Interview Y. Hope Osborn

Can you tell me about your background and how it influences your work?

I know it is common for people to speak about healing through creativity. There is also healing of creativity. Left to abusive parents and leaders, toxic places, and poor health, I only understood reality, not imagination or play. Creativity was always there bound like flowers pressed among the words of a memoir. I sketched, learned about flowers, and learned crafts. Help in the last ten years have enabled me to bring to light hidden flowers or creativity.

Share your favorite medium with us.

I sketch a little, dabble in painting and mixed media, and arrange décor and garden, but my favorite medium is photography and specifically what I consider documentary art.

It is a difficult medium for people to get unless they experience it firsthand. It draws on a combination of photography, authorship, research, personal experience, and your experiences—the stories you tell or the words you encounter and add blossom in the life of the artwork.

I seek or come upon interesting places or subjects to photograph and try to remember to make notes of either the address or my thoughts on it in a voice memo on my phone. When I upload hundreds of photos of a subject, I choose the best representation and add to those original thoughts my ideas of what might have happened under those circumstances. If I can I do seek the truth, the backbone of fact in which to delineate subjective from objective. If possible, I research places or places like it that have a certain history.

Then I take my time and it goes through many revisions over days to years to create an artist statement. I only have dabbled in the true final step, which is to document people’s thoughts, feelings, connections alongside or around the image and text I provided. That so far would be the story of a couple who bought an artwork on platine fibre rag because it reminded them of the footpath they walked their dogs every day—something new in their routine as a tornado had wiped out their west Little Rock home.

Where do you get your inspiration?

Out there everywhere . . . the clouds, early dawn, grasses against a muted hill. The rain reminds me that waterfalls are aspiring. The first autumnal color and feel reminds me that Arkansas Ozarks will soon be ablaze with color. Driving down Brookside Dr—one side apartments and the other side what I call Brook Valley—I see brilliant blue Ohio Spiderworts and I wonder what else is among those woods for me to photograph, so one morning soon after I’m out regardless of weather.

Or I am intrigued by a bit of history or a snapshot of general x marks the spot kind of map. Seeking, exploring, curiously, uncovering forgotten things. Connecting the dots of the famous and the infamous to all but disappearance of a building, or the idea that I may be the first in an extensive encyclopedia to introduce a subject with research, writing, and photography.

It may sound simple to many but because I have all my life had this love or almost symbiotic relationship with earthy things

(Sidebar: It is hard for anyone to believe that of all the sprains and breaks and surgeries for breaks and now to preempt all that by strengthening tendon and ligament in ankle I’ve never been seriously bitten, had allergies, broken bones, or even have sprains on my hikes that really are just walks now. Every one of the many times I have fallen and hurt some part of my body that needed extra care I was in the city on flat asphalt or ground. While on the other hand I am allergic to all medical adhesives! Try confusing a nurse with that tidbit especially as I need to tell them it isn’t the silk, hypoallergenic, or paper tape but it is the sticky part itself.)

Describe how important art is for society.

Art softens and hardens the edges of reality for whatever is needed at the time or for whatever a person needs to deal with that reality. It is the outward organization of randomness into patterns that people connect over.

Once I gave my stuttering artist talk over the black and white The Price of Freedom that had won a year-long tour of Arkansas where I live. Whatever I managed to say about my photograph was enough for a mother and her sons to have hope, to know that there is triumph over trauma even when you are the one who created the trauma.

Art is important as a form of communication. It is no different than when all our writing was in cave drawings or hieroglyphics or well now with emojis.

Does art help you in other areas of life?

I don’t think research is considered art, but it is part of mine. When I photographed the Yankee Girl Silver Mine, the artwork is not finished. There is processing, researching, and writing of histories and my history and other’s history. As an explorer and researcher photography is not just a sidekick. It is half of the piece. What I research and explore is driven presently by art. And art drives me to learn and grow through research.

Art is helpful me in giving me focus and drive, to know when I get up or go to sleep, where and when and how far I travel, what I might do to lift myself up or even tear myself down, how I expend what energy I do have as a disabled person. And I have not said or thought anything like that until just now.

How do you develop your artistic skills?

Primarily by being a curious explorer by nature.

I take something like presently documentary landscape photography and I focus all my artistic energy towards it. I focused on black and white architecture for two years, and tried but didn’t and wanted to understand landscape photography—how to take an all-green spring or summer scene such as in the Bayou Bartholomew photos to the level of character and depth that is easily found among the hills of autumn Ozarks.

I took away from black and white dilapidated architecture a clearer understanding of where to begin my journey right now in landscapes. I challenge myself without much success to take plain dirt roads and turn them into interesting views.

Or you might say development is practicing fearlessness when all I have in the dark is my sense of direction when I do go behind an unnoted place toward an unnoted bayou but longest bayou in the world (over 350 miles) in the pitch black and dismissing sogginess of shoes or butt when I am trained in patience for the perfect shots.

I explore.

Just like now when in a walker and my trusty 2006 Honda Accord, I looked for any blooms along the road such as the passionflower I wanted but we didn’t have last year. However, with my focus being on landscape, I turn to a wider screen of the bloom among hills or along fences. Waiting for the duck plantain to be again covered by the rain that has dropped all over the inside of my car and some with my camera for moments at a time. Or perhaps, there is my message in the way these wildflowers took over the muddy tire tracks created by loads of construction materials being dropped off.

I experiment.

How can your work influence social problems?

I almost left this part in a empty way stating I’m not sure it does work to influence social problems. However, I was looking for big picture, the masses toward a singular goal.

My influence over social problems is one person at a time. Someone communicates with me with art as a talking point and as I said art being a form of communication its message or my message addresses only one family in a room.

I was just thinking, too, of the member preview tonight at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art for The Long View about sustainability, conservation, and preservation. No my works are not the exhibit, but my works are the feature pieces of the museum store. Most are my Roundup barns, some are landscape or street.

By including my work at this time it serves as support of the message of the exhibit. I don’t know if anyone will buy the works, but it is my part in The Long View message that the museum store already posted of my works coinciding with the exhibit. Ans larger picture still is how this joined message makes its way into the world, again, such as the premier Little Rock focused publication simply liking the post.

Artists need to know that they don’t need a big showy exhibit to affect society.

How do you navigate the professional art industry?

I tend to just do my own thing and try to encourage others to accept rejections. All of us must suffer from the few really good things that come our way if we are open and persistent.

Also, I try to educate people about one of the unknowns of the art of photography. It is not often a mere click of a button. I research subjects online and in person and drive and walk many miles. I discover interesting angles, stabilizing for precision, and capturing multiple minute focal points away from me to stack for depth of detail. Then, I invigorate my photos, adjusting contrast, shadow, light, etc. to suit the subject and develop the meaning I find in the images.

Selling is not my strong suit but even other artists think I must be selling a lot because of the groups that gather around my booths when I can make it out for one. When in truth that very time I sold absolutely nothing. You need to have a carefree feeling about your art for one time it may sell and another you go home with exactly what you left home with.

In short, I explore, experiment, and engage come what may.

How do you manage work-life balance as an artist?

One day, one step, at a time. How do you eat an elephant – one bite at a time. I know! Cliché. But it is true even if I have to live on and around disability, including low income. Finances and art being one of those tug-of-wards, I have an excel sheet I update when necessary that holds all the subscriptions labeled by month and amount, so I can strategize as to when or where I can afford to submit according to hopefully early bird discounts. Health is the number one decisive factor in my life. If all my body is conspiring with me at one time I have a “bad health day” and perhaps that is when while lounging on my sofa I post process photos. Everything has to move around medical appointments too of which there are too many to count. As I am the only to take care of me, I have to be really knowledgeable about many medical matters. That to say in brief a couple of things that some may not realize about being truly disabled, (even hidden)You are an artist by heart but your body still has to sit its butt in the hard chair and that is only after you figure out if you can afford the chair. And I make time for my raised beds and potted plants garden, cat Isobel, sometimes the house and meals (artists know about working on an empty stomach, because what is a stomach . . .)