Studio Visit with Kirstyn Wright

Originally recorded May 29, 2022.

George Irwin of Western Gallery visits with Kirstyn Wright, based in Decatur, Texas (the Wright House), for a wide-ranging conversation about the artist’s work, process, and studio practice.

Transcript note: Speaker labels were assigned from the source audio where available and dialogue context otherwise. Paragraph breaks were added for readability, and verbal filler was lightly edited. Joint labels mark rapid or overlapping exchanges. This was prepared from an automated transcription, so minor transcription errors may remain.

In-person studio visit—May 29, 2022

Watch the original video on Instagram (15:33)

Participants: George Irwin, Kirstyn Wright, and Will Wright

George Irwin: Hey everybody, George Irwin here with Western Gallery and I just made a road trip out to the Wright House in Decatur Texas which is about an hour away from where I live. And so we're doing kind of an impromptu live here because I've got Kirstyn Wright and Will Wright here with me. And Kirstyn is one of our New Western Talent artists, and so I thought we'd show you around their spot here in Decatur, and then also kind of give you another look at the pieces on the show. And then we can look at some of Will's pottery too. So y'all say hi. Hey, hi, Kirstyn! Cool, yeah, so they've got this nice little sweet little shop in downtown Decatur. I'm going to flip the camera around so you can see out the window, which looks far away from now. It's just right off the square and they do pottery lessons and other art lessons and painting.

George Irwin: Then they have a bunch of their work that they're selling here like kind of a gallery style and then some art supplies and plants. So it's kind of a really cool little shop. Oh, that's okay I just forgot what I was doing with my camera. Yeah so anyway this is one of the pieces that Kirstyn has in New Western Talent and it's just really super awesome. There's just so many things about it and we were just talking a second ago when I was looking at these things about how you see so much more in person. I don't know why, but you just always, not only does it like feel better and look better in person but you see a lot more detail and pieces of the image when you're looking at it like that. But, Kristen would you mind coming over here and maybe we can talk about this piece?

Kirstyn Wright: Yeah, yeah kind of helps give the scale of the piece to me looking online. It's hard to always tell the size of something but yeah, this is the second piece I've done. I call them scarf paintings and basically because I was inspired by Kermit Oliver who is my favorite Texas artist, if not my favorite artist. And he's made Scarfs for Hermes so kind of inspired me to start thinking in that way like a very textile way. This one is also inspired by South Texas which is where my dad's from. He's from Mission which is the Rio Grande Valley. So I tried really thinking of animals like flora fauna that are unique to that area. The citrus, of course is big in South Texas. My family moved down there to be citrus farmer so kind of an ode to spending summers and Christmas in the valley. It's always summer down there and it's desert but also tropical so I just love it down there.

Kirstyn Wright: And of course, ocelots, I've never seen an ocelot in South textures but they're still there, a few of them, and I have a dream to see one of those someday.

George Irwin: Very cool, yeah, I mean, I love all the pieces of this painting and yeah, the armadillo are just so cool. And I like how it's like, you know, it's a reflection or, you now, balance 50-50 kind of, but it's not an exact.

Kirstyn Wright: Yeah, I tried changing the two cats Yeah, it's kind of symmetrical but I try changing things up too. Those coral snakes are cool. I had to look at them and I was like, red and black, friend of Jack. Yeah, I never know. Red and yellow, kiddo fella. Yeah, yeah. I had the look it up when I was painting it. I hope that's correct. I did look at pictures hopefully it's not like a, I think, king snake or what's the other one? Yeah, i'm not sure what the other one is. It's not a coral snake. And the other thing I was happy to find in here, I guess are these like fun little paintings that

George Irwin: Kirstyn has done. Like it's just a little bitty. Real quick, like I don't know, little portraits.

Kirstyn Wright: Like little acrylic paintings. I just kind of do those in between a big oil painting just because they dry quick and yeah I just kinda whipped out some little cowboy portraits It's like all moody Cowboys and these two actually I did like a caption contest on Facebook So we've got say when and I'm your huckleberry. That's good

George Irwin: Yeah, and then over here in the back of the store There's there's some more like 2d artwork but this is kind of like the I guess the one of it one of the class stations the painting station and then like ceramic displays. And Will, you're the in-house ceramicist. What did you, you went to school for ceramics?

Will Wright: Yes yeah I was at University of Texas for MFA in Clay. And then I got my undergraduate in Clay at Harvard and Simmons so it's actually where Kirstyn and I met at Clay at that time. Very cool. Yeah so I'm born in red West Texas. Well sorta West Texas, I have one so I'll start West Texas So yeah, some of that influences a lot of what we do here. But yeah, I got my degree there at North Texas which was largely wood and salt firing lots of what they call atmospheric firing where the fire does a lot work for you. A lot of people are familiar with like RACU And it's not dissimilar to that except it's usable It's a little bit hotter so it's a bit... I'm gonna come over here and show them some of these wood fired pieces. So yeah, you can see I'm trying to find a good one here. This little hot jar is nice. You could see these little warm spots that have a little bit of sheen

Will Wright: and then other parts are a little drier. That's all due to the ash and salt. We actually put a little salt in there to create a little sheen. Does the salt pop or? Yeah it kind of, it really vaporizes. So I try to usually get a salt that won't pop too much because usually that means you're getting a lot of salt inside your kiln and not enough in the wind. Draft, so yeah, it's cool because you're very connected when you're throwing in pieces of mesquite wood and stuff that feels very like, it's hot there's flames, it feels very Texas- I don't know, there's something connected to me in that and yeah, just kind of natural materials We just talked about sometimes with fire clay that we dig up. Mm-hmm. So yeah, but that's kind of what I went to school for, but we also here do a lot of electric firing. So where people can paint your own, I make the pot and then people can change it.

Will Wright: Yeah there's the painting. And we have another potter here, Hunter Mars that makes some of this stuff as well. And so you can come paint it and these are just heated up in an electric tank long enough to turn into glass. And so, and I've actually started doing some more of that. I brought these out because I think they're very like fun nice pieces little. Yeah, see bluebonnets on that one? That kind of sage or bluebonnet kind of in between. Lots of barbed wire. Yeah, you can do them on Poncele and then of course the armadillo. That's always a good seller. Like, I don't know we've kinda started getting into, Kirstyn and I at the same time kinda maybe together we have like a blossom being sorta aesthetic that she's really kinda led the way on the western stuff. I was kind of, like I said, I was mainly taught the wood fire thing,

Will Wright: but then she's our whole experience here in Decatur has sort of helped us embrace some of the aesthetic of it. Sure where you are. So pretty cool. You can see little armandillos too on some of the pots that the person actually sculpted herself. Oh very cool. Oh, cool. So this is like... Little collab. Stuck it on. Okay and I did not realize that this yellow is the... The road. Yeah so I got a... It's a good laugh. Good cable. Shout out to Matthew McConaughey for teaching me that phrase. What's the phrase? The phrase is there's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. Oh yeah. That's good.

George Irwin: And then we've got the other scarf painting over here. And what's the, what is this one called?

Kirstyn Wright: I just call it Flora and Fauna. Texas Flora and Fauna yeah. This was the first one I did. This was like my I did a project. We were teaching all this little art so into quarantines for a couple of months I started working on this one in 2020 and then yeah I decided to pursue making this little scarf out of it and did that and I'm out of those right now but he'd stay tuned for more of those. But yeah, just kind of all Texas animals and I really kind of focus on spiking animals because that's mostly what we have here in Texas like spiking plants, spiking animal so almost everything has horns or even a guard catfish are kind of spiking and they're just created with those Yeah, our poisonous spiders, poisonous snakes, there's a copperhead, and the wild snakes. The skeet are spiny, yeah. I've tried doing all animals I've seen except I've never seen it in my life. But most of these are...

Kirstyn Wright: They're spiky. There's no animal in here. Oh yeah!

George Irwin: Awesome man, I'm just gonna show- let's show them your throwing classroom over here. I was gonna say we do a lot of like, lazy places where some teachers can learn about the art. We even train women. Oh, very close. Really nice. Okay, sorry somebody's asking what's our name? This is Will and Kirstyn Wright and we're at the Wright House in Decatur Texas so I hope I hope you guys can hear that a little bit better. So nice to get it. Really cool.

Kirstyn Wright: Krista, can you tell us about these two? We've got the one on the left up here, Try Hard, in the New Western Talent show as well. Yeah so, Try hard, but should we try harder? I don't know if you can see it really well, but it's scratched into paint. Oil paint and he's just kind of the cowboy's cowboy. I based it off of the really famous longer room and cover of, I don't remember if it's like that theme but you can go find this photo. I don' know if it is. Sure yeah. Classic cowboy. Uh, didn't it add in water to the slime? I liked kind of doing that juxtaposition. Classic. I'll just do the cowboy with the slime on. In the Tri-hard that she's been trying harder, I just like to write down little phrases like here, in Western music or someone says some kind of a key point, and it means something to me.

Kirstyn Wright: And there's still a key movement at Tri-heart that she has tried harder than any other person. And then we can have more of an episode of the Trihard that I've been trying to play with in my career set up. Welcome to show, this one is one of our very first like graphic cowboy artworks. And good night Roy that is from quickly down under with Tom Selleck.

Kirstyn Wright / Will Wright: We both have the aesthetic and the So they just kind of, you know, some of that bull We'll see if it does. Just kind of a shout out to a lot of the students. But our friend, we make some of them, but our friends do. So you guys will be here somewhere. We'll just keep texting this. We just surprised that our students would do the art. Occasional Van Gogh and O'Keeffe. So this is one of those things. And all of that stuff. Excellent.

George Irwin: Well awesome! Well um... Well this has been fun. Thank you guys for- Yeah, thanks. Yeah, kind of a perk of living close to the George Irwin. What's the U.S. Department? You know, beyond just the internet world. It's great. Yeah, super glad you came out. If y'all are in the Dallas area, come up to Decatur, it's not that far away. And visit the right house. Come out to the country and see us for a year. We stay through Saturday and you can follow the right house and we've got hours and different workshops. Hey Max, I was just talking about you. I saw that you just popped on here. Real quick, I'm going to go back in the other room and show them your little portraits, Kirstyn. Because you were doing the Just for Fun paintings and that's what these reminded me of. A person is doing these little cowboy portraits for fun in between stuff and they're really cool.

George Irwin: Hope you all are well, take care, thanks for tuning in. See ya next time. Adios!