Artist Feature:
Interview with
Sara Baker Michalak
Aaron Lelito: How did you get started making art? Do you remember a particular formative experience that happened early on in your creative journey?
Sara Baker Michalak: I didn’t have what may be considered a typical start; it goes like this: My high school was a small one. The visual art teacher had taken note that I’d dodged his studio art electives throughout junior and most of senior high school by taking the vocal music option. He found me in the hall one late-winter day and reminded me that I’d need to take one of his classes to graduate; he’d signed me up. I don’t remember much about the semester-long course, except for the class discussion at the completion of a wire sculpture project. I’d made a bread-basket sized bundle, a densely wrapped central core with ever-widening arcs extending and flinging loosely outward on each side. “Was it…. a bird?” someone asked. I admitted that it was. “Was the wire supposed to be like a cage?” “No,” I said. I couldn’t elaborate; I just knew it wasn’t a cage. At that point, “Art” materialized in me, deep down, as a wide-open field full of room for individuality and ideas and possibility.
AL: Part of your educational experience is in an interdisciplinary graduate program at SUNY Fredonia, with a combination of geoscience and humanities. Can you explain a little bit about that intersection and what influence it has had on your creative interests?
SBM: I’d always loved being outdoors, immersed in the natural world, reveling in its beauty, diversity and creativity; wondering about its rhythms, cycles, patterns and its immense order. Curiosity has made me a reader and asker-of-questions. The natural world, literally or abstractly, has always been a factor in my making of art; as I got further along, I thought more and more about the parallels and links among natural and human systems. When time and circumstance made it possible to pursue an advanced degree (after earning the BFA years before), I decided to jump into an interdisciplinary opportunity to explore, on a formal level, the intersections between art and science—geoscience, specifically—as the curriculum dealt with the “real stuff” of place: the materials and processes that manifest the great energies at work.
AL: You have experience with a lot of different media. In particular you use both layering techniques like collage and “subtractive techniques,” such as sanding, washing, and scraping. Can you describe some of your approaches to these techniques? What attracted you to them?
SBM: The processes I use have evolved over many years and continue to do so now. I rarely visualize a completed piece before I start; rather, I begin with a firm idea and general outlines as to finished form, then select material, color, line, texture, and the processes to achieve what I have in mind, refining as I go. I’m process-oriented, tending to push the possibilities. Lots of experimentation and trial-and-error happens; I rarely do the same thing twice. My inclination is to follow up with just one more step further into the unknown.
Specifically, I gravitate to “subtractive” processes to remove what would be superficial to my work and vision: finding the essential, the elemental, the fundamental. I use subtractive techniques, too, to selectively expose previous layers of work, working “in” and “back,” implying the passage of time. Layers are a big part of it.
Here is my process: I begin with my painting, drawing, photographs, and collected imagery. Combinations of these become, whole or in part, collage drafts. I go on to do re-collage, cut, alter, and re-adhere. Selected areas are further changed, added to and removed (by sanding, scratching, and otherwise abrading), exposing new imagery, texture and depth; connections between layers emerge that suggest structure, form, and flow. It’s necessary to work without knowing. The work is completed with additions that emphasize the emergent fundamental image.
AL: I’m also interested in a connection we have—I’m not sure you’re aware of it—being from the Western New York region. Personally, I’ve lived in the Greater Buffalo area my whole life. What brought you to the area originally? Secondly, how has the region (broadly speaking) been an influence over the years?
SBM: Though I’ve done my share of living and traveling elsewhere, I was born here…and came back. The region is immensely influential in many ways, some that I can understand and many more that just seem to hold out endless lines for potential artistic and personal inquiry. First, the fact that my family’s roots here go back 200 years suggests an intricate web of connection among people and place that I value. I’m exploring, personally and with my art, some of what that might mean. Secondly—a very close second—the rural, wild nature of the region keeps me here: it’s immensely important to me that I can be in a place with the natural world close by.
AL: You have a series titled “ChautauquaNature.” Can you describe the thought process behind those works? And for someone who is not familiar with the area (WNY or specifically Chautauqua), is there anything they should know that would give them a better context for your work?
SBM: The series I call ChautauquaNature focuses on the region’s flora and fauna that’s native here—meaning that its presence predated European arrival. These works include realistic imagery, though in somewhat abstracted atmospheres. My “message” is that nature is fragile; we need it, need to respect it, preserve it, protect it, work with it rather than against it. Over years of study I’ve learned some things about balance and imbalance in nature, and the values in native populations. The last 25 years or so I’ve propagated, planted, and shared native wildflowers. Learning some of the science to do this, along with learning about associated insects, birds, etc., contributes to this series.
AL: As our journal features literary as well as visual art, are there any authors or poets that are favorites for you? Anything goes here—classics to contemporary.
SBM: Many. Here are a few: Rumi, the Chinese nature poets, many in the Zen tradition, Thoreau, Whitman, Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver.
AL: What are you currently working on artistically? What are your goals for the near future?
SBM: I titled a recent exhibition of my work “MetaPhysical.” In it, I explore the material substance along with the ephemerality of nature: the fluid forces—meta—within the tangible and firm—the physical. Concurrently, I’m processing the parallels, the links, the streams that nature and humans share. My practice reflects my general agreement with those who suggest that art reflects an effort to make sense of and encourage coherence in our lives. Ultimately, I believe the elements of visual art may comprise a language unto itself, and, as such, is best executed and experienced on those terms.
From artist statement:
My artworks are about our perceptions of place and time. By means of subtractive collage I combine, then alter my media to reference elements of land/water/sky, and their processes of arising, maturation and return. My use of color, texture, form and edge express, with layered imageries ranging from transparent to opaque, our experiences of dark-light, unfirm-firm, randomness-order, chaos-cosmos. Mystery and miracle make the path; the real etheral world makes our way.
- View more of Sara’s work at sarabakermichalakart.com and on Instagram @sarabakermichalak.