Joey Veltkamp creates soft paintings with textiles that reflect his daily life and experiences. Working on multiple projects at a time and inspired by the mountains, Puget Sound, ferries, his cats and garden, he uses scrap fabric to make his art.
Tell us about your journey to making soft paintings. Always an artist, or was there a “moment”?
I began my art career about twenty years ago as a painter. An old boss got me a gift certificate to an art supply store and I picked up a basic oil paint kit. Before that, I had been creative but nothing wildly artistic. The “soft paintings” spontaneously arrived about just over a decade ago. I got a yen to make a quilt and spent the weekend making one using a borrowed sewing machine.
Where do you find inspiration for your pieces? How does your environment influence your creativity?
It’s really only in the past few years that I’ve learned just how much my immediate environment influences my work.
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When my husband and I moved out of Seattle to a small nearby seaside community accessible via ferry, all my work changed. Suddenly I was making art about ferries, sea lions, and sailors.
And once we got into gardening, flowers began to reappear in my work. And if you’ve seen my last couple of shows, you’ll likely guess that we got some cats.
Sometimes I joke that I’m not an artist, I’m a visual diarist.
Do you use a sketchbook or journal? How does that help your work develop?
I used to just keep random scraps of papers with ideas on them, but it was just too disorganized. I only started using a sketchbook once we moved out to Bremerton.
Pre-pandemic, I would often commute into Seattle on the ferry, which takes about an hour. Ferry life is a trip – some of them can carry up to 2,000 passengers, plus 150+ cars. Some folks use the cruising time to be social and catch up with friends in the galley over beers. Others prefer to sleep or read. Some like to exercise by walking laps.
I got into the habit of using the time to sketch in my notebook. Now that I don’t go into Seattle as often, I really miss that dedicated time that I used to have. Sketchbooks are great to go back to and mine for ideas.
What do you do differently? What is your signature that makes your work stand out as yours?
This is a hard one to answer because I don’t really know if they do stand out. I think that people respond favorably perhaps because they are often relatable. I mostly try to focus on the positive so there is an optimism to them. I think they’re a bit earnest/uncool/sincere which I really kind of like.
Does your work have stories to tell?
Because I’m a self-taught artist, it took me a while to find my voice. And I think it started to emerge once I began thinking of myself as a storyteller. I’m a queer 50+ year old man living in a small(ish) town with my husband – I never thought that would have been a possibility when I was growing up, so I feel like many of the stories I tell are new just by virtue of gradual queer acceptance.
Do you plan your work out ahead of time, or do you just dive in with your materials and start playing?
Luckily, I get to do both.
I do a fair number of commissions and most collectors have an idea about what they’d like, so I typically will sketch out my ideas for them.
But to keep growing as an artist, I’ve learned that I need to make time to just play around and experiment in the studio. It can’t be all work, there has to be a little play, too, to keep things fresh.
When the sunlight returns, I always get a craving to make drawings with colored pencils, so I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, with no real purpose and that’s been very enjoyable.
How do you manage your creative time? Do you schedule start and stop times? Or work only when inspired?
It was always so erratic in my 30s and 40s, but once we moved into our own house, I started finding natural rhythms to work around. We have a decent sized garden that we’ve slowly been putting in, so I now know that the months of April & May (and probably June) will always be spent outside getting the garden ready, so studio time takes a backseat once the warmer weather arrives.
My art has organically been influenced by so much time spent in the garden, so now it’s kind of a reflexive cycle – I get the garden in tip-top shape so I can spend the summer being inspired and then getting into the studio to create!
As for the day-to-day schedule, it just depends on what hat I’m wearing that day. My husband clocks in at 8, so I use that as my general guide. My stamina in the studio is typically dictated by project due dates. If I’m having a light week, I’m leaning into feeling okay with that and being a little bit lazy. I used to feel so guilty. But I often have home errands or house projects that interrupt studio time, and I welcome the distraction.
Do you have a dedicated space for creating? If so, what does it look like?
I’m pretty certain I’m ADHD, and so I don’t always like to work in 8 hour stretches. For that reason, I prefer to keep my studio at home because some days I can just tell nothing good is going to happen in there and so then I can just quickly pivot to a different project.
My husband and I share a big, bright basement where we both make art. However, I’m super untidy and my practice flourishes when I have big piles of scrap fabric laying around to pick from. For this reason, I have been banished to the one room in the basement where I can close the door to contain all of my chaos.
How often do you start a new project? Do you work actively on more than one project at a time?
I go kind of bonkers when things get too monotonous, so I have to have several different projects going on. I keep a sketchbook of ideas and once I finish one, I’ll go through that to see what’s speaking to me currently.
Which part of the design process is your favorite? Which part is a challenge for you?
I really love the second draft. Once you have your initial idea and then you get to take that and refine into something even better. That hardest part is usually coming up with the original idea. I can’t really tell a good idea from a bad idea, so I like to let them marinate in the sketchbook for a while.
Can you tell us about the inspiration and process of one of your works? How does a new work come about?
New works come about from a few different sources, but pretty much always one of the following: my husband, our cats, my commute, our garden, or David Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe. I just sketch all the time because the ideas are the hard part for me. Executing them is mostly easy but figuring them out can be a lot trickier.
Here is how one of my pieces came into being from start to finish:
On our very first ferry trip, the captain made an announcement, “Will the owner of a Black BMW please come secure your car alarm. It is going off and will continue to go off for the remainder of our journey.” The owner happened to be sitting near us and he turned red and sheepishly went down to the car deck to turn it off. The whole experience was so charming that I made a note about it on my phone. The next time we rode the ferry, it happened again but this time with a White Mercedes. After a couple of months, I had accumulated a list of car alarms that set off the ferries, which I eventually turned into a soft painting. It ended up being a bit of an inside joke for ferry riders, because if you saw the list, you immediately knew what it was.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
Gosh, I think I’m pretty partial to the quote that often gets mistakenly attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” because in a world that values monoculture, our uniqueness is our greatest asset.
As a working artist, how do you define success?
What a great question – what is success? My definition has changed so much in the past 20 years. I’m going to limit it to how do I define a ‘successful artist’ and I think my answer is that if you keep going, you’re doing It. The rest is just optics. Keep making art (or craft or whatever you call it!). That’s success. The rest is just Ego.
Where can people see your work?
You can currently see a few of my pieces in the exhibition, “Soft Power”, curated by Ellen Ito, at Tacoma Art Museum. The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco is showing two works of mine in the travelling exhibition, “Indie Folk: New Art and Sounds from the Pacific Northwest”, curated by Melissa E. Feldman. And the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum recently opened “Shift Change”, a national survey of quilts by 21 artists, curated by Brian Nigus. And I’m often on display at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington. My next solo exhibition there will be in early 2025. And of course, Instagram and my website always have more information.
Interview posted March 2024
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