In Life and in Art...
Here we chatted with visual artist Stephen O'Donnell, who's "play of gender is my most recognizable thematic device," and his partner, writer, editor, and graphic designer Gigi Little about how their life together and the release of their collaboration: THE UNTOLD GAZE.
We first met Stephen when he delightfully graced the cover of our Issue 20 and promptly fell in adoration with him and Gigi, who live a life truly steeped in the arts. . .
We first met Stephen when he delightfully graced the cover of our Issue 20 and promptly fell in adoration with him and Gigi, who live a life truly steeped in the arts. . .
You’ve been together for 14 years. How did you two meet?
Gigi: It was the art first off. I was living in the Midwest and had flown to Portland to visit family. While I was there, we went to Stephen's art show Mythos at Froelick Gallery. That show was primarily self portraits of Stephen as mythological characters (Venus, Medusa, Leda...) and wearing beautiful gowns à la 1930s Hollywood, and it was the most fabulous thing I'd ever seen. When I got home, I wrote him a fan letter via email. And through that we just started emailing back and forth. That was one "meeting," the email. We had a few different first meetings, actually. When I wrote the fan letter and he responded, when we first spoke on the phone, when we finally met in person. That last first meeting was maybe nine months after the fan note. And really, most of that nine months, we were just writing. When did you know your relationship had evolved into something more than friendship? Stephen: About six months in. We were still only emailing each other—we hadn’t even spoken on the phone, yet--when we both admitted that we had a crush on each other. I think G knew before I did; it kind of snuck up on me. Gigi: It was interesting because I knew and didn't know, in a way. Or. Because my first association of him was of a man in a dress, I thought of him as a gay man. I've since (and I think that as a country we've since) learned so much more about the fluidity of sexuality and gender, but back then I just thought, gay man, straight woman. So for a while it was easy to shove away any inklings I was having that I was feeling crushy about this man I only knew through paintings and words on a screen. |
What is one of the most unusual things you’ve learned about each other over the years?
Stephen: It isn’t really something unusual, but I’m often surprised at how tough she is. How smart she is in dealing with people. I worried when we first got together that she was too nice, too much of a push-over. But as time has gone on, as sweet as she is, as generous as she is, I’m always so impressed at how she works it. She’s ambitious, amazingly hardworking, and very little gets past her; she’s pretty fierce. Gigi: Oh, that's not fair. Here I was thinking about things like how he likes peanut butter on a cheese sandwich or how he'll wear socks with flip-flops or how he'll leave his glasses on the dining room table overnight instead of on the bedside table or, you know, the whole painting-himself-in-dresses thing, and he goes and says sweet things like toughness and fierceness. What is the top characteristic you most love in each other? Stephen: Only one thing?! Her kindness. The most important thing for her is that people are happy, that they get what they want in life. And she’s incredibly generous. And so funny. And really smart. Gigi: Gosh, if I had to narrow it down to one, I'd go with how much he cares. He cares so much. He always wants to do good in the world. The writers include: Monica Drake, IPPY Award winner; Margaret Malone, Finalist for the 2016 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize; Whitney Otto, author of five novels including How To Make an American Quilt, which was a New York Times Bestseller adapted into a feature film; Tom Spanbauer, who won the Oregon Book Award; Vanessa Veselka, winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize; and Lidia Yuknavitch, winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and Finalist for the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award (and member of our advisory board). WHEW. How did you select these writers? Gigi: It was so hard because we know so many amazing writers. The Portland writing community is an embarrassment of riches, and it wasn't so much how do we assemble a group of writers as how do we narrow it down. We tried to focus on... OK, who writes fiction as opposed to nonfiction, who doesn't seem busy with a book tour or a big project, who really seems to connect with Stephen's work... things like that. But in the end we just had to make some really hard decisions. At the hairdresser. We made our hard decisions at the hairdresser, with me under the hot dryer with a pad of paper and our very long list and Stephen next to me going through all the names. How were the writers paired with their painting? Stephen: I made a webpage with images of what I consider my best work, work I knew we would include in the book, and sent a link to the writers, telling them to pick something they felt they might want to work with. Left the choices totally up to them. We weren’t worried that more than one person might choose the same painting. In fact, we welcomed the idea. It turned out that we only had that happen twice, but we love the results. What were some of the most surprising interpretations of the paintings? Stephen: As the writers were letting us know what paintings they’d chosen for prompts, I was surprised and rather amused that so many of the male nudes were chosen by straight males. What was that about? Gigi: Ha! And one of the things that I thought was interesting was how often the writers took the image of a man in a dress and turned it into the character of a woman in their story. But we had so many fascinating interpretations. The one that always sticks in my mind is Karen Munro's story "Les Lunettes," which took a self-portrait circa the 1870s and turned it into a post-apocalyptic sci-fi yarn. Another fascinating interpretation was Kathleen Lane's "Training of Bird," which is the story of a boy being trained by a child psychologist to be a "real boy," to lose any inclinations he might have that don't veer totally masculine—and the interesting thing there is that Kathleen originally wrote the story based on one particular painting and then realized that it fit better with a totally different painting. Why did you make the decision to self-publish? Stephen: It wasn’t so much a decision. We just figured it would be too difficult, probably impossible to find a publisher interested in such a project since the book is such an odd hybrid. The big benefit of not being able to give away all the work to someone else is that… we didn’t have to give it away. We would never otherwise have had the kind of control we had with this. We chose the authors, the images, the fonts, we edited the stories, we completely designed and laid the whole thing ourselves. Other than the actual printing of the book, we had TOTAL control. And, yeah, I like that. Do you have any other Stephen and Gigi projects in the works? Gigi: Right now we don't have any joint projects, but we're always busy with things of our own. Stephen has a show up now at Froelick Gallery through the end of May and is working on his next body of work. And I'm designing a couple book covers and working on a couple long-term projects: a novel and a children's picture book. Best in everything you both do. Thank you for the lovely interview! xo- Gertrude |
Stephen O’Donnell is a mid-career fine artist. His work is widely collected, both in this country and abroad. Entirely self-taught, he is best known for his self-portraits, paintings which typically employ a great deal of gender ambiguity, historicism, and a strong dose of droll humor. His work – both literary and visual – has appeared in the literary magazines/journals Nailed, Menacing Hedge, and Gertrude. He is married to writer and graphic designer Gigi Little. They live in Portland, Oregon with their dog Nicholas.
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Gigi Little's essays and short stories have appeared in journals and anthologies including Portland Noir, Spent, and The Pacific Northwest Reader, and she's the editor of the collection City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales. She's also a freelance book cover designer and the staff designer for Forest Avenue Press. In her earlier days, Gigi spent fifteen years in the circus as a lighting director and professional circus clown. She never took a pie to the face, but she’s a Rhodes Scholar in the art of losing her pants.
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