Sustaining Craft - Episodes Tagged with “Art Stories”

Episode 20: Hannah Allen: Putting Petal to the Metal

Elizabeth Silverstein — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 11:00:00 -0500

Hannah Allen stumbled into the flower industry with a customer service job. “I had no intention of touching flowers whatsoever,” Hannah said. “Only because my manager was just like, ‘This is your job. Don’t expect much.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, fine.’ I was young and dumb, so I was like, ‘I’ll just do whatever. Just give me a paycheck.’”

Then the head florist, Marie, asked her for some help. “She got really overwhelmed one day and she was like, ‘Come on over,’” Hannah said. “She was drilling me on the flowers, on what’s what, I had to label them. She taught me all the basic arrangements that I needed to know.”

Marie was transferred, and Hannah became head designer at the shop.

She’d always loved weddings since she was young. As the flower girl at the weddings of her mother’s friends, Hannah was determined to do the best job she could. When a bride came into the shop looking for affordable wedding flowers, Hannah remembered how much she loved weddings. “A girl came in looking for cheap wedding flowers on the fly,” Hannah said. “My manager handed me this big binder full of wedding information on all the questions you need to ask and all this stuff. And he was like, ‘Here you go. You can do it.’ I was like ‘Oh, ok.’ Having that sit down with the bride and getting excited and talking about what we’re going to do for her wedding was what ignited that, I think. I had this entire trade-style crash course on how to have a wedding consultation. That’s where it started, I think. It was the wedding stuff.”

In 2018, when she decided to “go rogue” as she described it, she started with Hannah Allen, Flower Gal. Then came Petal to the Metal Floristry. “I was just making an Instagram post one day, and I was just like, ‘Everything is going so fast, it’s petal to the metal.’ It just clicked in my head. It was the best pun of all time for a flower business.”

Find more of Hannah's work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/petaltothemetalar/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/petaltothemetalar/

Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through partnerships with friends. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/
Facebook - http://facebook.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Website - hewandweld.com/news
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/

Special Guest: Hannah Allen Anderson.

Episode 19: Michael Eubanks: Using Art to Combat Fear

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 16:00:00 -0500

Michael joined the military at the age of 16. By the age of 31, with a three-month-old daughter, Michael was let go from the military in what the armed forces calls a reduction in strength. He was sent back to the United States with his family, with no understanding of life as a civilian for the past 15 years.

“I panic," Michael explained. "I experience a lot of stress. We were trained to not recognize stress. We didn’t talk about stress. We didn’t talk about trauma. So you’re outprocessed--in other words, you come through this process of coming back to what we call ‘the block.’ And I would say you try to hold your head up, you try to be proud. You try to be an adult. You try to play the male role but you are in a nether world. Even though you’re back with the family that birthed you and raised you, you’re back with a whole different mindset, a whole different paradigm of what life’s about, and you are disconnected. You suffer from disassocation disorder. You’re out of your element, your’re out of your sphere. You don’t know what to do.”

Michael graduated with honors from the UA Little Rock Masters Social Work program with a concentration on community and family therapy. He works as an education specialist in a program at UA Little Rock with an office from the Department of Education. He also plays once a month in Hot Springs and performs several times a month for veterans with dementia, VA staff, and veterans in the day health care program.

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Find more of Michael's work:
Website - www.michael-eubanks.com
Email - meubanks@michael-eubanks.com
Arkansas Arts Council Directory - https://www.arkansasarts.org/aie-artists/michael-eubanks
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/michael.eubanks.315
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-e-eubanks-71800043/

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Each episode is only possible with the help of friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Joshua Kurtz.

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article - hewandweld.com/news
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/
Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/1355556997945302/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/

Special Guest: Michael Eubanks.

Episode 18: Jessica and Justin Crum: Proving That Creative Careers Are Possible (But Difficult)

Elizabeth Silverstein — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 15:00:00 -0400

Jessica and Justin Crum decided to move to Conway in 2014, where Justin began working for PBS creating documentaries. He created educational documentaries, included one that aired nationally. But with little room to grow, he decided to take a step back into the scripts he’d written previously. “My roots are very much in narrative filmmaking,” Justin shared. “And I did grow to love documentaries there, I didn’t want to only do documentaries, and there’s no way to branch out from that there with PBS, really, unless you’re Downton Abbey. I just felt it was the right time to move into other scripts I had written before and start producing those. PBS was a bit of a training ground for me in a lot of ways and built my confidence up. I left there with the intention of making the film I’m making now, which is Papaw Land. I’ve been working on that for a year and a half. And it’ll probably be another year or so. It’s a long process.”

And Jessica tried to continue her career as a fashion designer. She was freelancing for her contacts in LA and started saying yes to other projects. “When people locally would say, ‘What do you do?’ I would say I’m a designer,” Jessica explained. “I would tell them textile design, fabric design, graphic t-shirts, and they’d go, ‘Oh! Could you make my logo?’ I was like, ‘Probably.’ I’m a yes person, so I was like, ‘Yes, of course I can,’ and then secretly I was like, ‘I’ll figure it out.’”

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Find more of Jessica's work:
Silverlake Studio Website - https://silverlakestudio.com
Silverlake Studio Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/teamsilverlake/
Silverlake Studio Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/teamsilverlake
The Studio Downtown Website - https://www.thestudiodowntown.com/
The Studio Downtown Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thestudiodowntown/
The Studio Downtown Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/thestudiodowntown

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Find more of Justin's work:
Papaw Land Movie Website - https://papawlandmovie.com/
Papaw Land Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/papawlandmovie/
Papaw Land Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/papawlandmovie
Papaw Land Twitter - https://twitter.com/papawlandmovie
Papaw Land Land Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1546893063/papaw-land-movie-filming-in-arkansas-summer-2018

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Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article - hewandweld.com/news
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/

Special Guests: Jessica Crum and Justin Crum.

Episode 17: Matthew Castellano: Building Community Through Art

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 16:00:00 -0500

When the gallery was in danger of closing, Castellano decided he would take on the project. He started raising money and planning pop-ups, absorbing the risk. “I didn't want to bring anybody else down,” he shared. “I wanted to do it pretty much on my own back. I did the GoFundMe for it and I had a lot better response than I thought I've ever had. So I have to do it now. Yeah, it's like yes, okay, I get to do it and have to do it. … It's really the community.”

He’s also built an educational element into the gallery, sharing the smaller details of working with galleries, like making sure a name is on the back of every art piece, resumes and portfolios are up-to-date, and that every “no” hits hard, but each “yes” makes up for it. “I've been rejected more times than I've been accepted but I was accepted a few times and that makes all the difference,” he said. “I want to be the person that I didn't have.”

Each artist accepted into Gallery 360 walks away learning how to work with other galleries as well. “Everyone that gets to show here is going to learn how to be an artist by the end of their show,” Castellano said. “That way, they are stronger about going into other places and being represented. A lot of times, gallerists and people that represent don't want to have to deal with people that don't know. It's a lot of work on their end. if they come in and they're completely perfect, then they have nothing but good roads ahead of them. So even the smallest things like not putting information on the back of the piece is detrimental sometimes because you never know if that could be a sale or if you're never gonna see that piece again because it can get lost.”

Find more of Matthew's work:
Art Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/matthewcastellanoart/
Gallery Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lr_360/
Gallery Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/360Gallery/
Website - https://manvswheel.bigcartel.com/
GoFundMe - https://www.gofundme.com/gallery360
Ultraviolet - https://www.facebook.com/events/824094007942154/

Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Local. Magazine (http://localmag411.com/).

Find more from Hew&Weld:

Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article, which can be found at hewandweld.com/news.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter: @hewandweld
Sustaining Craft is also on Instagram: @sustainingcraft

Special Guest: Matthew Castellano.

Episode 14: Legenia Bearden: Opening Horizons with Affordable Art Classes

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 23:00:00 -0400

Determined to fulfill the vision she’d had as a child, Legenia Bearden began researching to make her dream, the Bearden Productions Center for the Arts, a reality. In 2006, she found the resources to file for her 501(c)(3) status and was approved three months later.

But it would be another eight years to fully get her vision off the ground. “I just stopped doing stuff, once we got our 501(c)(3) status,” Bearden explained. “It just wasn’t moving fast enough for me when I tried to actually start the business, so I kind of let it just sit there and nothing happened until 2014.

She taught drama for a bit, then worked for the city until 2014. “When I started Bearden Productions, I was still working at the city, and it would just be on my heart every day as I was driving to work,” Bearden shared. “And I’m like, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be going to work.’ I just knew I was not supposed to be doing it. I just knew in my heart, this is not something I’m supposed to be doing. So I remember, that one particular day, I was crying on my way to work. I went to work, I sat down, and I’m still crying. I’m working. During my lunch, I said, ‘Ok, if I do this, I’m going to need a building.’”

She found the space, renting a dance studio in the basement of a church for $300 a month. “And it was ours,” Bearden said. “Just that simple, just that quick. Like all within a week. I thought about it, I moved, and I did it.”

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More of Bearden Productions Center for the Arts:

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/beardenproductions/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/bppas_

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/_bpca/

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Want the full article about Bearden? Head on over to http://hewandweld.com/news/.
Find Hew and Weld on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as hewandweld.

Special Guest: Legenia Bearden.

Episode 13: Katy Raines: Melding Structure and Creativity for Career and Community

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 14:00:00 -0400

Ever the researcher, Katy Raines discovered that becoming a graphic designer meant she could create as a career without foregoing the paycheck. There was also the freedom of creating the art she loved in her spare time. “I figured I could do the graphic design full time and then do fine art on the side and still have fun with it,” Raines said.

In 2014, Raines graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a degree in graphic design and a job. The job started as an internship in 2013, over her senior year of college. A professor had emailed her about the position, suggesting she apply. “I saw it and I was like heck yeah,” Raines said. “It’s an internship, they just want part-time, this would be perfect for my senior year or over the summer, whatever. So I was actually in Hawaii when I found the email on my honeymoon. My husband was still asleep so I got up super early and luckily I had my laptop with me and I finished my portfolio and sent my resume. And I sent it to my current boss now and she emailed me back the same day.”

They scheduled an internship after her return. Jet lagged, Raines thought she’d bombed.

She began the internship at Colliers International soon after while she finished her degree, working 20 hours a week while going to classes. “They didn’t have a marketing department at all about a month before I started,” Raines explained. “And then my boss said, ‘We have to have a designer.’ And so now I’ve gotten to do everything from photography to web to social media to actual graphic design work.”

Special Guest: Katy Raines.