Meet North Carolina-based Artist Colin Cutler
Colin Cutler is a musician, poet, and writer based in Greensboro, NC. His latest album, Tarwater, is available now on Bandcamp. You can follow Colin on Facebook, Instagram, and X and learn more on his website.
CATHOLIC ARTIST CONNECTION: Where are you from originally, and what brought you to your current city?
COLIN CUTLER: I was an Air Force brat growing up, then in the military myself. I came to Greensboro for graduate school at the advice of my undergrad advisor, went overseas for four years after graduating, first with the Army, then traveling, working, studying, and playing music in England and Romania. When the pandemic hit, I realized that Greensboro was home, so I moved back.
How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist?
I don't call myself a Catholic artist—I was raised Pentecostal, went Presbyterian in college and only started the RCIA program while I was in England. But I had a good washing in the theology and philosophy of Catholic art, by way of Benedict XVI's "Spirit of the Liturgy" and Flannery O'Connor's "Mystery and Manners," which shaped both my artistic and spiritual outlook. Their emphasis on the implications of the Incarnation gave me a much more humanist view than my spiritualized upbringing, so in my art, I tend to focus on the human, but leave space for the divine to strike through.
Where have you found support in the Church for your vocation as an artist?
Tangentially, by way of several Catholic scholars of O'Connor who encouraged, inspired, and helped guide me in this project.
What is your daily spiritual practice?
Working in my garden is my daily spiritual practice. In it, I get to observe the daily experience of life and death in the competition of fertility, and the year-long arc of life and death and its yearly recurrence, and am constantly faced with the question of contentment with enough in the face of both loss and abundance.
Describe a recent day in which you were most completely living out your vocation as an artist.
A weekend of five gigs in four days over 600 miles of traveling; two of the gigs were very well-paid, one was a fairly prestigious festival, two were humbling and very much in the space of "Those who have ears to hear, let 'em." It was, all taken together, immensely fulfilling. Two of those were solo gigs focused on acoustic traditional music, in two I was a band leader with our fuller electric sound, and one was a gig where I was very much following the leader in acoustic traditional music without much prior planning, but a shared love for the music. Getting to share music, both with an audience and with other musicians, in various modes of performance, made for a well-rounded weekend.
How do you afford housing as an artist?
It goes back to that question of "what is enough." I was lucky to buy a small house during the pandemic, with a relatively low mortgage. It has been a slow work with my partner of repairing and updating it and turning it into a space that can welcome fellow travelers. This has shifted over time, but the Glenwood neighborhood of Greensboro has historically been a hub for artists—it's less affordable than it once was, but still is relatively, and Greensboro is one of the most affordable larger cities in North Carolina, with a huge artistic presence.
How do you financially support yourself as an artist?
I teach at the local community college (I adjuncted for a number of years, and recently was brought on full-time). I'm lucky to have a department head who completely supports my creative endeavors and gives me a schedule that still allows me to travel on the weekends. I am, however, taking the Spring 2024 semester off to pursue music full-time for a bit. Again, this goes back to cycles and seasons and "what is enough." The full-time gig allowed me to pay off the costs of the album, and I'll follow that first wave for a bit, but have a job to come back to if needed. I don't teach the more "prestigious" classes, but am happy with the basic and remedial composition courses. They're not the most intellectually stimulating, but they have a much smaller out-of-class workload that allows me the freedom of time to send out booking emails and travel. And—the students in those classes come from a much wider range of backgrounds and are heading to a much more varied future than the students in the literature classes, or at four-year universities. I have students going into culinary arts, HVAC, car repair, nursing—they are personally inspiring.