Episode 108: Sex, Art, & Rocks (Not For Throwing) with Artist Katie Commodore

Podcast

Episode 108: Sex, Art, & Rocks (Not For Throwing) with Artist Katie Commodore

"Creativity is just the willingness to experiment with things.” — Katie Commodore

This week’s episode is the reminder that creativity is both a question and an answer, a process of constant problem-solving, adaptation, and asking what’s next.

I’m joined by my dear friend, Katie Commodore, artist and educator at Clark University and Rhode Island School of Design.

From drawing and peyote stitch beading to embroidery and textiles, Katie explores new mediums while continuing to celebrate sexuality, intimacy, and everyday objects in her work.

Tune into this episode to learn how Katie translates erotic photography into woven tapestries and finds emotional release through beading rocks instead of throwing them at people (yes, really).

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or on your favorite podcast platform while you cook, clean, or create.

What’s in This Episode:

Katie defines creativity as the willingness to experiment, ask questions, and find your own answers. She spends a lot of time looking at and thinking about her work.

She shares her antidote to creative blocks, inspiring you to lean into your own simple creative projects when you're not sure what's next or how to move forward.

She highlights the importance of keeping personal series that no one else has ever seen, like how she paints her panties to honor each pair before retiring them.

Katie also opens up about how her creative process has shifted as she navigates life with MS, including how embroidery has become a surprising and liberating medium for reclaiming precision and presence.

Topics Covered:

Defining creativity as experimenting and asking questions

Navigating chronic illness and adapting creative tools

Embroidery and beading as meditative, emotional outlets

The power of beautifying everyday objects (even cigarettes)

Having simple, personal projects to work on when facing creative blocks

Question:

Have you tried a new medium or creative outlet lately? Leave a comment below or tag us on IG @chefcarlacontreras & @katiecommodore share with us.

xo Carla

PS: Are you Substack curious? Listen to this podcast episode about building your new digital home on Substack. Join the Substack Accelerator to share your creative projects and work in the world. Create, Launch, & Grow Your Substack

Disclaimer: Always seek the counsel of a qualified medical practitioner or other healthcare provider for an individual consultation before making any significant changes to your health, lifestyle, or to answer questions about specific medical conditions. This podcast is for entertainment and information purposes only.

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About Katie Commodore

Katie’s parents could have told you when she was a toddler that she would grow up to be an artist, despite years of her insisting that she was going to be an astronaut and them sending her to Space Camp twice. Never giving up her dreams of painting Martian landscapes and testing low gravity pastels, she went to art school, which surprisingly lacked the rigorous science background NASA required.

Katie attended the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, graduating with a BFA in Illustration. After time spent abroad, in locales including Florence, Paris, Prague, Greece, plus a short stint in Las Vegas that is better left unspoken about, Katie returned to school, attending the Rhode Island School of Design, and earning her MFA in Printmaking. After 14 years in Brooklyn, she returned to Rhode Island to reside, and is now Adjunct Faculty at her alma mater and Clark University.

As any artist would appreciate, making art is seldom a full-time profession one gets paid well for. Katie’s professional career includes: Working as a Studio Manager and Artist/Personal Assistant for Maya Lin, the designer of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. She has also worked at several museums, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, was a Majordomo for a Boutique PR Firm in NYC, and as the Administrative Director of Crux LCA, a cooperative of Black XR Creatives and Producers that focuses on Black storytelling and creating a foothold in the burgeoning vocabulary of new media of VR and creating Black wealth.

Her most recent day-job was as the Personal Assistant to her childhood heroine. If you meet her, be sure to ask her about it. It’ll make your day.

FIND + COMMISSION KATIE:

Website: https://www.katiecommodore.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katiecommodore/

Full Transcript:

Carla (00:01):
Welcome to Nourishing Creativity. The cycle of the last few years has left you and me feeling mentally, physically, emotionally, and creatively drained, nourish your very full life through interviews with creatives and entrepreneurs about how they create and move through their creative blocks. If you don't know me, I'm Chef Carla Contreras, a food stylist and content strategist. You can find me, chef Carla Contreras, across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. Katie, welcome to the podcast. I am so grateful to have you here, my friend. Can you share with us who you are and how you serve your community?

Katie (00:50):
My name is Katie Commodore. I am thrilled and excited to be here. Also, I service my community. That sounds terrible, especially what I'm going to say next. I serve my community by doing really fabulous erotic portraits of my friends, living their best sexual lives and celebrating everything that they have to bring to power and sexuality and all of that good stuff to the world.

Carla (01:18):
And you also teach, can you tell us about that?

Katie (01:21):
That's true. I do teach, teach college level drawing at a couple of colleges at Clark University in Worcester, mass and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.

Carla (01:32):
Beautiful. Yeah. Can you share with us your last

Katie (01:35):
Meal? I am really terrible and I have not eaten lunch yet. So my last meal was breakfast where I made an herbs frittata that I then covered with leftover bine cheese and ate it with whole wheat toast and it was delicious.

Carla (01:55):
This sounds so good.

Katie (01:57):
Percent. It makes everything better.

Carla (01:58):
A hundred percent. I agree.

Katie (02:01):
It's true.

Carla (02:02):
Big question, curious of your answer. How do you define creativity?

Katie (02:07):
That's a tough one. Well, it's tough and it's not because creativity can be everything. I think creativity is just the willingness to experiment with things. It's the willingness to ask questions and then go and do the work to find the answers as opposed to just to doing what someone says or what the rules say. Creativity is that tweaking the recipe or taking a different route to work or just asking why instead of just doing.

Carla (02:43):
And what do you ask? Why about

Katie (02:45):
Everything? There's absolutely nothing that shouldn't be questioned in the world, at least in my opinion.

Carla (02:55):
Your expert art star opinion.

Katie (02:57):
Exactly. And then right in the art world, it's pretty easy to be like, what's creativity? It's just the act of creating something from something else, like be that paintings or sculptures or performance art or photography. But creating something new from something else is just an act of creativity.

Carla (03:21):
I'm curious because you've done artist residencies too. Yep. How do those experiences fill in the gaps of creativity?

Katie (03:30):
Artist residencies are like magical places just because unlike the real world, your day-to-day life, there is nothing else to do but make art. There's no tv, there's no social engagements. Half of them are in the middle of nowhere. All you can do is make art all day whether you want to or not. And so it's kind of fabulous just because one, it proves how absolutely productive you could be if you have no other choice. And then the other one, it just gives you the space to make mistakes. Like the work you're most likely working on isn't necessarily for something. It's not for a show. It can be something that nobody ever sees because you don't have to take it home with you. You can leave what you make behind, just throw it away. Nobody cares. It's kind of a time of no consequences and just pure productivity. So it's kind of great and freeing and lovely. I wish I could do more of 'em.

Carla (04:32):
That's amazing.

Katie (04:33):
Yeah. It's like camp, but better because you don't have to get up and do activities that you don't want to do. Nobody telling you you have to go swimming now. You have to do archery. But it's art camp.

Carla (04:48):
What is your current relationship with creativity?

Katie (04:51):
I live and breathe this stuff, man. No, I was my current relationship with creativity, I think right this moment, I feel like my creativity levels are a little bit depleted. I just did a residency this summer and was so productive and did some really great work that I was really happy with, and then came back and was then put under a deadline for a show in January that I'm doing a piece that's the biggest I've ever done. A tapestry that's a little bit bigger than life size and of probably the dirtiest image I've ever done too. So it's kind of this double whammy of artwork where it's pushing my own boundaries. It's pushing the weaver's boundaries. It was pushing all of my capabilities. And then the weaving initially arrived and it was totally fucked up. It blew out in a whole bunch of places. The colors were off. And so the entire piece has been a long-term struggle with problem solving, which is one form of creativity, but not the really fun of creativity. I suspect it is getting kind of old.

(06:02)
I just want it to work and be beautiful, but I'm still problem solving every way around it. But the piece is almost done, and it's going to be great. It's going to be perfect, or it won't be perfect, but it's going to be great. And hopefully the beautiful part of the dirtiness still really comes through in it, and hopefully viewers will see it that way too. And then the rest of my time, I have been beating cigarettes for a year because, oh my God, who would've th it? But everybody wants a beaded cigarette. And it turns out I stumbled upon a craft or a staple that who knew the world needed, and all of my spare time is spent beating cigarettes. And now all of your listeners are like, what's a beaded cigarette? And I really am making cigarettes out of beads. There's no cigarette in there. They're just a beaded tube, A glorified beaded tube that looks like a lit cigarette, feels like a lit cigarette, looks like a lit cigarette. Not as smokeable as a lit cigarette, but they're pretty,

Carla (07:15):
They're beautiful. I've held one. I have a video of one. We'll make sure we show people what they look like. So cool. Now we have all these listeners that want baby and cigarettes too.

Katie (07:28):
Exactly. And you can't have them. I don't have any more right now. Leave me alone. Stop ordering them. No, it's fine. In reality, they're for sale through a gallery in San Francisco called Catherine Clark Gallery. And right now, that's the only place I'm doing it. I can't do personal orders anymore. It just has totally taken over my life. I need interns to make them for me. So if anybody wants to be my intern, they can show up. If they know how to do peyote stitch beading, I got a job for you. Amazing.

Carla (07:59):
So we talked a little bit about your creative process, problem solving and doing other projects, but I want to know here about your creative process. How do you create,

Katie (08:11):
I'm a little messy when it comes to that sort of stuff. I know a lot of artists that have rituals that, yeah, they make a cup of tea. They're in their studio space, they put on audiobook and sit there with the artwork for however many minutes and then they get to work or whatever it is. I have a studio space. It is in my apartment. I never make artwork in it. I prefer working up from my couch. My couch is really comfy. I don't have a time of day where I know I'm going to be in the studio. I tend to be more productive in the evening than I am during the mornings. But I think what really comes down to it is I think a lot about my art. I'm constantly brainstorming and problem solving, and particularly with these tapestries, there's a lot of problem solving that comes into them.

(09:02)
There's a lot of just staring at them and going, all right, well, what's next? What does this thing need to push it beyond just being a woven piece of fabric and into a real celebration of somebody's life? This is real. People showing me their sex lives, that is an honor and a joy, and I am so lucky to have friends that trust me that way. And so every ounce of work that goes into them has to celebrate that in some way. And so how do I make sure I'm celebrating it and adding not just beauty and acceptance and sparkly bits, but adding meaning to them and adding something more than just a pretty image to each piece. That is a constant thought process. And then sitting there looking at what I've got in the studio, what do I need to order? What do I need to go out there and find? And then adding that too. What do I need to do? I think half of my creative process is just trying to figure out what I need to do all the time.

Carla (10:15):
And your artwork comes from photographs. Can you talk about this?

Katie (10:20):
I take terrible, terrible photographs. I am the worst photographer I've probably ever seen examples of. I take terrible basement style pornography photographs that when I die and I'm dead in my apartment for three weeks and they finally break in the door and they find my cats having eaten off my face and go into my computer to figure out what happened, it's going to hit the news because my computer is filled with tens of thousands of basement terrible shots of pornography because I'm not going after a good image. I'm going after something that I can use to reference. So yes, it has its roots in photography, but the photographs themselves never see the light of day. I then either do drawings from multiple photographs at a time, or I will combine photographs to use as reference for the weavings, but the photos themselves never get seen beside by people besides me and the models. And I'm always surprised when the models want to see them because they're terrible. They're terrible pictures. They're not flattering. They're not anything because photographer, I am not. I can draw. I draw like a mofo. I cannot take a good photograph to save my life.

Carla (11:39):
I would love to see some of these photos because you are an artist and you do have an eye. I wonder if, and this is a deeper question, are you looking for, is there a motion that you're looking for? What is the essence that you're looking for in these photos?

Katie (11:56):
I am looking for trying to mitigate the distortion that your camera gives you. So I'm trying to get the whole figure in the frame and without their legs getting really long and their heads getting really big. So they're often taken from weird angles just to mitigate that fisheye, the distortion that happens automatically with a digital camera or even a normal camera, which means that they're never cropped in a nice, beautiful way. So you think about the most beautiful photograph you've ever seen in your life and it's artistically cropped. It's not about getting the whole figure in there. It's about how the image intersects with the planes of the photograph, of the edges of the photograph to make something that's interesting and dynamic and beautiful. Whereas I can make it interesting and dynamic on my own. What I need is to have all of the limbs in there. What I need is to have the feet not look like they're either microscopic or they're bigger than your head. What I need is a good reference photograph as opposed to a beautiful photograph. So I 100% shoot for reference as opposed to sexy. I don't think my pictures are very sexy. They don't become sexy until they become art. They're specimens. They have all the information that you need as opposed to being seductive and leaving something to the imagination. It's got to have everything in there.

Carla (13:29):
And so when you are turning this into art, what are the mediums that you're working with

Katie (13:37):
These last few years? Most of what I've been doing is tapestries, so they're digitally woven Ja card tapestries that I then go into and add applique and hand embroidery and bead and disrupt the weave in different ways, but add more to them that you get that artist hand in it instead of it just being like a printout basically. Because basically that's what it is. I send a file to a weaver and they send me back the weaving, which is no different than me sending a file to my printer and it printing it out, and there it is. It's done. Yeah, that can be a finished piece of artwork, but it doesn't have my hand in it as the artist. It doesn't have anything in it to make it different than I could have a 10 of them woven and they'd all be exactly the same.

(14:28)
So how do I make it unique and special on top of it just being something that I had created. So I do mostly that this past five, six years, longer than that, 10 years. Other than that, I do paintings drawings with a medium called Gache, which is a opaque watercolor medium that I'm a huge fan of. Gives you nice flat, bold colors that I adore, and then I like to do things in beads. I've been beading since I was about four years old, and my mom taught it to me as a way just to keep me occupied and out of her hair. And so I bead things and not like jewelry. I stopped doing jewelry decades ago, but I be sculptures, I be rocks, I beat cigarettes. Now I'm going to try my hand at beating dice. I think that's a good vice to move into after the cigarettes are done.

(15:24)
Their addition, I'm going to close the addition at 50 cigarettes. Right now we're at 30 and so 20 more and then I'm done. No more cigarettes than onto dice. I really want to figure out how to be joints. I think we need some beaded joints, but it's a complicated, that sort of increase and reduction to get the fatness of the joint and then much less the twisted bit at the end. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I'm going to talk about Z. Exactly. Half of my creativity is just problem solving in my head and trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. I'll figure it out. It'll click something, will click in my head and I will have figured it out.

Carla (16:05):
How do you move through creative blocks? And I want to add in here about health challenges. We've known each other a really long time.

Katie (16:18):
Yeah, a few minutes.

Carla (16:21):
Been through a lot together. So I'd love for you to share if you're open to sharing that.

Katie (16:25):
Yeah, absolutely. I have several things that I do in the studio that are just busy work. I have a couple of series of drawings that are just for me. Nobody's ever seen them. One is a series of paintings of my underwear as I retire them. So before I throw them away, I do a painting of them to commemorate the panties with all their holes and whatever reason it is, I'm throwing them away is explained on the back of the painting. So I do a little tiny painting of my panties before they get retired. And then I'm working on a series of drawings of 1940s through sixties French pinup girls that I've been working on that for probably 20 years, just as busy work as like warmup work or I don't know what to do in studio, so I'm just going to sit here and draw these.

(17:17)
That I found fascinating when I finally did get diagnosed with MS because some of them are terrible and absolutely I can draw, as I said earlier, I can draw like a mofo, I can draw. If one thing I can do is draw a beautiful drawing, and some of them are so bad, they're out of a portion. They're just bad line quality of shaky lines. There's nothing about them that looks like it's something I did, it looks like somebody else drew them. And I always did them. And I'd be drawing like that and I'd just be like, all right, today is just not a day. I'm not feeling it. I'm not going to be in the studio today. I'll do something else. And it turns out it's more of an issue of one of my symptoms of MS is I'm losing my fine motor skills. And so it's just proof that I have MS and it's showing up in the real world function of being an artist.

(18:16)
And there are just times when I can't draw, which is how I stumbled onto doing embroidery work. I started going into textiles because I was looking for a way to continue drawing essentially, and keeping that super tight line and all of the detail that I put into my paintings and my drawings. But without needing the super fine motor skills anymore, I can stab that piece of fabric a thousand times until I get into the right spot and nobody's going to know the difference. So it gives me so much more freedom when it comes to maintaining that OCD anal line quality that I've gotten everything and detail level and pattern and everything else that comes with every piece I do because I have a different amount of control when I don't have control in it. So when I'm stuck and don't know what to do, I know this is kind of a roundabout way of getting to the point of when I'm stuck and don't know what to do, I tend to fall back on just doing things that no one's going to see because I don't do them well anymore.

(19:30)
In a way that, and I have been working on this series of beaded rocks that are not for throwing at people's heads where they're all beach rocks. Okay. Alright. So this series I started during Covid and just like everybody else during Covid, I was dealing with some serious anger issues and we'd go to the beach, even though the beaches in Rhode Island were technically closed during covid, I would go for the beach for walks and pick up these beach stones, and they just felt so good in my hands. But what they really felt good in my hands is because I wanted to throw them at people's heads and I just wanted to throw them at people so badly that I needed a way to make them beautiful so that I wouldn't want to throw them at people's heads anymore. So I collected way too many stones and I still have a box of 'em that I'm working through and I cover them in beads or I weave beads around them. So the weaving's actually just a casing around the stones and so that now they're all beautiful and pretty and they feel even better in your hand with the goal of not wanting to throw them at people's heads anymore because I've worked through all of the anger through this meditative process of beating and exercised the demons of violence when it comes to social injustice and everything else that bothers me on the day-to-day basis.

Carla (21:00):
Well, it's a beautiful service.

Katie (21:02):

I thank you. They are pretty. I will admit that they are really pretty and they do feel simply amazing in your hand. That texture of beads is just one of my favorite things, and they get so warm from your body heat that it just feels great. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them though in the long term outside of just keeping them in a box.

Carla (21:21):
Maybe there's a series with the rocks, who knows?

Katie (21:27):
So long as people understand they're not for throwing at people, they're just for looking at and being pretty. The anger has left them

Carla (21:34):
Rocks that are not for throwing.

Katie (21:36):
Exactly.

Carla (21:37):

Katie, can you share with us how we can find you, how we can work with you, how we can support you?

Katie (21:42):

Absolutely. I am actually incredibly easy to find Katie. Commodore is not a very common name. Commodore is spelled just like the band or the old computer or the rank in the Navy. My website is katie commodore.com. You can contact me through there or Instagram at Katie Commodore. If you want to have a dirty portrait of you made, I'm here for you. Amazingly, that rarely happens. Most of my commissions are people's children, which I think is one of the great ironies of life because most of my day I make artwork. That is what happens before you have children, and then people commission the product of the sexy time that they had before they had kids. I guess the best way to support me is just to support all artists.

Carla (22:34):

Thanks so much for tuning in to Nourishing Creativity. You can find me Chef Carla Contreras across all social media platforms and more information in today's show notes. While you have your phone out, please leave a review on iTunes or Spotify. This is how others find this show. I really appreciate your support sending you and yours so much love.