Dylan Cale Jones: My name is Dylan Cale Jones,
Isa Rodriguez: and I'm Isa Rodriguez,
Dylan Cale Jones: and you are listening to Practice Practice.
Isa Rodriguez: So this is our first episode of the Practice Practice podcast, and we want to introduce ourselves to you, introduce the project, give you an idea of what you can expect from us, and just explain a little bit about what we're doing and why we're doing it.
So Dylan, would you like to introduce yourself and say a little bit about yourself?
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. So my name is Dylan Cale Jones. I am an artist. I am an educator. I am a Queer person and a weirdo. I currently live in Oklahoma city. I teach here and I make art here and I collaborate with my partner, Isa Rodriguez.
Isa Rodriguez: That's true. That's me. I'm Isa Rodriguez. I'm an artist. I'm an educator as well. I'm a designer. I am a Queer person. I also identify as Latinx. Part of my family is from Venezuela. Part of my family is from here in Oklahoma, where we live and work and create together. So we have been collaborators for about 10 years now. And we will be your hosts.
Dylan Cale Jones: I'm excited to finally be the host of something. This is great.
Isa Rodriguez: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about the Practice Practice project. That's something you and I create together that we've been working on for a couple of years now. Dylan, would you like to introduce the project?
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. So Practice Practice, it's a collection of resources for artists and other creative people that is really focused on creative practice and how creative people cultivate their creative practices.
Isa Rodriguez: We focus a lot on building and fine-tuning a creative practice so that it is sustainable.
And when we say sustainable, we don't really mean like solar-energy sustainable. We mean that you can sustain it, that you can continue creating for a long period of time without burning yourself out. Rather than sustainability, we sometimes talk about like wellbeing, right?
Dylan Cale Jones: Balance...
Isa Rodriguez: Balance. Practices that are balanced. How can we have creative practices that support our everyday lives rather than competing with other things in our life for our time or our energy? How can we have practices that center our wellbeing and the wellbeing of others?
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, and I think something that we try to do a is really honor the creativity that exists in other aspects of our lives that aren't, say, making paintings or choreographing dances or writing songs.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah. The kind of creative moments of making. Making lunch is really creative, I think.
Dylan Cale Jones: Resting.
Isa Rodriguez: Resting can be creative in itself. Like it creates a lot of space.
Dylan Cale Jones: So Isa, what are the resources that we offer?
Isa Rodriguez: So right now we're producing this podcast.
We also have a newsletter that offers a lot of free resources. In the newsletter, we usually go over a topic and then give a couple examples and a couple exercises that someone can try to integrate in their practice.
We also have a workbook that we just finished printing. It's new. It's shiny. It's full of wonderful, supportive information.
So, uh, why did we start making this project?
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, I think both of us got really burnt out. I think that's the short version of it. I'll speak for myself specifically, and I know that you have adjacent experiences. I was navigating the art world in the tried and true ways of going to universities and working at universities and working with commercial art galleries. And I was exhausted and dIsatisfied and I reached a critical point where I decided that I wanted to change how I was doing the whole being an artist thing.
Isa Rodriguez: Sure. Sure. That makes sense. Yeah. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Those systems work really well for some people, but they definitely don't work for everyone.
Yeah, I do have a similar experience. My parents are artists, right? And so I watched them and their experiences. I watched them sometimes really struggle against the way that things are set up and what an artist is supposed to be. And then I decided to also be an artist and I went to school to be an artist. And after I got out of school, I worked at galleries. I wanted to understand how those worked, and so I worked there and I learned a lot about it. And I struggled and tried to sell work. And that's kind of the archetype we have, right? It's like the struggling artist or the starving artist or the frustrated artist.
We have a couple of options. We have like the successful genius or the struggling, hungry artist. And I was definitely a hungry artist for a while until I got sort of sick of that role.
Dylan Cale Jones: You were hungry because you were forgetting to eat lunch.
Isa Rodriguez: That's true. Yeah. Cause I was working through lunch. That's why I was such a hungry artist.
That's true. That was a huge turning point for me. Right. And it took years, but the realization that whenever I had a big deadline that I was up against, I would skip lunch. And then about an hour after I should have eaten lunch I would just shatter into a million pieces.
I couldn't think. I would become really irritable. Nothing would get done. And it was the realization that it was happening consistently because I was skipping lunch. And it can be as simple as that, right?
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. Yeah. So what it sounds like was that you were neglecting your hunger in service or in supposed service of your artistic output.
Isa Rodriguez: Uh huh. But it actually made it a lot harder to create because I was hungry. Sure.
Dylan Cale Jones: So then , from knowing you, you then built eating lunch into your practice.
Isa Rodriguez: Oh yeah, that was my solution. I put it in the schedule. For a long time, I set a timer that would go off at lunchtime. I had a rule for myself that I had to stop what I was doing and go eat lunch before I could continue working. And that was back at the time when I was still way overworking myself, but I had at least this small step towards a healthier practice.
Dylan Cale Jones: You know, this reminds me of how people will say in movies, you never see people going to the bathroom and it makes me think like, you know, I've never seen a picture of Jackson Pollock eating a sandwich or Pablo Picasso eating a salad at lunch, stopping from working and doing something to maintain their bodies.
Isa Rodriguez: That's true. You don't see those images very often.
So, what about you? Do you have a specific example that you want to share of something that reached a critical point and then you decided to change something and that that really helped balance your practice?
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. A couple of years before 2020, I was working on a pretty ambitious exhibition and I was also working a full time job. And the exhibition became sort of like a second full time job. It was really exhausting. I noticed that myself and the person I was collaborating on the exhibition with, that we were both really neglecting our families and our loved ones.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, it became pretty apparent that those relationships were strained.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yes. I felt really strongly when I noticed that. That, that's not what I wanted for my life. That I want to create art and I want to have a meaningful art practice, but I don't want to do that at the expense of my most meaningful relationships... on top of just being completely burnt out.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, and since you've made that change, something that has become really important in your practice is relationship. Your closest relationships, with your friends and family, with the people in your neighborhood, you made those relationships part of your practice and folded them into your practice.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, and I decided that those people were going to be my audience.
Isa Rodriguez: Mm hmm.
Dylan Cale Jones: And that I could make art that I got to share with them a little bit here and there. And that it didn't have to be this big, massive show that I worked super hard to do.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, so that all your estranged friends could come to the opening...
Dylan Cale Jones: And say, "I love the show. Great job. Goodbye."
Isa Rodriguez: Uh huh. Your loved ones becoming your audience and starting to make work for them. So then your work really started to support your relationships rather than taking away from them.
Dylan Cale Jones: Mm hmm.
Isa Rodriguez: I guess I would say in summary that we created this project because it's something we needed when we were younger, right? Like we needed examples. We needed solutions. And a lot of them we made for ourselves or we made in conversation with other artists, and learned from other people, but we needed a resource where some of those solutions were maybe collected that we could access more easily.
Right? We really had to dig for a lot of the things we learned, but I wish we had had something that was a little bit... more available to us, to help support us as we started to change some of these things in our lives.
Dylan Cale Jones: Me too, and I would have loved to hear from other artists, "Hey, it seems like you're really exhausted, and it's okay for you to slow down and push the deadline back." Or " You're giving too much and you don't have to give this much right now."
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Or like, "Hey, I brought you an apple. You doing okay? Have you eaten recently? Do you want to go get lunch?"
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: And so I think part of what we're talking about here too, is that... Isa and I see, and I imagine, listeners, that you see these things too... images of artists whose self destructive behavior is glorified.
Isa Rodriguez: Mm hmm.
Dylan Cale Jones: And that those artists and their work is glorified in part because they sacrifice everything for their creative practice.
Isa Rodriguez: Mm hmm.
Dylan Cale Jones: It's their passion. They're obsessed.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah. And when I was younger, I really idealized a lot of those artists as well and admired not only their work, but the way they worked. And now as I've gone deeper into my practice and like, really been thinking about this for a long time, that I really want to hear from everyday artists, right?
The people who I look up to has really shifted a lot and I'm not so much interested in people who can crank out giant work really fast. I'm interested in people who are balancing things, people who also have a job that's fulfilling and interesting for them that's separate from their art practice. Or people who are also parents. Or people who maybe their creative practice isn't marketable in the same way, right? Or isn't, isn't easy to advertise, isn't easy to profit off of. I'm interested in hearing about that. I'm interested in hearing from elders, people who have been making artwork for a long, a long time.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And I'm, I'm interested in, in hearing from artists who are confident in their own version of success and their own ways of being satisfied that deviate from these idealized images that we see of artists.
Isa Rodriguez: Sure. Yeah. And, and so that's a lot of who we're focusing on in this first season. Those are the artists we're going to be talking to. We're going to be talking to Oklahoma artists. We're going to be talking to people who have all kinds of lives and experiences that are different than the images that we see in mainstream media about who's an artist and what they look like and what they sound like, and we're really hoping to open that conversation up.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. In mainstream media and in art school too, right?
Isa Rodriguez: Well, that's sort of mainstream media, right? Like it's mainstream art media.
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. Sure.
Isa Rodriguez: So who are we going to be talking to Dylan?
Dylan Cale Jones: We're going to be talking to all kinds of wonderful people. They're all visual artists who live in the state of Oklahoma , where we live, where we work, where we play. And we're talking to as many different people as we can... from different backgrounds who, like Isa said, are parents, are queer people, are neurodivergent, have day jobs...
Isa Rodriguez: have night jobs...
Dylan Cale Jones: And have creative practices that they find meaningful and exciting. And we're going to talk to them about how they do it.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. How they do it, how they do what they do. Hopefully we'll be talking to people who are a little bit like you...
Dylan Cale Jones: and a little bit like you...
We're assuming there's at least two different people listening to this podcast right now.
Isa Rodriguez: Right. Well, I think that's a pretty good introduction. What do you think Dylan? Is there anything you need to add?
Dylan Cale Jones: I don't think so. I would just like to direct people to the things that we do. So, if you'd like to visit our website, our website is practicepractice(dot)space. You can sign up for our newsletter there. By the time we post this episode, we'll probably have our workbook up there. And you can also follow us on Instagram at practice_practice_project and we will put all that stuff in the show notes.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, sign up for our newsletter. It's our most available resource.
Dylan Cale Jones: It's free.
Isa Rodriguez: It's free. It's free. And we put a lot of love into it. Sign up at the website, you know, stay tuned for the next episodes. We have a lot of really interesting people coming your way.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yes. And we look forward to seeing you, on our next episode.
Isa Rodriguez: We're not going to see anybody on our next episode.
All right, well, this has been Practice, Practice. I'm Isa Rodriguez.
Dylan Cale Jones: I'm Dylan Cale Jones.
Isa Rodriguez: Thanks for listening.
Dylan Cale Jones: Practice, Practice is created by Isa Rodriguez and Dylan Cale Jones. The music you heard in this episode is by Kate Jarboe.
Isa Rodriguez: This season of Practice Practice is funded by a Thrive Grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Dylan Cale Jones: Thrive Grants fund community-driven, artist-led projects across the state of Oklahoma. Learn more and apply at ovac-ok.org