Meet Devan Horton

Today we’d like to introduce you to Devan Horton.

Hi Devan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself. 
I grew up mostly in Northern Kentucky, but my entire family is from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. I come from a family of farmers and my grandparents instilled the views of caring for the land and the importance of healthy ecosystems. I went to Northern Kentucky University and graduated with my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 2015. Since graduation, I have shown my work in local and national galleries and curated a series of pop-up art exhibitions throughout the city of Covington, Kentucky, called “Perennial,” which converted vacant urban buildings into art galleries. My work has always carried environmental themes, with my older work featuring subjects like mushrooms and swarming insects. I was interested in the micro-life and how seemingly insignificant individuals can become something fierce when in a swarm. In 2019, after being frustrated with always finding litter while on hikes, I began my series, “Penchant,” which is a collection of trashed landscape paintings and is my largest body of work to date. The trash began stealing my focus and became a symbol that I used to showcase the human swarm. With this series, myself and another local artist, Paul Kroner, created an exhibition titled “Trash Talk”, which was a fundraising event for local sustainability organizations such as Green Umbrella, Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, the Cincinnati Recycle and Reuse Hub. The show then traveled to Dayton, Ohio, which supported Waste Free Dayton. Since “Trash Talk,” I have joined the art committee for Keep Cincinnati Beautiful and I have become the curator for the Midwest Regional Sustainability Summit, held annually in Cincinnati. This series not only altered the way I was consuming, but it has begun to transform my entire artistic practice. While I have always been a painter mainly using oil paints, over the past year I have been on a mission to create art more sustainably using non-toxic botanical dyes and locally harvested material. I have been creating my own paints and papers and even have a land cultivation project scheduled for May of 2024, where I will be using seed paper and homemade paints to invite my hometown community to create drawings that they can plant and watch bloom into a pollinator meadow. This past August, I participated in the Urban Ecology Artist Program at the Civic Garden Center in Cincinnati, where I created an installation of 20 linen ribbons hung from a maple tree that were all botanically dyed using materials collected at the Garden Center. My current focus is on continuing my education of plants and natural color, curating work at the Sustainability Summit, and working on my 2024 meadow project. 

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
As you could guess, creating work featuring subjects like bugs and trash hasn’t been the easiest route to take. Talking about sustainability in a world of extravagance and divisiveness is a tricky road to navigate. Getting into galleries takes a lot of convincing others that what you do is important and good, which is why including a non-profit in my exhibitions has been so important. This has helped to bring together two worlds that do not typically interact. Galleries have enjoyed that I am able to bring in a different crowd, and organizations like that they can share their message at a different venue. It works out for everyone in the end, but you definitely have to work to make it known. Completely changing the way, I work has not been easy either. I am obviously quite comfortable with oil paints, and working with botanical mediums has been the opposite. Oil paint is consistent, strong, and resilient. Botanical mediums are not. Working with these has taught me so much more than just how to get stable color. I have learned patience, how to be gentle and listen. The only way to grow is to keep challenging myself with the unknown, and this has by far been my biggest challenge yet, but I am getting there. When you are fueled by passion and have a true intention behind your work, I don’t really think you can fail. The work becomes more rewarding every day. 

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My work has always had environmental themes and has dealt with a collective in one way or another. My older paintings of fungi and swarming insects were about the power and mystery of the hive mind. I found this hive behavior to be a form of higher intelligence and something I wished humans were a little more in tune with. My focus on micro-life has led me to always look towards the ground and intently at the small. Litter was more prevalent than you would hope for in 2019, and the pandemic created even more of a waste problem. I saw an invasion that we were causing, which inspired me to create my series, “Penchant”. This series of trashed landscapes was about our cultural obsession with consumption and waste. These pieces are about a connection to the planet that was traded for convenience and how this is not a fair exchange. I am quite proud of this series. It was something I needed to paint for me, and I the fact that I have been able to share the work with many and create a space for non-profits to do some fundraising and outreach has been a gift. I have met a lot of inspiring and passionate organizations and people because of this series. The series has also changed me a lot as a person. I was monitoring my own consumption habits and changing the way I made art. I no longer wanted to use mediums. I felt harmed myself and the planet, so I embarked on a mission to create art more sustainably. I did not want to focus on trash anymore but instead show the possibilities for the future. “Life attracts life, Garbage attracts garbage” is a quote by Robin Wall Kimmerer that has stuck with me as I develop this new work. I do not know many artists who make their own mediums, let alone harvest and make them sustainably. I have not encountered plant pollinator gardens as art installations, but I hope my 2024 meadow installation will inspire others to take on similar projects. Most of all, I am proud that through the challenges I have faced from starting over from scratch, I continue to stick to my mission, and as a result, I feel more comfortable every day. I am grateful that I have found a way to get communities engaged in restoration and sustainable art-making simultaneously. My new work is a creation that is actually alive, and to me, it doesn’t get much better than that. Continuing my themes of collective thinking, these new works aim to shift my old perspective on large groups of human beings and instead show the power of collective good we can achieve. 

I hope to continue creating more installation and community-minded work. While I am proud that “Penchant” is out there in the gallery world starting conversations, I love that this new work is active restoration. 

Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
I love the small-town community feel of Bellevue, Kentucky, while also being 7 minutes away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Cincinnati. I can walk to the city and do so frequently, but I can chat with my local City Council and neighbors easily about my pollinator project. The Ohio Valley landscape is so beautiful and rich in history. I have access to so many materials year-round that can be used to make color and that is not an option in every environment. 

I wish Cincinnati had more of an Eco-Art scene. While I can see this happening slowly, not just in Cincinnati but in all art scenes around the country, I feel Cincinnati tends to hold on to more traditional forms of artmaking. I consider my new way of creating to be traditional also, being that it follows techniques and materials used by generations of indigenous people, but I do feel Cincinnati tends to hold fine art painting and sculpture to a higher standard than most. Being in a city makes it harder to notice the landscape around you, but it is indeed still here and needs even more protection and maintenance. Litter is still a huge problem in the metro area, which demonstrates a need to usher a shift in mindset. We need to trade this want for convenience and ease to a willingness to care and protect because in the end, it helps everyone. I hope I can help aid in a shift of this presence in the Cincinnati. 

Pricing:

• My paintings range in sizes and are between $300 – $4,000

Contact Info:

• Website: www.devanhorton.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hortondevan/

Image Credits
John-David Richardson