Inspiration: Interview with Corrie Ladd Part 2
I had the opportunity to interview Paint Love artist Corrie Ladd. We sat on a leather couch in a Java Monkey coffee shop, and chatted, wearing casual summer attire. Corrie's beautiful tattoos revealed her creative persona before we even began speaking, and a small necklace hanging around her neck exemplified her delicate jewelry work. Read Part 1 of our interview, which is about a typical day in her life, here.
Corrie always wants her work to have nostalgia and purpose. She describes her process as slow and about reinterpreting the materials rather than reinventing them. She says she bores easily, and always wants to be doing something with her hands, which drives her to always create art and seek new materials. But as she explores new mediums, she likes to work to mix them together, specifically to incorporate her drawing background - a skill she developed with her college major in technical drawing.
Figurative work
In her portraits and figurative work, Corrie says she is often inspired by family photos. She utilizes both photos of her own family and discarded photos she purchases of other families. She explained that the aim of these works is to re-contextualize and give focus to people that would not typically be featured by putting them in a place of prominence. For example, in her recent recreation of a Polaroid of her taken at a young age, she described herself as looking disheveled and explained that it was not a picture that most people would ever have thought to have hung up in their living rooms. But Corrie was drawn to this picture and chose to paint the piece pictured below of her younger self in her swimsuit.
Dish Towels and Home Goods
Corrie's dish towels and other products for the home incorporate images and patterns including a revolver and a shaving lather brush. When asked about these designs, Corrie confessed that she gets bored with common home décor patterns such as polka dots. She seeks edgier imagery folded into her home and her kitchen, as she finds it makes the space more interesting. She thinks of many of the ideas for the particular images she chooses during road trip discussions and brainstorms.
Corrie incorporates her desired sense of nostalgia and personal connection into these works by using a swatch of fabric given to her by her grandmother as the tag for every dish towel.
Jewelry
When making jewelry, Corrie aims to keep her pieces delicate, simple, and subtle, so that they are easily layered. She is drawn to creating jewelry because she likes that the result is a small token you can carry with you and considers it her medium that is currently gaining the most traction.
Corrie creates her jewelry pieces using precious metal clay, which can be found at metalclay.com, inlaid with glass enamel. Supplies to use this unique medium can be found at Rio Grande. Corrie's pieces are often inspired by vintage charms, which she has made silicone molds of to help recreate them.
The Most Meaningful Piece
When asked if there was a particular piece that stood out to her as a favorite or most meaningful to her, Corrie shared the vignette of a litte girl below.
This piece was made using watercolor, colored pencil, and thread on layers of vellum on a heavyweight drawing paper back. When Corrie was younger, she traveled to Peru, a trip which served as inspiration for this piece. Corrie recounted "constantly being handed stuff" during her travels and said that many of those items and other objects she found while abroad have since inspired her artistic work. The subject of this piece, the vintage-style girl, was on a playing card given to her during her stay in Peru. The llamas and planes seen in the background layers and needlework also symbolize her time there. Corrie shared the great impact those trips had on her, explaining that it was the effect of those trips that made the imagery so significant, in turn making this piece the one with the most personal meaning.
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