TWO INLETS — “I would describe my art style as more of a Swiss army knife than a single blade,” said Winona artist Andy DuCett to Area Voices on the KAXE Morning Show.
“If you look at my work, it's pieces that span installation, drawing, collage, and I'm working on some painting, so I like using a lot of different disciplines to help reveal my artistic center,” he said.
DuCett recently spent time at Two Inlets as part of an artist residency program through the Nemeth Art Center in Park Rapids. He became friends with local artist Aaron Spangler through Instagram, who reached out to him about the program. DuCett likes doing solo residencies in the winter, so it was perfect timing.
As an artist, DuCett is drawn to how place impacts process. Residency opportunities can bring new inspiration, especially in the quiet and cold of a place like Two Inlets. For three weeks, he lived and worked in a lakeside house.
Art beginnings
As a kid, DuCett was drawing all the time. He talked about memories like trying to draw an 80s boom box in the kitchen over and over to get it just right. He also remembered spending time drawing with friends making secret bases and maps.
“I think a lot of the seeds that we plant as kids if as artists or as people, we water them enough, they'll grow.”
But for DuCett, it is not just about drawing.
“I think it's a collision of who I am as a person, and how open the faculty members were at colleges that I went to, [that] have me work across different disciplines,” he said.
Not all influences are positive. When DuCett was 11, a moment in a nature center art class shook his confidence. A teacher told him he was drawing something wrong, and from that point on, he began to believe there was a “right” way to make art — and that he wasn’t doing it.
“And it turned me off from drawing for a while, and my way back into it was through computers,” he said.
DuCett's high school had a lot of Apple computers, and it started him working in HTML programming and early Photoshop. During that time, he visited a graphic designer's cubicle and saw a painting with newspaper and magazine cutouts.
“Seeing somebody put a collage element into a [painting] kind of blew my mind and opened me up to thinking how else I could not only bend the rules a little bit, but how I could go explore and decide for myself what things made sense to put together.”
DuCett entered the University of Wisconsin–Stout with plans to study character animation. But he was drawn more to the art studios than his design classes. Eventually, he had to ask: Did he want to spend his career bringing someone else’s vision to life—or creating his own?
Talking with his parents and college teachers, he decided it was time to see how far he could go in a career in art.
Two Inlets residency
Even though it was winter, and temperatures hit –40, DuCett found inspiration at his residency at Two Inlets. He was working on a painting for the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s not his first time creating something for the area. In 2016-2017, he made a site-specific piece that was a large interactive installation for an exhibit called Museum Confidential.
After the piece was up for three months, the museum asked him if he wanted to create a drawing. He worked on it for a couple years then decided to turn it into a painting.
“I had been very painting curious, and I think the [museum] director had sensed that and gave me this really wonderful opportunity to see how I could translate... part of this existing drawing into a new work that was I guess a new part of my practice for me.”
Inspiration pieces
Working in collage art, DuCett takes inspiration from photos, newspapers and even YouTube videos. But he also finds it can be a challenge to keep track of all the pieces he has to work with. DuCett has come up with a couple of different systems in his studio to keep things fresh in his mind.
“I had to put a lot of my art materials in clear plastic bins at a certain point so I could step back kind of scan the whole of what I've collected and be able to zero in on certain parts.”
He also has dozens of drawers filled with newspaper clippings and stuff that he frequently goes through to keep fresh in his mind and see what inspires him. He compares himself to a concrete mixer.
“I feel I need to spin slowly all of the things I have around me, otherwise they might harden and become not useful.”
When it’s done
DuCett said determining when a piece is done as an artist is like developing a muscle. Eventually, you can tell when it’s done by pure instinct.
“When you say something's done, this is how you start developing that the hunches become something that you trust a little bit more,” he said.
DuCett said with time, it can be easy for artists to fall into self-doubt and second-guessing. Past successes can create a kind of legacy - and it can prevent taking risks or trying new things.
“I haven't made a drawing or a painting or work in the last 20 years that about 75% of the way through it I’m pretty sure it's going to be a colossal failure,” DuCett said. “To feel that insecurity, the positive thing is that it tells me that I'm going somewhere that I haven't been before.”
To find more of DuCett’s work and follow his journey people can visit his website or Instagram.
Tell us about upcoming arts events where you live in Northern Minnesota by emailing psa@kaxe.org.
Area Voices is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.
