit of a roundabout story. A few years ago I bought a sheet of handwritten prescriptions from the late 1800s that I just fell in love with. It’s full of this beautiful calligraphic writing that seems alien with symbols and abbreviations. In the upper right corner of one slip there is a square of symbols, measurements, that I loved more than anything else and had it tattooed on myself not too long after that. The design of it was just too perfect. Dr. Kennedy Jones is printed at the top of that particular slip and i started joking about how it would be the most wonderful alias. There is a great cadence to it. When it came time to name my Etsy shop I chose that as the title, after thinking of then rejecting names for four days, and the blog followed.

HC: I’ve really had a great experience with both of these sites. A friend of mine just pointed out a great statement by the illustrator Frank Chimero about getting started as a creative, “You breadcrumb your audience along like Hansel and Gretel did, leading your fans along a trail of small bits of information and tiny, tasty morsels of output. It’s important that these tasty morsels have a clear point of view and a consistent flavor. Then, every once in a while, deliver a house of candy. Something big. A complete idea. Something lasting. A full thought.” This is so true and I think having the right network of platforms, in this case sites like Flickr, Etsy, etc, really makes this concept available and possible without devoting your life to marketing yourself. It’s a way for artists to shape a brand and look completely on their own and also be a part of a larger whole with other artists in the same field, with a similar vision, individuals that inspire and encourage each other. Etsy is such a wonderful starting point for artists. I have had great success so far with online sales through Etsy but also I have had many galleries and individuals contact me for showings and other events and jobs through my shop on Etsy that maybe they initially found through a blog or Flickr group.