Today we’d like to introduce you to Trevor Grabill.
Hi Trevor, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I got my start as a professional artist around 2010 working zine fests around the Midwest. I’d just finished school with a degree in graphic design, and while I didn’t have a clear path to follow, I knew that I wanted to find a way to be self-employed as an artist. Zine fests were a wonderful, formative experience – I hardly made any money at them, but I learned that I love sharing artwork in person and talking with people.
Around the same time, I was trying to figure out how to make prints at home. While my major was in design, my heart had always been more in fine art, and printmaking in particular was very exciting. I’d been more interested in screen and intaglio printing in school, but after I graduated, I gravitated to relief printing as a process I could do with almost no special equipment or materials. Relief printing (a process where a print is made from a carved block of wood or linoleum, similar to a stamp) quickly became my focus, and as I moved around, I made prints with a wooden spoon in kitchens, garages, and basements.
In 2013, I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and about a year after that I got involved in the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. The KIA is where I got my start teaching – I’d taught and organized a few one-off events before, but it was there that I learned to teach ongoing, in-depth classes that really delved into the medium. Like many art teachers, I found that leading a class helped clarify and hone my artistic process. This was a turning point for me – a lot of disparate threads in my work pulled together, and the path to a rewarding, ongoing creative practice began to emerge.
In 2017 I started a Patreon subscription service for prints, and in 2018 I started traveling to sell prints at art fairs – in a way, a throwback to my earlier experience with zine fests. In 2020, with the start of the pandemic, my part-time graphic design job (which had been my primary income) ended. While I hadn’t been making much money at it, most of my labor had been going into my art practice for years, so it felt natural to transition to full-time art-making at that point. Since then, I’ve been working in my home studio (which I share with my spouse, who’s a potter) and traveling around the region to teach and sell at art fairs.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Patience and trust have been big struggles for me. It took almost 10 years after finishing school to begin to feel like I had an art practice that could sustain me both spiritually and materially, and in that time, I didn’t often feel confident that I was on the right road. I didn’t go to grad school, and while I have many peers in a similar position now, at the time I didn’t know any self-supporting artists who didn’t have a graduate degree. I’m grateful that I had a partner and many friends who were always curious about what I was making and never seemed to share my doubts about whether it was worthwhile.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I make woodcut prints, which are made by carving an image into a flat wood block, rolling ink onto the surface, and then pressing it into paper – similar to a stamp, but much larger. I like block prints because of how much process there is between an idea and a finished piece – an image is drawn, then edited, then carved, then inked, and finally printed – I like to think that the piece gets better with each of those steps.
My work deals with finding strangeness in everyday life. There are so many kinds of strangeness – things that are beautiful, tragic, haunting, or just plain bizarre. Unfortunately, information overload on our phones, combined with the obvious repetition of commercial spaces and roads, tends to flatten out a lot of our daily experience. It’s my belief that boredom is a kind of hopelessness, and that its opposite – fascination, vulnerability, presence – is a powerful gesture of hope.
More specifically, I make prints of people, buildings, animals, and plants that I see around the neighborhood, hoping to capture the strange mixture of natural beauty and midwestern neglect that typifies this part of the world.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I love the way that artists in Kalamazoo show up for each other. There’s very little sense of competition here – one artist’s success is everyone’s success, and I think that folks around here are great at sharing opportunities, showing up for each other’s openings, and just generally celebrating each other. In a small town, you’re grateful for your artistic community, and you do what you can to keep it going.
I hate that the Kalamazoo River has been irredeemably polluted. It’s tragic to live near a beautiful body of water that people are afraid to swim or even wade in.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://flatmtnpress.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flat_mountains/
- Other: www.tiktok.com/@flatmtnpress
