Isa Rodriguez: This is Isa Rodriguez.
Dylan Cale Jones: And this is Dylan Cale Jones.
Isa Rodriguez: And you're listening to Practice Practice. So today I'm going to interview you, Dylan. Woohoo! How are you feeling about that?
Dylan Cale Jones: Uh, I feel a little nervous, but I think once we get talking, my nerves will calm a little bit.
Isa Rodriguez: Okay, so let's dive right in.
Dylan, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. So my name is Dylan Cale Jones. I am an artist. I am an educator. I currently live in Oklahoma City, but I'm from Chicago, Illinois. And yeah, that's all I'll say for now.
Isa Rodriguez: Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. So as you all may know, or may not know, Dylan is one half of Practice Practice. Dylan's my long term collaborator. We've been working together for about 10 years now.
Dylan Cale Jones: It's true. Yeah. I'm smiling right now.
Isa Rodriguez: So I would like to go back further than that and talk about your experience as a child. What was creativity like in your life as a kid?
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, I am an only child, so I had an involuntary responsibility to entertain myself as a young person. I was always very interested in drawing as a way of exploring my imagination and expressing myself and trying out different ideas and things like that.
Isa Rodriguez: What kind of things did you draw?
Dylan Cale Jones: There was a period where there was a phase that I had where I drew king cobras a lot.
Isa Rodriguez: Okay. Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: There was another phase, uh, a friend of mine, Aaron, when I was a young person, we used to pretend to be aliens. And so we would come up with different alien characters who had different powers and different personalities. So we would like draw them and what they looked like and them trying out their powers and things like that.
Isa Rodriguez: Oh, okay. That sounds fun. That sounds like a role playing game.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, it was really fun. And I also, yeah, I like in general, I like to pretend a lot. And perform different characters or identities or do impressions of famous people. I went through like a pretending to be a Ninja Turtle phase for a while.
Isa Rodriguez: That sounds great. That sounds really fun. Um, how, how did your parents respond to this?
Dylan Cale Jones: My parents have been consistently. I would say, for the most part, really supportive of me being creative. My dad was a small business owner when I was a young person. He ran a print shop with his brother and his dad. And so I spent a lot of time hanging out there. And being a print shop, there was a lot of paper around.
So they really encouraged me to draw, I think, Just as a way to keep myself busy.
Isa Rodriguez: Mm hmm.
Dylan Cale Jones: And I think my mom also really got a kick out of my pretending activities. I thought that was really interesting and funny and like as I got older both of my parents and other members of my family were very supportive and encouraging of me taking art seriously, like taking classes outside of school and beginning to think about pursuing that as a career or something.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. I know that you're grandfather had wanted to do that, but didn't really have the space to do that.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. Yeah. And you never met my other grandfather, but he was also really supportive of it. And I think he also had fantasies or dreams of being an artist at some point too.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. And then growing up in Chicago, it seems like you'd be in proximity to a lot of culture.
Dylan Cale Jones: Oh, yeah, that's, that's a really good point. So one thing about where I grew up, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and my parents intentionally landed me in a place that had, you know, relatively good public education.
And so there was a lot of art education there that I received from elementary school, middle school and high school. So I was receiving an art education in school throughout my whole childhood. And then my dad's parents and my mom's parents would both take me on trips to downtown Chicago where we would go to the Art Institute and the Field Museum and the Chicago Symphony and different things like that, but I really always loved the Art Institute.
And as I became old enough to travel to Chicago on my own, when I was in high school, I would also just go there on my own because I was really fascinated by the work that was there.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. There's so much to look at there. It's a really huge collection. Yeah. What was some of your favorite things in the Art Institute when you were growing up?
Dylan Cale Jones: I was really captivated by painting. There were certain paintings that I was really interested in. There was a painting by a, I believe he's Austrian, he's either Austrian or German, painter named Ludwig Meidner. That was a portrait of someone. I can't, I can't remember his name right now, but the, I remember encountering this portrait and just kind of feeling this like numinous, magical, kind of energy from it and being really drawn to it.
There was also a couple paintings by Picasso that I was really interested in. There were some paintings by some fauvists there that I was really interested in. And then as I got older and spent more time there, I became more interested in contemporary art. I remember There's a big portrait or double portrait by Alex Katz that I really enjoyed of these two young boys next to each other.
And then there were just like, you know, I started learning about people like Félix González-Torres and more kind of experimental non figurative art that I became really interested in too.
Isa Rodriguez: A lot of those are still portraits though, right?
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, yeah, you're right. That's, that's a good point. Yeah.
Isa Rodriguez: There's sort of like poetic or symbolic portraits, but they're definitely meant to represent a certain person or a certain relationship with a person.
Dylan Cale Jones: This is true. That's a great observation, Is.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. What else was really influential for you when you were a young person?
Dylan Cale Jones: So when I was, I guess I probably would have been around 12, my dad decided to close the print shop and opened up a skateboard shop. And, my dad didn't skateboard. He got interested because me and my friends were skateboarding, and I think saw a lot of correlations between skateboard culture and like sixties and seventies rock and roll culture, which he was really like excited about and interested in.
He kind of had this explosion of creativity of transforming the print shop into this skateboard shop and also decorating the space and kind of colliding all of these different things. The walls would have like animal taxidermy heads and religious memorabilia from his family and sports memorabilia and rock and roll memorabilia and clippings from the weekly world news and books about dogs and just like all of this kind of like culture just like jamming and crashing into itself. And Like that created a pretty profound sense of place and then also really created a really amazing community, like a place that people wanted to go and then a culture of different groups of people sort of interacting with each other regularly. And. That, that was really amazing for me too.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. It sounds like that was really influential and came at the right time for you.
Dylan Cale Jones: Also, when I was younger, I played music a lot. I was in bands with my friends. And we played music. And of course there were visual aspects of that too. Like having our MySpace page and printing t-shirts and figuring out how we wanted to present ourselves on stage and stuff like that.
Isa Rodriguez: Very interesting. All right. So what aspects of creativity, from your younger life, do you think carry through into your practice now?
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, I've, I think consistently been invested and interested in drawing. It's something that I took a little bit of a break from when I was in undergrad as like part of my public practice, but I always had like a sketchbook practice and would doodle and draw faces and characters in my sketchbook. But then once I got into grad school, my interest in drawing renewed and I've kind of continued that since then.
A big part of what I've been interested in drawing since then too is portraiture. So I've drawn you a lot. I draw myself a lot. In my current ceramics practice, I've been trying to integrate drawing more in a way that's connected to my sketchbook, like not necessarily drawing things from observation, but drawing things that just come out of my brain.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Well, and I know you're teaching drawing right now too, right? We've had conversations about how teaching drawing can really reignite the passion for drawing.
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. It's got my mind on it like all the time now. When I'm working with my students, I'm looking at what they're doing and analyzing what they're doing and trying to understand how they're seeing or not seeing things. So it's really at the forefront of my consciousness right now, which is really exciting and really fun. Like the other day you were teaching in the morning and I had the apartment to myself and I was like, "I'm going to make a drawing!" And I like sat down and finished a drawing and it was really exciting.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. I get really excited when my students are drawing, that's like a vicarious excitement. And I'm like, "Oh, I want to draw too. I need to draw too."
I draw a lot when I'm working with my students so that they can watch me draw and learn things. I draw and talk about what I'm drawing or how I'm drawing it, but sometimes I just quietly draw and they come over and watch me.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, and I get really hyped to and the students I work with discover something or try something new or something clicks. Where they're like trying to draw in a certain way and they're not understanding how to do it and then something clicks and they're like, "Oh, I get it now." Yeah. It's like, "Yes! This is awesome!" And I get so hyped for them. I think the kind of studio environment in the classroom, we all feed off of that. And that's really exciting.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Yeah. So I know that teaching really influences your practice. Would you talk a little bit about that? Cause you've been teaching for a long time.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. When I was in undergrad, I was a student worker at the wood shop at the school that I went to. And my boss, Sue Frame, was really my teacher at that point. She hired me to be a woodshop monitor in the woodshop. And I told her, " I don't know how to make anything in here" She was like, "That's okay. You have a good personality for working with people. And you can't teach that, but I can teach you skills"
Isa Rodriguez: It's like the woodshop skills are easy to learn. You've already got the, the meat of it, the people skills.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And the way that Sue taught was really helpful for me and I think I learned a lot from her about how to teach. She was really forgiving. There was no punishment or reprimand for doing things quote "wrong". It was also a different environment than a classroom environment, right? It was like this interesting place where I was at work, but I was also a student and so the rules were different.
Isa Rodriguez: And it was like at a studio, right? Like you're working. And learning in an actual functioning studio where people are making things all the time.
Dylan Cale Jones: Totally. Totally. I like in art school that there's this studio culture of a bunch of artists working together. It's not just an art school, right? We experience that in community studios and maker spaces and things like that too.
Isa Rodriguez: There's like a sort of horizontal teaching that happens, a peer to peer teaching.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And that's something that I strive to bring to. The classroom in the university to which is a little bit more difficult to do, but any environment where people are kind of exchanging information and ideas is something that feels really exciting for me and a place that I want to be around and participate in.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, I like that. Okay. So you have your drawing practice, you have your teaching practice, what else is in your creative practice right now? What else are you up to?
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, right now I am doing Practice Practice, which is a big part of my creative practice right now. And that's been really interesting. It's very different than a studio practice. It's much more administrative in a lot of ways.
Isa Rodriguez: Administration as creativity.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. Like emailing people and setting up meetings and conversations, and setting up times with you to write and things like that. But this, this part of my creative practice is really rewarding too, because I think having and cultivating a kind of self awareness around our creative practices is really important, right? Cause it's, it's not just about how I paint or how I draw or how I dance or whatever. It's like the whole constellation of my life around those things too and how it supports or detracts or harms those things, right? And hopefully it ends up containing as much balance and mutual support as possible.
So that's been really interesting. And I've been enjoying that and getting a lot of joy out of that practice. I've also been doing a lot of ceramics lately. You and I took an intro to ceramics class and I had my first go at trying to throw on the potter's wheel.
I sort of, I made it like a few kind of okay things. I made like one coffee cup that was pretty nice and that everything else was kind of like, "Well, this is really small and heavy and weird shaped" So I was like, I'm determined to learn how to do this. So I've been learning how to throw on the wheel.
Isa Rodriguez: How long has it been since that first class?
Dylan Cale Jones: Oh, geez, probably almost two years and it probably took me about nine months to really be able to throw on the wheel with confidence and make a vessel that's balanced and I can have some level of control over the outcome of it. And that's been really exciting, learning about ceramics. As much as I enjoy cerebral or conceptual forms of creativity, I also really enjoy the act of learning a craft and learning how a material works and seeing what other people make and trying to replicate that too.
Isa Rodriguez: Ceramics is really old, right? Like it's really old. Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah.
Isa Rodriguez: There's lifetimes of information that you could learn.
Dylan Cale Jones: And it's kind of like drawing in that way, right? That drawing is really old and ceramics is really old. I've also been watching a lot of ceramics videos, and there's this famous ceramicist named Bernard Leach, who people quote all the time as saying, like, "Throwing a pot is drawing a line in the air" or something like that.
Isa Rodriguez: Okay. Yeah. That brings your interests together, huh? Okay. Okay. Nice. Uh, what else is going on in your life right now?
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, it's springtime. So another thing that I do that I consider creative and fun is I go around my neighborhood and find flowers to lick and film videos of me licking the flowers. It's sort of erotic and queer and weird and not really subversive. Some people think they're like really funny. I know some people, some friends in Chicago who kind of think they're sexy. And then other people who are like, "I didn't want to see you do that!"
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Subversive. It kind of scratches that itch for performance, right?
Dylan Cale Jones: Totally. Totally.
Isa Rodriguez: What else, what else is going on? Like that you're trying to balance with your creativity.
Dylan Cale Jones: Hmm. Well, I'm kind of in a place right now where I don't have a full time job. I have several part-time things that I do. So that's kind of like a constant thing where I'm figuring out okay, what do I want to be doing in six months or what do I want to be doing in four months? And so like right now i'm thinking a lot about teaching and what are the conditions that are best for me? Working at OU or at a university in general, is that something that I want to continue pursuing? If so, how do I want it to look?
Isa Rodriguez: And like thinking about that for next fall?
Dylan Cale Jones: Before that, I had been working a full time job for six years and the schedule and timing and all of that was pretty predictable. And so I'm getting adjusted to a life where that's a little bit less predictable.
Isa Rodriguez: But it's more flexible.
Dylan Cale Jones: It is more flexible. Right now I only work two days a week for sure. There, there are other like things that I pick up. I'll work a shift at the front desk at the Oklahoma Contemporary Studio School for a couple hours, or I'll do a workshop at the Oklahoma Contemporary or I'll sell some ceramics or whatever. It is something that I'm constantly negotiating and renegotiating with myself. But I like that it changes. When I was working at the School of the Art Institute and I was there five days a week rain or shine or snow or ice or...
Isa Rodriguez: global pandemic...
Dylan Cale Jones: global pandemic, right? It was predictable and there was something nice about the predictability, but it was also like, if there was something I didn't like about it, there wasn't much room for change.
Isa Rodriguez: That it just sort of gnaws away at you.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah.
Isa Rodriguez: So it sounds like there's always a lot of change going on. What is stable?
Dylan Cale Jones: You and I have our home which feels really stable to me. We have this material culture in our home that's really meaningful and grounding to me. So a lot of the furniture that we have in our apartment is stuff that we've made and feels really familiar. The things on the walls are things we've made or things are friends and loved ones or people we admire have made. So that's really grounding. We have this big clawfoot bathtub to take hot baths in, which I love. My sleep schedule is generally really predictable. Sleep is really important to me.
I require a lot of rest. I would say probably like an extra normative amount of rest, meaning the amount of rest that I get is abnormal, I think, in our culture. Yeah, eight hour minimum, but probably I'm usually sleep like nine or 10 hours a night.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, you also expend a lot of energy in the day. It sort of makes sense. You do a lot out there in the world.
Dylan Cale Jones: It's interesting that you say that I do a lot. This is something that I kind of struggle with internally is that I perceive myself as perpetually not doing enough.
Isa Rodriguez: Oh, that's interesting because you just told us about all the things you do, right? You've talked for like 20 minutes about all the different things you do and there's a bunch of different things you listed.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, yeah, totally. And this is changing. This perception is changing and it's something that I'm working on and therapy. It's something that we talk about together. It's something that I'm trying to shift my perception on, but there's like a default that if I'm not careful and aware of is like, "You need to be doing more. You're not productive enough or not active enough or...
Isa Rodriguez: not doing enough.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. So, That's something that is a challenge for me.
Isa Rodriguez: Oh, that's interesting. Cause I kind of see as a sort of nonstop flow, like, "Okay, I'm doing a drawing. Now I'm going to work. Tomorrow I have this other thing and then we're going on a walk and then we're going to go get groceries, and then I'm writing in my journal." There's like always something in motion for you until you go to sleep and sleep for 10 hours and then wake up and you're ready to go again.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. It's good to hear that. It's good to hear that. And it also helps me feel like, oh, I can pull back on the throttle a little bit.
Isa Rodriguez: The next question is, is there anything coming up? Anything that you're looking towards?
Dylan Cale Jones: Oh, yeah. I'm gonna be teaching at the Eli Whitney Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. I'm teaching a skateboard making class to some young people, and I'm excited about that. I did that last summer too, and frankly, it was exhausting, but it was also really fun and really rewarding. The campers who took the class loved making skateboards.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, I mean, it sounds awesome. It sounds empowering and exciting to make and design your own skateboard.
Dylan Cale Jones: I mean, that was my dream when I was 12 and 13. I guess I didn't think specifically about making skateboards, but I thought a lot about skateboard graphics. I loved skateboard graphics. They're so cool. Like, if toy machine had one of my drawings on it, that would be the coolest thing ever. And now as a person who's done a lot of research in woodworking and practice woodworking. It's like oh I can also make whatever shape of skateboard that I want. And I don't need permission from a skateboard company to put a graphic on something. I can make my own graphic.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, I think we're at a good place to start asking our wrap up questions, so what advice do you have for your past self? What did your younger self need to hear?
Dylan Cale Jones: Enjoy the process and believe in your work.
Isa Rodriguez: Enjoy the process and believe in your work. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Enjoy the process? Let's start there.
Dylan Cale Jones: This is something that I've been struggling with since I went to university, feeling a lot of insecurity and fear.
Isa Rodriguez: Sure. Yeah.
Dylan Cale Jones: Like, is this good enough? Is it, is it professional? Is it smart? Is it interesting? Is it engaging? Like, I guess sometimes feeling a lot of stress and grief. And then, I often find myself revisiting work that I have been feeling that way while I've been making it, and then, looking back on it years later and being like, "Damn, this shit's dope! What was I worried about? Like, this is cool!"
What I want to do is to be able to integrate that realization into the present. Because I still struggle with that sometimes. Less so now than a few years ago. You know, yeah, I want to enjoy it. I want, and I want to be my own hype person. I want to be hyped on it.
That's something that I try to fortify in my students too. Right? Be hyped on it!
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Enjoy it. Enjoy the process. That's great advice. Yeah. Okay. And what advice do you have for your future self, for old person, Dylan?
Dylan Cale Jones: I guess like be brave.
Isa Rodriguez: Be brave. I love that.
Dylan Cale Jones: Be brave.
Isa Rodriguez: What brings that to mind?
Dylan Cale Jones: As I have been getting older, layers of insecurity and fear and me stopping myself from being myself peel away eventually. And I think this experience is probably common for a lot of people, right?
A great example for me is expressing and exploring queerness in myself. Being like, okay, these ideas have been nagging at me for a long time and it's time for me to start talking to people about it. And I'm scared to talk to people about it because my identity with them is stable and predictable to a certain degree. And "What if I'm not queer enough" or I don't know, all of these insecurities, right?
Isa Rodriguez: Sounds like really similar insecurities to the creativity insecurities.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. And now that I've started talking to people about that and being like, yeah, like I don't really, I don't really identify as being only male. And I'm attracted to all different kinds of people. And I think all different kinds of things are sexy and interesting and fun.
And I'm still here. Right. I'm still here. Even if I were to face violence or pushback or criticism it doesn't mean that it's not worth doing necessarily. I do want to mind my safety and be discerning about who I share information with and how I share it. But, I want to be my authentic self with the people in my life who I love and who are important to me and who I want to know me. I want that in my creative practice, too. I want to encourage myself to do things that feel uncomfortable or risky because I'm interested in them.
Actually, funny enough, the flower licking stuff, was something that I was scared to share with people at first. I think part of it comes from having the role of being a teacher and that in the culture that we live in it's taboo for teachers to have any sort of like performance of eroticism or sensuality.
Isa Rodriguez: What did it feel like to do it anyway, to start putting yourself out there like that?
Dylan Cale Jones: It feels good. I get a kick out of it. I think it's fun and I think it's funny. I think realistically, nobody's gonna get hurt from this. It might make some people feel uncomfortable or strange or whatever...
Isa Rodriguez: But that's not hurting them, right? Feeling uncomfortable is not the same thing as harm. Okay. So, be brave, future Dylan.
Dylan Cale Jones: You can do it, Dylan! I believe in you! You're great!
Isa Rodriguez: Well, Dylan, this has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on.
Dylan Cale Jones: Oh, anytime.
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