Strawberry Fest 2019: Success!

When my friend all but dragged me to my first festival booth last year, I was anything but ready. It was… probably the greatest challenge of time management and McGuyvering that I have ever faced, and it was an utterly irreplaceable learning experience that lit a fire in me. In twenty days, with the help of a small village of kind people, I was able to pull together a tent, a display with too many moving parts, some tables, and enough inventory to last me to Sunday. Somehow. It was amazing, and I made friends and sold a lot of work!

This year… this year was so much better. Better because, even though I had 75% of it figured out, and there was 25% uncertainty, we rocked it. The Saturday weather was beautiful. I made new friends. The twenty-dollar shoes I wore were totally bomb. Bunches of people signed up for updates. I made sales. I got commissions. There was a half hour of rain on Sunday, and the clear shower curtains worked as a PERFECT alternative to hundred-dollar walls that I just couldn’t swing at the time. Couldn’t go any better.

I also got to see one of my wonderful photographer friends open up and just bloom. :) It was the first fest that he has ever had to prepare for, and there was so much excitement leading up to the day… we would shoot messages back and forth about what might work, what the weather looked like, how the air crackled every time someone said “Strawberry Fest.” And when he showed up with his beautiful wife to set up… and it was windy… and it looked like rain… they pulled it all together and set up, charmed the crowd with stories, and put some beautiful photography in some homes! In fact, I can’t wait to hang some Kevin Sladky originals myself! Can’t wait to see where he goes.

All in all… Thanks to everyone who took some time to drop by during a hot, busy could of days!!! It means the world.

It was a perfect weekend

to make friends,

to learn,

to sell art,

to spread some sunshine around!

Visit me at Strawberry Fest June 22-23 in Cedarburg, WI

Everyone, I’ll be at Strawberry Fest June 22-23 in Cedarburg, Wisconsin again this year! Rain or shine, the fest is still on, so I hope see you there.

Here is one of the items I will be bringing:

I will be there with paintings, pep, and maybe some ponchos.

Thanks, everyone!

PROGRESS: A Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Series

Very briefly, I love my sport almost as much as I love making art, and the intersection where they collide is kind of magical for me.

Below you can see the progression of jiu jitsu belts from day 1 as a white belt (so… so unaware) to the vastness of growing knowledge represented by the black belt. There’s blood, sweat, tears, more sweat… lots and lots and lots of sweaty love.

I created this for a training partner firmly in the brown belt stretch. He is incredible at what he does on the mats, and he’s also an amazing dad, doctor and medical professional. It’s a reminder to me that we are are riding a spectrum in every endeavor we undertake. Progress!

Personal Favorite Project: Impossible Planets

RATHER IN PROGRESS…

love making different art… but my-oh-my do I love making these. :)

They allow me keep rolling into new territory, work on as many challenges as I want, never get tired of one area… it’s like painting twenty different paintings at once united by a common goal. Besides, I love nature and travel!

After Wine and Harvest

A totally beautiful weekend

Below? That is me beaming all weekend at Cedarburg's Wine and Harvest Festival this past weekend, feeling terribly lucky. The weather was gorgeous, the people were amazing, and a bunch of my pieces went as an added bonus!

It was a BLAST.

Thanks to all

Thanks for visiting my tent, either at Strawberry Fest or Wine and Harvest Fest and sharing the shade of my canopy.

Thanks for giving me more projects! I love having a constant flow of ideas to push myself in new directions.

Thanks to those who even came back to see me after the first time at the beginning of summer - I remember your faces! There is no feeling like having someone come back to you from the depths of memory because they wanted to exchange a few words again

Thanks for endlessly chatting with me about art, culture, language, food or random nonsense. I am so apt to just take a topic and run with it. I met travelers, doctors, painters, performers, clerks, accountants, teachers all with a lot to ask and say.

Thanks for letting me buy more art supplies and improve my booth display with your painting purchases.

Thanks for believing in the importance of being passionate.

Thanks for helping this artist's dreams come true! Sometimes it feels like I am a hermit sitting in my living room of a studio dabbing at a canvas, isolated from the world. But when I meet ACTUAL PEOPLE in the hot summer sun, equally bug-bitten, with kids and/or backpacks, sometimes a little tipsy, and pretty much always talking, I feel connected in the strongest way!

And thanks, of course, to everyone who helps me with the preparation, setup, emotional support, etc. at home, work, remotely, and implicitly. Totally impossible without all that lurve.

A gallery piece?

Right now, I am working on getting this piece into a gallery in downtown Milwaukee. It could be very important for me to get into that particular one, and I hope I make it. Here is “Will o’ the Wisp” below:

Revisiting a beloved style

A couple of amazing folks really enjoyed my art and commissioned me to work within one of my favorite styles, something I call “impossible planets.” The one below was made for a woman from the jiu jitsu gym and is called “Convergence.” Creating pieces like this one reminds me of the beauty and vastness of the world we live in. These pieces can also hang from multiple directions to say that things can be seem from different viewpoints and remain viable.

I will be working on this next one with a renewed love.

My “Shop” page is coming soon… promise.

For those who asked, I promise to get my online shop up and running by the end of the month once things settle down. Prints and originals will both be available!

I have long considered going through an outside service like Etsy or Ebay, but there is something to having my own turf that greatly appeals to me.

Again, huge thanks. I am so lucky.

SZ

How Martial Arts Helped Me Make Art Again After 12 Years

Every part of me wishes that I had learned it earlier, but it took me the better part of my conscious existence to really understand that humans can learn just about any skill imaginable. All of us have friends, relatives, heroes and even individuals we passionately dislike who are very, very good at something – so good they can’t be ignored – or have accomplished astronomic heights. And I can’t justify how long it took me to acknowledge that, no matter how unbelievable the gap is between me and Mozart or Monet or Bill Gates or Tiger Woods or Elon Musk, it was just a bunch of consistent, smart, hard work... way more than I’ve done in those areas. Ugh. No prodigies? No born talent? No differences in DNA? No privileged circumstances? Well, almost negligibly some of those and definitely the last of those, but even with the uneven playing field in mind, I consciously remind myself that my day is a collection of choices, and nothing in life has ever been so delicious to know! What freer way to live than with the certainty that we are supremely trainable animals?

My dad is an amazing artist, and he put his brushes away a long time ago to get good at math and computers. So I grew up in a house filled with art and always drawing with the adults crunching numbers (my also creative mom is an accountant). I put art away years ago – somehow I figured that not taking a high school art class was the way to go. I was afraid of color, afraid of new mediums, afraid of failing at it, so I just quit altogether. Certainly doing nothing was better than being embarrassed about making ugly stuff, right? That didn’t feel good at the end of the day, though. Years went by. I made nothing. I didn’t get better at it. I felt bad.

Speaking of difficult, I’ve mentioned before that I do jiu jitsu (looks a bit like high school wrestling, sometimes in a bathrobe) and that it’s really hard to get good. Our guy who joined in 2007 just got his black belt this years, and he took few breaks, had some kids and kept up a full-time teaching position. It was something about getting the mat cleaned with my face night after night that finally renewed by belief that getting good at something complicated is really hard (REALLY hard) and takes time. Obvious, right? And so on June 24, 2017, taking a night off nine months into practice, I lay in bed staring at the house spiders on the ceiling thinking about how I wasn’t making art. I’d skipped practice because, although I loved it, it was also painful and really defeating if I let it be. I failed a LOT but I never let my ego defeat my wish to keep practicing – those are the people who quit in the long run. I counted down from five, got up and found my art supplies under the bed. Once I started painting (deciding I’d keep going even if I was failing), I didn’t stop for a couple of hours. And that process, although I giggle about it now, was so satisfying to me that I haven’t put my paints down yet! I now have a tiny company (Worth the Paint, LLC) and a website to showcase my joy. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible a year ago!

Studying both martial and visual arts has changed my life profoundly and led me down a path to trying to understand how the brain works. Why do we hesitate? Why do procrastinate? Why do we do the same things repeatedly? How do we learn? Why do we stop learning? How do we develop grit to persevere despite failure?

I am learning the answers, and I should know a thing or two in another twelve years or so, seeing as I don’t intend on stopping for any reason.