Your path on becoming an artist was not typical. Share that with us.
Roland Kulla: I’m on my third career. I spent ten years in the seminary studying to be a priest. I made a lateral transfer to social work, a career that kept me busy for 30 plus years as a practitioner, administrator, teacher and consultant. But throughout it all I have always been active with art in many forms. I’ve sung, designed sets and costumes, played violin, rehabbed and restored several Victorian buildings and gradually tried different types of visual arts. I started with drawing and watercolors, moved to oils in 1989 and then started using acrylics in 1996. I’ve also picked up some printmaking along the way: linocuts, woodcuts, drypoint, lithography and more. I took the plunge and started to show my work about a dozen years ago. Many, many baby steps later, I decided it was what I really wanted to do with my life.
Why are you a painter?
Roland Kulla: I have visions. Painting is the process by which I make them visible. I ignore the visions at my peril.
NA: Describe your overall work and method and also why you have been drawn to “bridges” as a subject matter.
RK: Bridges caught my eye about ten years ago when I was looking for something more “conceptual”. In my interpretation of that term, I took the bridge forms and painted them in a realistic style, but I eliminated backgrounds and cropped them in such a way as to make them abstract at the same time. I generally compose with the camera, then select the most dynamic images to produce as paintings. I usually work in series, so I will be working on a dozen or more paintings at one time.
How a working artist builds toward a gallery show
You recently had a one-person show at the George Billis Gallery in NYC. How was that whole experience?
Roland Kulla: It was a great situation because by the time it happened, I’d had experience. I was used to developing bodies of work and working to deadline for several years. I was also used to putting on my own shows at the co-op gallery where I was a member. So I knew something about what it took to put on a show.
I had been showing with the Billis gallery for several years as an “other artist” before the gallery decided to represent me. They had been selling a half dozen paintings a year of my Chicago “bridges” work. So I had a track record and didn’t feel like I needed to “prove” myself in that sense. I had already been scouting New York bridges, so when the time came, it was easy to pull together a group of images that I felt would make an exciting show. I also included the gallery director in the process of selecting the final set of images. I felt it would be more productive if he were invested in the images and not surprised by what I produced.
What was different was letting go of certain parts of the process. I had been used to doing my own thing, hanging the show myself and the rest of it. With the gallery, they worried about that. They also handled the media, cards and other logistics. My job focused more on producing the best paintings I could. While I have less contact with the collectors who buy more work, the fact remained that more than half the paintings sold, the best show I’d ever had.
What the artist’s method suggests for anyone building a body of work
A few practical points sit under Kulla’s answers, and they apply well beyond painting. He built a track record before the gallery took him on, which meant the relationship started from evidence rather than a pitch. He worked in series, so a single strong idea produced a dozen finished pieces instead of one. And he brought the gallery director into the selection, which turned a solo decision into a shared one. Each of those choices reduces the risk that a show, or any creative project put in front of an audience, lands flat.
There is also a lesson about being found. A painter who works only in private eventually has to solve the same problem any small business faces: how do the people who would value the work actually come across it? Kulla answered it the slow way, by showing at a co-op, then showing as an “other artist”, then earning representation. That is a version of the “know, like, trust” sequence John Jantsch describes in Duct Tape Marketing (2011), where being consistently findable and referable matters more to a small operation than any single campaign. Galleries, directories, group shows and word of mouth are all ways of being placed where interested people already look.
Trust does a lot of quiet work here too. A collector deciding whether to buy is reading signals: who represents the artist, who has bought before, how long the work has been shown. Rachel Botsman, in Who Can You Trust? (2017), argues we have moved into an era of distributed trust, where reputation systems, ratings and third-party endorsements let people extend confidence to work and sellers they have never encountered directly. A gallery’s backing is one such endorsement. A curated listing is another. Both stand in for the personal recommendation an artist cannot make on their own behalf.
Where the work goes next
Where do you see your work taking you in the future?
Roland Kulla: The short answer is “all over the place”. I’ve begun to do “bridge cities”. So far, I’ve done Chicago, Boston, New York and Pittsburgh. There’s plenty more material in each of those places. But I’d like to do Portland, the beautiful bridges on the Oregon coast highway, Cleveland and more. There could be a whole road trip on the Ohio. And that’s just the continental US. Eiffel did some beautiful bridges in the south of France that gave him the experience to build the Tower in Paris. There’s the Blaues Wunder in Dresden. Some great stuff in Cologne. Lots of possibilities.
And if I get tired of bridges, I can keep working on my occasional series of ruined Cistercian abbeys that are scattered throughout Europe.
What comes through in Kulla’s account is patience with the boring parts. The visions may arrive unbidden, but the shows, the deadlines, the scouting trips and the years of steady output are what turn them into a career. If you are trying to get your own work in front of people, treat that as the takeaway: build a body of work, keep showing it in places where the right audience gathers, and let the track record do some of the talking before you ask anyone to take a chance on you.
