In honor of Kei Gratton's new show at Gallery 360 in Minneapolis, I am reposting my 2019 interview with Kei with images from the exhibition. Thank you for reading! (All images courtesy of the artist / Instagram: @keigratton / Website: keigratton.com)
Jackson: Does nature influence your paintings? I think of outside when I see them.
Kei: Absolutely. I like to think of my paintings as internal landscapes, reflections from within. I grew up in the woods and spent endless hours pretending I was a pioneer living off the land. Spirit animals are my muse and I am always collecting stones...they are timeless sacred objects and their magical properties are certainly present in my paintings. I also love the female body and how she mirrors so much of nature's landscape. If you look closely there's a lot of female imagery in my "landscapes". It's all so playful and secretive.
Jackson: When and how did you first become interested in art? Do you think you were born with it?
Kei: I studied Art Education and a lot of my friends were serious studio majors. They ALL went off to get their Master's degrees and I went to Germany and got married. But it was there that I found my voice as an artist and was given the opportunities to develop myself as an exhibiting working artist. I had my first one person show in a really great gallery in Hamburg when I was 27 years old. I sort of felt like a fraud because I didn't follow protocol. Crazy. Was I born with it? I was born connected to another mystical realm. It's like I am always searching to find a way to describe it on canvas or paper...sometimes I feel like I nailed it. Sometimes.
Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?
Kei: George Raftopolous. He's a Greek/Australian contemporary abstract artist. I'm rather obsessed. And he's funny. Humble. He inspired the Emperor in my tarot paintings for sure. One day he started following me on Instagram and I just dropped.
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