Katie Carillo painted a picture of a spilled strawberry ice cream cone with bugs overwhelming the mess for her final project in a painting class. She said her work is most often described as “creepy cute,” and she likes to make people smile. Carillo sat down with the Daily Lobo to discuss the relevance of trying different art forms, biology in relation to art, and how making people happy makes
good art.
Daily Lobo: Your majors are an interesting combination, how did you put them together?
Katie Carillo: It’s two things that I love, and I think biology probably has more of a practical use once you get it out of college, but I just always loved art.
DL: Do you find that your work in biology is influencing your work in art?
KC: Yeah, I think so.
DL: Can you give me an example?
KC: I’m painting bugs right now. (Laughs.) I think there are kind of different correlations between art design and the health sciences. The process of art is kind of like a science, and then biology is perfect — everything is art, just the way things work together.
DL: So what sort of medium of art do you enjoy doing the most?
KC: I love painting, drawing and photography. This is my first painting class, but I’m really liking it. I like to play around with everything.
DL: Tell me about your creative process. How do you get from a blank page to having something on it?
KC: It’s definitely something I have to do alone. For me to come up with an idea, I have to do a lot of brainstorming and sketching things out. Usually something just kind of hits me and then something happens.
DL: Guide me through a piece of artwork.
KC: I think probably that the main thing that translates through all different kinds of art is that you have an idea to start with, you start working with it and you are always continually growing with it because it’s changing and it’s a process. You have to be adaptable with it.
DL: What does it feel like when you have a really good idea and it doesn’t follow through?
KC: Well, when things don’t work out, I don’t know. There have been things that I’ve tried that haven’t worked out very well, but I just kind of keep sketching stuff out for later on and later, I’ll figure it out.
DL: How do you deal with imperfections in your work?
KC: I get some space away from it for a while and that’s basically how I deal with it.
DL: When you’re “having space”, what do you like to do in your non-art-related time?
KC: I like reading and music. I like fantasy sort of stuff. I like funny stuff.
DL: Do you find yourself creating more art about a
particular theme?
KC: I think animals are definitely a recurring theme, and I like to work with people — portraits and stuff like that. My work is pretty happy. I like to make people smile, I guess.
DL: And you said you did a little bit of photography. What do you take pictures of?
KC: I’ve done a lot of portraits and wildlife photography. I like to go into Photoshop and make stuff that isn’t real, too.
DL: What does painting offer to you that other forms of art don’t?
KC: With photography, everything’s there and you have to find your frame. Kind of with drawing, I don’t know, I mostly draw in black and white. Most people draw in colors. I think that’s really interesting, trying to make something look sort of real or add colors to it.
DL: Without art, where would your life be? What keeps you coming back to art?
KC: I think there’s just something with art that makes you, whatever form of art it is, express yourself (in a different way), and, I don’t know, it sounds kind of cheesy, but I have this place in my heart — it just gives you this really great feeling to work on something for so long and have it be done with and have people see it and understand it.
