THE OVERTURES

Steven Climer and the Art of Flow

Our 2024 November Resident

by Miden Wood

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Steven Climer is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of November. 

He does not ruminate on the abstract idea of doing something—he either is or is not doing it.

When we meet in the studio during Steven Climer’s month-long residency at DVAA, he tells us enthusiastically about a workshop he’ll be leading in the coming weeks. “I'm doing a workshop at a little coffee shop that I go to. There's some neurodivergent kids there; they're all under four, so we're doing a workshop on using color to communicate because they don't have a lot of their words yet.” If you’ve met Steven, then you know that enthusiasm is his M.O.—as is sharing the tools he’s enthusiastic about. There is no shortage, in his generosity, of matter-of-fact delight.

Steven’s experience expressing these feelings through the lens of ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) is part of the reason this upcoming workshop is so important to him. When he got angry as a kid, Steven tells us, he would “just freeze. It's like there's something right here,” he points to his chest, “and I can't come up with the right words, and I can't get it out, and I get so angry.” With another career as an instructional designer, it makes sense that he would be so invested in sharing frameworks that have worked for him in a world that he has often had to navigate without one.

“I was in the hospital a lot the last three years,” Steven says. “My doctors in the hospital, they would ask me, ‘What's your, what's your pain? One to ten?’ Smiley face to a sad face? And I said, ‘My pain is green right now. It's a greenish blue.’” Now, when Steven goes to the doctor, he still uses a color to express his feeling, “My own primary loves it… She goes, ‘What color are you today?’ And I go, ‘Oh my God, I'm a bright orange sun.”

Growing up in Flint, Michigan (with summers spent in Tennessee—“My mom did it because she was like, ‘I can get these kids out of my hair!’”) Steven didn’t find that secondary school clicked for him. “I was not a good student in middle school or high school. I was just like, I just didn't care. I didn't get what they were doing. I was too busy. I was already writing books by then… Then I went to community college, and it was like, I got a perfect 4 .0, and I was engaged because it was a way different way of teaching.” Here we see the practicum-oriented quality of Steven’s artmaking: he does not ruminate on the abstract idea of doing something—he either is or is not doing it.

This mode of being connects back to the idea of flow that many artists speak about: that an idea comes to an artist, and the artist’s task is then to present the idea as faithfully and with as much craft as possible. In Steven’s words, this flow of ideas is so inherent as to be organic: “I call it the bloodstream. It's like the bloodstream is the universe, and we're all connected to the bloodstream. We need to be nourished by the blood.” Paired with a novel series he’s written called The Bloodstream Saga, what term would be more fitting for a state of flow that moves through us; that, in its own way, keeps us alive?

“Someone gave you this idea and now you go fulfill that.”

“Every one of them says how they want to be painted,” Steven says of his work, paintings and novels alike. “If you go into it trying to figure it out… and you're having trouble with characters—well, you're the problem. You're the author and you've got a preconceived way that you want it done, and your characters are going, ‘No, I'm not saying that. I'm gonna say this, and I'm gonna go over there, and do that.’ ...And then you let them do what they're gonna do and it works.

Steven feels hardwired into this flow of ideas—and the craft he most often uses to convey them is painting. “I do a lot of traditional impressionist florals…because that's what they drilled into me when I was in my private art classes, like, ‘You do bowls of fruit, you do landscapes, you do bouquets.’” While these techniques and influences are still in his visual vocabulary, he still turns to the bloodstream for his ideas. I ask if his experience in instructional design (his other profession) has given him any perspective on his own sort of throwing-away-the-menu attitude—the tendency to not settle for the options we're all given—and he corrects me: “It's not that I made a conscious decision to reject a menu,” he says in his usual jovial tone, "I just did it, and I didn't think that there was any kind of parameter... I've been realizing how preconceived-everything can just restrict the artist inside."

I point out Steven’s propensity for actively doing things instead of just thinking about doing things; a method that fearlessly says, let's do it and find out how it went, and then do it again and do it better. “That's actually a very autistic trait for people with autism… We say what we're going to do,” Steven replies. “It's like, ‘Well I want to learn how to do this. Okay, I'm gonna do it.” He jokes about someone saying something offhand, like Let’s do lunch next week. “I think we're doing lunch next week because you said it. And then I’m contacting you like, ‘Where are we going? When do you want to meet?’”

Steven's relationship with his own creative source feels akin to this relationship with the truth. I ask if he feels the parallel between this hypothetical invitation to lunch and an invitation from something greater to act on inspiration. "Yeah! Yeah. Someone gave you this idea and now you go fulfill that." Steven's expectation of the truth sets him up to believe inspiration when it calls. How else would the universe speak, if not sincerely?

When hired to paint glass fragrance bottles for a perfume launch last fall, Steven—as he seems to do with anything he’s interested in—jumped in. “I had about a month—and I’d never painted glass before, so I had to practice and do research,” he says of his foray into the new medium. “Canvas will suck up paint… but glass is not porous, so the paint doesn't really want to stick on it, and so I had to figure out a process.” Once he found the right methods, Steven tapped into a flow again, coming to love the medium. “Painting on glass is so therapeutic because it's got such a feel to the paint.”

In typical fashion, he invites us in: “You should try it, just for the fun of it.” For Steven, the process required is not a barrier; it just is. No self-defeating narratives around not-yet-knowing-how will get in the way. He’s putting the try in, in his own words, “Trial and error, trial and error.” He’s reminding us that we should try it—just because it’s fun.