Q&A with Patty Voje: Show Up for Your Art
It’s Mother’s Day weekend, so let me introduce you to my mother! My mom—known to most as Patty Voje (pronounced VO-jay)—is an incredible artist and go-getter. I grew up watching the journey of her graphic design hustle grow from working at home (in the days before everyone worked from home) all the way to where she is now—which is running SPOT, her own strategic marketing agency with 32 employees. Alongside her daily role modeling of what it is to be a creative entrepreneur, she’s also an accomplished fine artist and oil painter. She raised my sister Jane and me to be artistically independent and to embrace the highs and lows of the creative journey.
Patty a.k.a. my mom has been making art her whole life. She studied Fine Art at the University of Minnesota, earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Metropolitan State University, and continues to study at the Atelier of Minneapolis. She’s exhibited her oil paintings throughout the United States and has received a variety of accolades, including Best in Show at the Paint the Point Plein Air Competition in Mineral Point, Wisconsin; First Place in the Boulder Plein Air Competition in Boulder, Colorado; and First Place in the Wild Rivers Plein Air Competition Quick Paint in Taos, New Mexico. Her work has been featured in the national PleinAir Magazine as well as on the walls of my house. (I may or not have an “Ava wall” comprised of oil portraits of my cat.)
I chatted with my mom in her art studio about her creative process, her journey as an artist, and how motherhood fits into it all.
Q&A with Patty Voje, oil painter
Q: When did you first know you were an artist?
A: I grew up the ninth kid of a large Catholic family with no money. My favorite thing to do in the summers was craft days, where you’d go to the school and make a craft for four hours. They’d send out the little community flyer that said, “Here are the crafts we’re going to be doing this summer,” and I’d study it so carefully and I went to every one. I didn’t care what the craft was, I lived to go to the craft days when I was little! That’s my first memory of making art—and then my other one would be my mom painting. She didn’t paint much, but the idea that you would set up an oil paint easel with oil paints in the middle of nine children in a 900-square-foot house that was completely chaotic, while she worked full-time and sewed and cooked and baked and gardened and did everything else—I thought that was pretty brave of her. Those are my early memories of art. In junior high and high school I was more of a recluse. I enjoyed drawing and art and it was the only thing in high school that I semi-excelled at. When I went to graduate from high school and I didn’t have good grades and there wasn’t any place to put people who didn’t have good grades but who liked art, everyone kind of scratched their heads. Then they said, “Well, you could go to a commercial art program, and you could learn how to work in advertising.” Which is what I did.
Q: And you kept painting alongside that?
A: I always kind of painted. I took art classes throughout my life and painted on and off. But then when I had kids, all of a sudden it felt like a very frivolous activity. It felt selfish that you would paint when you have housework to do and house repair and children that need your attention. And also, it wasn’t generating any income. It was that and reading books that I got a lot of judgment on from other people. I continued to read books, but I stopped painting because I just got a lot of flak. And I think I gave myself a lot of flak. I thought, “You shouldn’t be doing that when you have small children; you should be doing things with your small children.” But then I got divorced and all of a sudden I had so much time on my hands because I had joint custody of my kids, and I didn’t have anything else to do every other weekend. I thought, well, I could take some art classes. I never realized until that moment that art is part of good mental health hygiene. Having art to kind of lose myself in was an important coping skill at the time.
Q: When did you start plein air painting?
A: A friend was doing these plein air outings at this little nature preserve. I was working at an advertising agency, trying to come back from a period in which I was quite broke, so I was trying to work as much as I could. I got this invitation and it was like, “Oh, we just go on Saturday mornings for two hours and we paint outside.” And I thought, “All right, I’ll try.” I went, and going outside to paint felt like, “Oh, this is what I miss. I miss being outside. I miss nature.” The nice thing about plein air painting is that you don’t care about your finished product at all. It’s just two hours of having fun outside and then you bring the painting home and you get it indoors and you look at it and usually it sucks, and that’s fine. Some of my favorite paintings are still plein air paintings that I did that really suck—because it’s the experience that I remember. Or, I do a lot of traveling for plein air, and then I always remember, “Oh yeah, that place in Oregon” or “that place in Utah,” and I remember clearly the experience of painting and the joy that was there that day.
Q: When did you start your daily painting commitment?
A: When you were both gone, I realized there’s nothing harder than having both of your children leave for college far away. That was when I looked at Jane’s bedroom and I thought, “I could just make this into an art studio—but what if I do this and then she’s upset because I took her bedroom apart for an art studio that I never use?” So, I thought I’d better use it! Painting’s intimidating, and people have a hard time picking up a brush and going to paint. That’s part of why I like daily painting. I did small paintings. Any time I’m stressed and don’t have time, I go back to little 6x6-inch paintings. The idea is that it doesn’t matter how long you paint, it matters that you do it every day. Even if you only paint for a half hour, you’ve done something. And you’ve done it every day. Doing that for at least a solid year really accelerated my painting ability, because I was making all my own decisions. I wasn’t studying what other people were doing or what brushes they were using. You really start making your own decisions on what you like to do because you’re just constantly starting over with another little painting. And you let go of caring about whether it turned out or not because you always have tomorrow to paint another one. I told myself that, statistically, if I did four paintings, one of them I’d like. So, if I have three paintings that suck, I don’t get upset about it, because part of the process is to know that you fail a lot. Doing little paintings really helps you get through that quickly.
Q: What is your creative process?
A: I do three kinds of painting. I paint on location outside, from still life in my house—including a lot of paintings of my pets—and from photos. I paint from my own photos (unless it’s a pet portrait commission), and I’m not a photorealist by any means. Sometimes I have commissions to do, so then it’s pretty basic, like, you know what you’re going to paint that day. With non-commission work, I try to keep it to what I want to paint. I’ve been trying to paint flowers in my studio for spring, so I’ll go buy fresh flowers on Sundays and have flowers to paint during the week. Or sometimes I just want to do buildings one week or I want to do more cows or pigs. If I’m going to paint from photos, before I go to bed the night before, I’ll know what I’m going to paint the next day. The more decisions you don’t have to make that day, the easier it will be to go paint. So, I try to know exactly what I’m going to paint—and then when I get into the studio I almost always change my mind at the last minute and decide this is not doing it for me, I want to do something else, and then I usually do something else. But at least I had a reason to get into the studio! With art, the hardest part is just getting yourself to show up. So, the easier you can make it for yourself to show up, the better—which is why daily is good because it becomes a habit. Otherwise you never carve time out.
After that, the process is just to know what kind of paint I need, have a clean palette, prep the board because I usually don’t paint right on a white surface. Those little processes of getting things ready kind of gets you going. I figure out what I want to paint and what music I want to listen to. Occasionally if I’m really fried, I will paint in complete silence. Or, you know, my dog has been sick, so we’ve been listening to a lot of quiet classical music—a lot of Chopin right now. But also a lot of Carpenters and John Denver—easy listening quiet moments.
Q: Why do you think you’re so drawn to cows?
A: I don’t know! I didn’t grow up with cows, I never lived on a farm—I mean, I lived on a 10-acre hobby farm where we had a couple of pigs. My sister had horses which I hated—I’ve never painted a horse because I think they’re just, like, too beautiful. I had pigs, I had sheep, I had pigeons. I had one chicken. But I never had a cow. And I don’t know, it’s something about—who doesn’t like a pasture filled with cows? I always have to stop and look at them. I think because they have such a weird bone structure and they’re so misshapen, they’re kind of easier to paint because they’re kind of flawed-looking animals to start with. They don’t have the majestic lines of a horse at all. They have all these extra stomachs and weird bones in their faces, and their hip bones are very weird looking. I love how their underbellies just reflect the green grass underneath.
Q: What’s the hardest part of your creative process?
A: Ending a painting is probably my least favorite part, because it’s so rare that I’m like, “Oh, this is turning out great, it’s a wonderful painting.” Usually it’s more like, “Oh, let me try to fix twenty things,” and you don’t have time and it’s just like, “Nevermind.” I’m a quitter which is probably good for me, because I don’t pick things to death. But it does mean I let paintings go and then I think, “Oh, I guess I could’ve fixed those ten things but I never did.” I think painting is like going through school, or like having children. Your baby is your brand new little painting—it’s so cute, and it has so much hope and optimism, anything could happen, right? And then I always think about a third of the way into a painting is junior high. Everything is ugly and hard and bad in junior high, and that’s when your painting really starts to look awful, and that’s when you shouldn’t panic and you shouldn’t quit. You should try to just take a deep breath, because you have to make a lot of corrections, and you have to be alright making corrections, and you have to be okay just looking at a terrible painting for a while. And then, you know, sometimes they blossom in high school! And then they’re fine later, and you love them. But just get your painting past the junior high moment. I always have to tell myself, “It’s just junior high, it’s fine, just keep trudging through until your painting gets more mature.”
Q: What advice do you have for other mother artists?
A: I would say that it is not selfish to make art while you have children. Art is important. I raised two artists and I’m proud of that. I might have been disappointed if one of them had said, “Oh, I think I want to get into tax accounting.” They both took very creative turns, and I encouraged that because that was the one thing I didn’t have growing up. It wasn’t my parents’ fault—they didn’t have a lot of resources and they had nine kids, and, back in those days, making art wasn’t considered a practical thing to do. Now people realize there are a lot of jobs that require people who are creative thinkers. I just cared that my kids could support themselves and that they were happy, and I wasn’t sure that anybody could really be happy being a tax accountant. (Though I’m sure that there are happy tax accountants out there.)
To learn more about my talented mother and to see more of her art, visit her website and follow her on Instagram @pattyvoje.
My mom recommends checking out two books: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey and, for the painter readers, Alla Prima Painting by Richard Schmid (“Out of print and expensive to buy but worth every penny—this book is my bible”).
On the topic of accountants and creativity, I’m pretty sure I just saw the best accountant portrayal I’ve ever seen in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.