Want to learn a new craft? 5 takeaways from a self-taught artist

For anyone out there who wants to teach themselves a new skill or craft, artist Kit Reuther has a piece of advice.

“Do it wrong first in order to figure out how to do it,” she said. “Sometimes ‘wrong’ ends up giving you better results.”

Reuther, 60, is a self-taught Nashville artist whose sculptures and paintings are on display in the exhibit “Casual Geometry” at Hodges Taylor Art Consultancy in South End. The exhibit, in collaboration with David Lusk Gallery, runs through Oct. 27, and is described in a press release as manifesting a playful take on the confines of geometry.

Her approach to learning how to create artwork was pretty casual.

She got inspired by her high school art teacher’s enthusiasm for artists like Warhol, Pollack, Oldenburg and Lichtenstein in the 1960s and ’70s.

“As a teenager who had never been in an art museum,” she said, “I couldn’t believe how much fun these people appeared to be having and I wanted to be more than just an observer.”

She gave it a shot.

“Very early on I remember setting up still-life subjects or pulling out photos of travels,” she said, “and simply painting exactly what I saw. The longer I stared at something, the more complex it became. Eventually my interest in capturing the realism of the subject gave way to more abstract ideas about the subject, and finally I eliminated the subject altogether.”

Reuther’s work has been on view in galleries in New Mexico, Tennessee, North Carolina, California and Germany.

Here are five things you can learn from her self-taught approach:

(1) Be able to challenge yourself

“I have a strong personal ability to challenge myself, without relying on outside motivators,” Reuther said. “I never stop asking questions of the work, and putting hurdles in front of myself to push the work into new and challenging directions. Abstraction was the result of changing the conversation in my head, and asking different questions.”

(2) Know your intention

“I try to avoid making art with an intended outcome or message for the viewer,” she said. “My only real intention is to make work that pushes and challenges me and feels slightly odd and fresh to my eyes.”

(3) Be ready to define success your own way, no matter how simple

“Success for me is a simple idea, jotted down on a Post-It note late at night, that becomes a portal to a whole new series of work,” said Reuther. She added that the work she is doing today is closely tied to art fundamentals people learn as beginners, such as composition, balance, color, temperature, line and form.

“I crave simplicity,” she said. “The distillation of all I’ve seen and learned over many years, reduced to a few simple directives.”

(4) Take time for yourself

“It helped that I was never married and didn’t have kids,” she said. “Not to sound like having a family is a bad thing, but in my experience, it afforded me tremendous periods of self-indulgent time and energy. I marvel at other artists who can do the family thing and have big careers.”

(5) Embrace trial and error

“I came to understand over time there is no right or wrong path to whatever my definition of success is,” Reuther said. “No ‘aha’ moment of achievement, but increments of learning and identifying my mistakes.

“Yes, making a living and gallery representation is gratifying, and other people will measure you by those things, but I am reminded every day in the studio that this is a practice. A humbling ritual of trial-and-error practice.”

Photos: Katie Toussaint

This story was originally published September 18, 2017 at 10:00 PM.