 And welcome back to The Creative Life from the American Creativity Association's Austin Global Chapter. We are brought to you in creative partnership with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleece. Joining me today is our guest, Joshua Kite. Josh is a one-of-a-kind force of nature, as you will see. He's a genius with words as a poet. He's a brilliant, vibrant, and even visceral professional artist of 42 years and counting. And Josh has been a full-time art teacher in both K-12 and college levels. Josh has touched the hearts of thousands with his unique blend of philosophy, art, poetry, and spirituality. And today he teaches us how to save your life with art and poetry. So that we can, in his words, keep falling back in love with our lives after each crisis or setback. Josh has an extensive portfolio of both art and poetry and the experience that built them. So we are dividing our show into two parts. Today we cover part one, which focuses on art and the artist. And on July 19, we'll be bringing you part two, which focuses on poetry and the artist and you. So stay tuned and we'll be back in a moment. Aloha, and welcome, Josh. Aloha. I wore my special Hawaii shirt, my favorite one, and it happened to be dark enough to fit with the background, so hello, everyone. Okay. Well, welcome. Aloha. Josh, your title, How to Save Your Life with Art and Poetry, did art save your life and how? Yeah. Yeah. You know, my life needed saving. I actually had a pretty good childhood up until the fourth grade. My best friend Stevie Hobbs and I went fishing. We hung out together and it felt to me very stable, very trouble-free. And then in the fourth grade, my parents divorced. And this is not something I learned until I turned 40. My mother told me they cut a deal where she got to take all of the kids except me and my father, I guess, bargained for me. I didn't know any of this was going on. And so I was alone in the house with my father and my mother took all the other kids. I went from having this really funny Huck Finn childhood to being completely alone. And my father went on the night shift, I guess make more money is what he said, but I never saw it. He was gone when I got up in the morning and he had gone to work by the time I got home from school. So I was very, very alone. And so the picture we just saw with Ash put up for us, that you went in fourth grade? No, no, I think that's probably fifth grade. And I had a fourth grade picture and it's much more dramatic. I saw it when I visited my sister and the shirt in my school picture is buttoned a skew. And my hair is exactly the way it would have looked when I rolled out of bed that morning. My teacher just, I don't know. I mean, it was like we were processed like, I don't know, cans or something. She just said, okay, next, he looks fine, you know, and, but all the heartache and sadness and everything I was going through. I was such a shattered little kid at that point. And when you look at it, you can see it in the picture. So all the pictures you went, oh. Yeah. And so this year, this photo is a little bit of improvement over that. Yeah. Okay. But it takes us to that point in time and that I'm assuming you really hadn't been an artist and a poet in a way that was visible to you. And so what happened, because I know you talked with me about going from crisis to relief through art. And what did happen for you to make that transformation? Well, my parents' divorce is even now still the signature wound in my life. It is the thing that just broke me. And about two years into that, you know, I cried every day the first year, cried every other day the second year. And at a certain point, I had a couple of friends and one of them got into comic books. And so I started reading them with him. And I started going to the local pharmacy to buy comics. We knew when the comics were coming in. We were very excited about them. And at a certain point, this friend of mine was drawing. And I said, wait, you mean people drew these? I mean, that's how they came into being. And people wrote these stories. And that was a revelation to me. I don't know what I was thinking, but it never occurred to me that these were drawn by people. And so I sat down and I attempted to trace. I put my piece of paper over an Iron Man comic. Oh, I like that. Like that looks like an original. And I traced it and I thought, well, this is not going very well. You know, I can't see through the paper. Let me just try and draw this. So I scooted the comic over and it came out really much more complex and actually proportional than I was expecting. And I thought, well, hey, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can be one of those guys, you know, and I think my original ambition was to be a comic book artist. I would have been happy as a clam as an 11-year-old to just draw comics all day. So my friends and I, we drew and we drew and we drew. And it was this incredible distraction, entertainment, but it also gave me my first taste of self-worth that in two years, in two years, suddenly there was a light that came on inside me that I thought, OK, life doesn't have to be this dreary, you know, put one foot in front of the other of this. I'm excited about this. I'm excited about what I can do. So that's how it... So that was the crisis and the relief and the change and did that direct you in your career? I mean, did that create your education choices and where you went, right forward? So how you made choices about your life based on... Yeah, my wife was talking to her ex-boyfriend and she said, you know, Josh has never wanted to do anything other than be an artist. And he said, yeah, that's pretty weird. Somebody with just one career choice at the age of 11 and they never waver from it, that just doesn't happen. And it's true. I mean, I think as I have moved through my life, I don't run across people who did that, where they decided what they were at 11 years old. But that's what I did. I knew what I wanted to be at 11 years old. Okay, so let's talk a moment about that process. You were in crisis, you really were. You were sort of raised yourself for a good two years. You're sitting alone in the room. You start sketching and you felt in your body for the first time some self-worth. And so I just wanna leave that with the audience too, whether it's 11 or 21 or 111, you know, what is it that brings you joy? This is not news on this show, but Josh is here to make the case, to show what comes from actually following your bliss, the Joseph Campbell recommendation, all the gurus' recommendation. You followed your bliss and by the end of today, we're gonna see what that provides the world in us, but you stayed true to your calling and that calling was you knew it because of what brought you joy. So you go through the grunt work of school and undergraduate and graduate or you graduate and it was life easy from then on. So did you, you talked about your early years. So you were doing campuses and we don't really have any art to show today of the early years, but. Yeah, I should have brought my, I did a comic when I was in seventh grade, the summer, yeah, the summer before high school, I did a comic, I wrote one, I drew it, I wrote the plot, I did the whole thing. So, you know, that's laying around somewhere. I probably should have gotten that out, but I figured we'd skip all the way to graduate school. I got my MFA from the University of Texas. Now I left Virginia Beach when I was 21. I graduated from college when I was 21, got on a motorcycle, put three suitcases on it, drove to Austin, Texas. I had a friend living in Austin, Texas that kept telling me all about it. And so I was very excited getting there. And then I got into school, went to UT for graduate school, got my master's and then when I got out, it was time to show work. Well, that, my life broke down. It broke down. My, I was married to my first wife and we fell apart, we got divorced. And it was horrible, you know, very difficult. And I kind of stumbled around, you know, thumping into walls and stuff, but I remembered I had this thing that I do, which is to go ahead and take what's happening to you and make it into what your life is. And so I started painting. I made a series of marriage and divorce paintings. And that was my way of dealing with it. It's rather dark, but it's also funny. It's also funny. And that's kind of the, one of the signature characteristics of both my paintings and my poems is they tend to either be kind of some version of dark and painting. Yeah, well, let's go back a minute, Ash, to that next slide, because we wanna give the viewers a view of, Josh isn't messing around here. That's Josh at the back. And those paintings are bigger than light. I mean, they're twice bigger. They really are, they're seven feet tall. So they are bigger than most life. Maybe not Shaquille O'Neal, but they're big. Yeah, and you're saying, so we're gonna see first divorce. No, yeah, first marriage, first divorce in retrospect, you did this after. And then your specter of a second divorce, what if that happened to you again? And the specter, no, the second marriage, I was, what was the grade of? And the baggage I was carrying coming into that. Okay, so we have a study now, just like all the greatest writers do their studies. And you know the poets and artists and writers who write about these life changes. So bring it forward a little. Would you ask that first, tell us what's going on with this first marriage. This is Josh's, when I said he's vibrant, he's bigger than life and some of the art is gonna be mixed media and actually 3D. So this is a big canvas and what's going on here? Well, I worked in a heroic size, which was what I wanted to do. And all my heroes worked in a, what they call mural size canvas. They're unsalable. They're completely unsalable, which I didn't seem to slow me down at all. Now this, I think when you look at this, what you're seeing is you're seeing a married couple going down the aisle and they've got the American dream. They're all kind of integrated. It's almost like what you'd call the exquisite corpse, which is a drawing made by two different people and then patched together. Only it's one person that did it. And I'm like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. So I'm able to kind of shift gears inside a painting. And I like that fracture. I like fragment because to me, it's what the 20th century and 21st century are all about is this fragmentation. And so the man and the wife are, the legs are kind of animated, you know? There's a circling hand and whatnot coming out of his zipper. And that is this allusion to the man's point of view that good, now that I'm married, I'll have all the sex I can stand for the rest of my life. And then the woman, of course, is thinking entirely differently. But it's a lot of this owes to pop art and cubism, I'd say. Okay, and I'm aware we have some more art to show and we have a tension in this show between studying the art as the art and not looking behind it at the artist because the art is so fantastic. So the viewers can go back to the library of the show, freeze it and take a long look at the art and work through what does it mean to you and what are you seeing there? I mean, what did you call that? The double corpse? I'd never heard of that. The exquisite corpse, it's an old surrealist concept. It's a ten-month-old name, two things put together to make a third thing. All right, so think of that audience when you see it. Maybe we'll remember to leave that in a comment with the show in the library. So now take it, I have to tell you, Josh, that looked pretty gruesome and you probably painted that after the first marriage and after the first divorce. So you were rewriting history on that first marriage, I'm thinking, but show us the divorce now. This is the next slide, Ash. What else going on here from the creative spirit in here? Interestingly enough, this is the first one I did in the series. Because I was drawn to dark things as I am, but I put a humorous take on it. So I'm in Texas, right? I'm a Virginia boy who's been raised on Roy Rogers movies and so I'm doing my pop art version of a cowboy. And again, it's got that Cubist fragmentation going on, but basically what you've got is you've got a cowboy being bucked off a horse and that is a metaphor or allegory for a divorce as you're getting bucked off the horse. There's a picture in the middle of it where my life vitals or anybody's life vitals that gets divorced are spilling, spilling out. I still like this painting. I think it's the best of the four. So I'm gonna check in with you, Josh, because we're more than halfway through today's show where we have two parts. There is a poem there and so what you did in terms of your creative expression is that you started packaging your poetry with your art and making actually classic posters with the two of them together. I just wanna leave that in the minds of the people who are looking at it and what they can do. And I noticed the poetry is a skew as is first divorce. And I would like you to share some of your poetry with us. You know, we have two other sort of combined visuals. Is this the poem? Do you think it would be a good one to share? Sure, I can do this one. All right, just give it to us. Keeping in mind that- Actually have it here. All right, well, we're- These go with the 3D heads. So we put it in this order because we're talking about divorce. So this is called Tales from Ex-Husbandland 3. And it has a lot of Chesapeake Bay imagery, which is where, you know, one of my places. Tales from Ex-Husbandland 3. Fears of fossils follow me down the tunnels of the Chesapeake into the tile echoes and sunsucked darkness where taillights swim in vermilion streaks. This is the road, the trail of riddles and tears that won't answer what died in her gut. What small sin was the final drop on a runny die that was our marriage? There are no answers in this black velvet light. She whispers from the grout, laughs through the wires, buzzes along the asphalt, the tides tick the time away, moving squirtballs and seaweed in sad serpentine lines. The burn of the stinging note, the fin of the catfish poisons my goodbyes, which die on my lips. I can't release our heady moments when our currents commingled seasoning and contaminating. There's a storm above the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. It's a jealous nor'easter that's been raging for three days. It won't leave till it tires of torn docks, split jetties and sand-scent tapping into whatever wall will catch it. Thank you. So from divorce to marriage, so let's show the audit. Do we have those on one image? Let's take a look at where you went with the theme of second marriage. We don't have that, right? We don't have the visual for second marriage. No, we don't have the second marriage. Do you have second divorce if you bring that up, Ash? And let's close out the study on the four. So getting to the end of your face and from crisis to relief. So this is the specter of what would happen to you in a second divorce and more time with this. But I just wanna give the viewers really a sense of how this role, this art is. To me, Josh, it's very emotional. I could be screaming, I could be yelling, I could be afraid and it's all there. So did you get into another era, so you remarried and you have another period of your work? So let's talk about that and what's the next round? Well, I had a show in Houston and I was shown with a group at the time and it didn't go well. It didn't go well from my point of view. It probably was somewhat successful, but I looked at the work and it looked tired. It looked like I no longer was in the same state of inspiration that I was in the early part. And so I went through something of a, an artistic and personal breakdown, I suppose. I was kind of a mess. And at that point in my life, Heather had her third child and so I was at home with three babies, two of them in diapers. There was an impossible situation. And I created this sculpture in the garage because I wanted to go 3D and I wanted to be different than what I'd been doing. And I kept adding things to it and it would get worse, which would make me want to add more to it. And the more I added to it, the worse it got. My father-in-law, who was an architect, stuck his head in the door and just shook his head and came back out, not a word. And Heather took to calling it boondoggle. Okay. I had a design class I was teaching and I felt totally in jail, imprisoned. Because I'm in the middle of an artistic crisis and there's zero time to work on it. All right, so hold that thought. Hold that thought. Because I want the audience to just relate. Are you stuck? Do you have burnout? Do you have artist block? Do you have writing block? Are you stuck in the project at work? You know, and does everything you're doing feel like a boondoggle and a piece of junk? Yes. And so, but I just want the audience to be thinking about that as we shift in where you went from boondoggle to relief through art. And maybe we could shift to that, maybe go through the next two or three sides a little bit more quickly. So people could get a flavor of shifting boondoggle burnout to, well, you know, to me, they're spectacular. For you, they were statements, really. And falling in love again with your life. Yeah, well, my love for my life was not in a good place at this point. And so I'm driving into a design class that I had to teach in the evening. And I'm driving along and I feel so imprisoned. And then I got this image of a face in profile with prison bars over the face. And I thought, wow, what an image. And then I thought, you know what, I can do that image because I've got all this pile of pointless wood sitting in the garage. So when I got to my job, I got the people, the college kids started, and then I drew very quickly in my sketchbook an image of a person with prison bars for a face over the eyes. And the idea being the prison is self-made. It's a self-made prison. It's not- And we have that. We have that already here. As soon as I got home, which was pretty late at night, and here you can see the prison bars there. When I got home at night, I started tearing pieces off of Boondoggle. And I started building in 3D first. Before I painted it, I started building in 3D the image you see in front of you. And it was fun because, and I had a very kind of cubist abstract sensibility. I liked having shapes show up that were accidental. And matter of fact, my daughter used to say, don't put anything down in this studio because it'll end up glued to the painting. So that's how I was back then. And the other thing that happened was, I had taken a poetry class in grad school. And I was pretty good at it. And when I was courting my wife, I wrote a ton of poems. I'd write her three poems a day. And so I got all my bad poetry out. I got pretty good. When you're cranking them out like that, you start working your way through it and say, well, how can I make these better? So then I got very serious about it. And I wrote a poem that fit with this head. And then I thought, well, the first time I showed them, I just typed it up, printed it out, and stuck it on the wall next to the painting. And nobody looked at it. I thought, okay, that's not okay. So Heather had a colleague who wanted one of my painting. And he said, Josh, I will graphically design your poems if you'll give me one of your heads. And he did all of my graphic design and he did all of my invitations for about five years. And that's Bob Brett's good designer. He's the one that chose the fonts and the colors and everything. So anyway, that's what got me into the head series. And of course, the crisis was having zero time and having an artistic crisis going on with no time to fix it. That it's so clear. And Ash, if you'll bring up, we're not gonna be able to share everything today. I'm glad we have a part two. There was a crisis that we all experienced, which was quarantine. I think that 12, if you could show slide 12, Ash, where the, no, no, that's existential. How about 13 and 14? This is, these are some expressions, dear audience, of what Josh did with quarantine. Actually, those are not, because of the night pictures after quarantine. And the crisis in those is retirement. Okay, so what does retirement look like? It won't hurt to show these in any event, but I think we've got, I've got to, that's it. We've got to stop it right there. And we'll be back on July 19th live. And we, I want the audience to know that you have been watching the creative life from the American Creativity Associations, Austin Global Chapter on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we've been discussing part one of how to save your life through art and poetry with our guest, Joshua Kite. Mahalo Josh for joining us and Mahalo to you, our viewers for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Bleece, and we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of the creative life. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.