Sustaining Craft - Episodes Tagged with “Little Rock”

Episode 33: Aaron Walker: Loving People Through Tattoos

Elizabeth Silverstein — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 13:00:00 -0400

This episode is built around Aaron giving me a tattoo while I interview him. Check out the interview on YouTube to get the full experience. For this episode, you'll hear the tattoo gun in the background, humming away. YouTube: https://youtu.be/qslGcx8uHmQ.

Aaron Walker is a professional tattoo artist with a private studio in downtown Little Rock. He specializes in color tattoos, particularly watercolor.

"Whenever I first started tattooing, I did a lot of color tattoos in general. I wanted to do a style called New School, which is very cartoony, almost based off of graffiti. And, I still love that style. It's a lot of fun to tattoo. But I got asked to do a couple of watercolor tattoos. And I had a lot of fun doing them. I was probably in like my first few years of tattooing and then one day I thought to myself that I had a lot of fun doing them and just wanted to keep doing them, so I told myself that some styles aren't for everybody and there should always be somebody that wants to be good at certain styles. Like for example, there's people that started doing tribal in the 90s, and they still to this day do it. I just started thinking to myself my style isn't for everybody, and that's completely fine. I necessarily don't want to be a black and gray artist. Or, you know, any other kind of style. You could name any style, really. But, while I can do black and gray, it's not what I want to specialize in. There's people out there that definitely can do watercolor, but it's probably not what they want to do every day either, so, you might as well have somebody that's gonna want to do it and try their best to be really great at it, and that's what I sought out to do." - Aaron Walker

Watch Aaron give me the tattoo on YouTube Here: https://youtu.be/qslGcx8uHmQ

Find out more about Aaron:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/aaronwalkertattoos/
Website - https://www.instagram.com/aaronwalkertattoos/

Find out more about Elizabeth and Sustaining Craft:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/
Facebook - http://facebook.com/sustainingcraft
Website - https://www.sustainingcraft.com

Special Guest: Aaron Walker.

Episode 32: Katy Raines, Part 2: Relearning How To Love Art

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Katy Raines, a Little Rock creative, joins Elizabeth again on the Sustaining Craft podcast for the second time since 2018 to reveal her work with the 2nd Friday Art Night After Hours Market, how she's relearned to love art, and why she joined an all-girls Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

"I don’t need to do an all-day eight hour event where I actually get up at 6 am to prep and then get there at 7 and the event starts at 9 and then I stay until 5 and tear down at 6. It’s hit or miss if I’m going to make fifty bucks or three hundred bucks. Is that worth my energy? At this point, not really. I do still have a full-time job so I’m grateful that I’m able to be more selective about my freelance and these vendor events. And with that, like I said, I’m not posting as much on instagram about my personal art because I’m relearning how to love art. I feel like I had to take that step back. Because it was, everything needed to be, how many likes did I get, or who is sharing it? I saw my friend share somebody else’s art but they didn’t share my art. And it was becoming a shitty comparison game that nobody wants. I love all of my friends’ art and I’m like, they should be sharing because they’re amazing. It was never a, ‘I feel in competition with them’, it was just a ‘I’m being behind’ feeling. With that, I think it was, I am putting too much pressure on myself. And I think it goes back to the pandemic. I took that two years to really relearn who I was. And part of that was, what did I like about being an artist as a kid? That was: sitting in my room, listening to music and figure drawing." - Katy Raines

Listen to her previous episode here: https://sustainingcraft.fireside.fm/13
Read here: https://hewandweld.com/katy-raines/

Join Katy and a group of talented artists this Friday, August 11, for the last Second Friday Art Night Afterhours of the year. To apply for next year’s events, email the Downtown Little Rock Partnership at downtownpartnership@downtownlr.com or Katy at WhatTheKaty@Gmail.Com.

Find out more about Katy:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/whatthekaty
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/whatthekaty
2nd Friday Art Night - https://www.facebook.com/2ndFridayArtNight
After Hours - https://www.facebook.com/events/740123451446905/740123454780238/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A%5B%7B%22surface%22%3A%22home%22%7D%2C%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22search_results%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22search%22%7D%5D%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/
Facebook - http://facebook.com/sustainingcraft
Website - https://www.sustainingcraft.com

Special Guest: Katy Raines.

Episode 22: Stacey Bowers: Stamping an Edge on the Delicate

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 17:00:00 -0500

Stacey Bowers wanted to make her friends laugh. She used some of her previous knowledge of jewelry making and learned how to stamp metal to make delicate pieces with interesting phrases on them.

“I think it has a lot to do with my own personal taste in jewelry,” Stacey said. “I typically wear things that are small and discrete, and I think a lot of other people appreciate that, too. But my attitude is not small or discrete. It's a little combination of the inner and outer me.”

She worked full-time as the communications director for the Thea Foundation while making jewelry every hour she wasn’t at work. As of February 2019, she decided to transition to jewelry design full-time with her company, Bang-Up Betty.

Find more of Stacey’s work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bangupbetty/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/bangupbettyjewelry
Website - https://www.bangupbetty.com/
Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.com/BangUpBetty/
Stifft Station Gifts - https://www.stifftstationgifts.com/

Sustaining Craft is a passion project of Hew & Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. 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 - https://www.hewandweld.com/news
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/

Special Guest: Stacey Bowers.

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 16: Kathryn LeMaster: Using the Unseen to Craft a Home

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 13:00:00 -0500

And that interest had started years ago, with a family project. LeMaster’s father, gifted in construction, decided to build their family home from the ground up. The family lived in a mobile home while they first built a barn to house all of the building materials, and then started on the house a few years later. “I kind of felt like i grew up on a construction site,” LeMaster said.” I loved so much of that process of building our house and being able to be so involved in that process. Hanging doors, helping my mom pick out wall paper and paint colors.”

After graduating with her degree and working for a year and a half at a local firm as an intern and then a junior designer, LeMaster decided to take a break. She joined her mother again, helping her flip a house as LeMaster considered what her next step might be.

She didn’t intend to start a company.

Get more of Kathryn's work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kjlemaster/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/kathrynjlemaster/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/kjlemaster/
Website - https://kathrynjlemaster.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: Kathryn LeMaster.

Episode 15: Robert Bean: Reading a Painting Through Visual Vocabulary

Elizabeth Silverstein — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:15:00 -0500

Robert Bean found himself stuck between needing a job that didn’t involve his craft, wanting to spend time with friends, and still being able to practice his art. “I have to practice, I have to draw, I have to create,” Bean said. “At the same time, I don’t want my life to be nothing but, I go to work, and then I come home and go to work. … I got creative and I said, ‘Well, what would happen if my friends were going out to dinner, or we’re going out to grab a beer or something--what happens I just take a sketch book with me?’ And so I started drawing on site. I started going out with friends and I would take a sketchbook and I would sketch while we were out. I do that all the time now.”

Bean turned the idea into a class at the Arkansas Arts Center, Urban Sketchbook, where he also serves as the Painting & Drawing Department Chair of the Museum School. “I encourage my students, if you’re sitting around in the doctor’s office, take a sketchbook,” Bean advised. “Draw in the waiting room. If you’re sitting at the DMV, draw while you’re sitting there. Waiting for your car to get fixed, sketch. You can find the time to sketch. You can find the time to keep those drawing skills alive because we have a lot more dead time in our days than we realize. It’s the idea of developing those kinds of disciplines that eventually roll around into making money. Because as soon as you start to create enough, as soon as you start to draw enough, you build body of work. Once you build that body of work, then you can show it. It took me ten years of figuring things out. I do look back at that period in my twenties and go, what if I had that mentor when I was 21 years old that would come in and say, ‘You’ve got to do this and this and this’? Maybe I would have started to make money earlier, but I was in my late twenties before I started making money somewhat consistently with my work."

Get more of Robert's work:
Gallery 26 - http://www.gallery26.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rbfineart/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/RBFineArt
Website - http://www.rbfineart.com/

Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and crafts people to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Joshua Kurtz, Morgan Allain (The Inkling Girl), Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance & Nomad Neighbors), and Local. Magazine.

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: Robert Bean.

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.

Episode 11: Geovanni Leiva: Roasting Romance Back into Coffee

Elizabeth Silverstein — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 16:00:00 -0400

Geovanni Leiva missed his family and his village, and then, after a visit five years ago, while flying back to Arkansas, he came up with an idea. “It was probably the worst three hours of my life because I would feel so defeated,” Leiva said. “And I would feel so helpless. … Why me? Why, out of all these people, I get to do this? Over one of those trips, I’m reading a magazine, and I have my little napkin for my Sprite, and I see a Chinese proverb in a magazine that says, if you give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. And I realized that exactly had happened to me. I had been given that opportunity. I had been given that chance to-- not only I was fed for one day, but I was actually given that opportunity. I realized, that’s exactly what I gotta do in my village. What if? And it started with that. Why if, why not? Why do I not bring their coffee, they grow coffee already. That’s what’s they’ve been doing for 60-plus years, ever since I’ve known them. What if I can get their coffee in the hands of my friends and family in the states? And then all of a sudden, I bridge the two, and while bridging the two, we break poverty? I was like, that’s it.”

Want the full article? Head on over to www.hewandweld.com for more.

Special Guest: Geovanni Leiva.

Episode 10: Diane Harper: Exposing Boogeymen with Ink Blots

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 22:00:00 -0400

Harper’s parents met while her father, Hal, was stationed overseas--her mother was French. They became a military family, with Harper the middle child of three. “I was a sick kid a lot and I grew up overseas in the military,” said Harper. “Just past toddler age in Berlin, when the Berlin wall was up, and things were pretty heated for the Cold War at the time. And I think my boogeyman was born in Berlin. Everything had barbed wire. There were armed guards everywhere, and so it was just kind of a terrifying place through a five-year-old’s eyes, but you don’t really have the vocabulary to deal with that. And then to be a sick kid in a military hospital with mostly adults around you, not a children’s hospital. It was kind of an unfriendly place. And there were noises at night and things like that, and my father was a police officer. so I knew there was danger and boogeyman out there but I didn’t have a vocabulary for it, so even as an adult I have a hard time coming up with that vocabulary, but I don’t have a hard time coming up with a visual vocabulary to describe it. And by allowing them to come to surface from my subconscious, it kind of allows me to embrace them in a different way as an adult and kind of be playful with them and be grateful that I had such a vivid imagination from the way we lived and grew up. I lived in the heart of fairy tales. We traveled in Bavaria and the Black Forest was around there, and the birthplace of Hansel and Gretel. And all of these kinds of bizarre folktales that we grew up with that were basically cautionary tales to children to mind their moms, but it was kind of a wonderful place.”

There are a few ways to find Diane's art in person: she'll be at Art on the Creeks in Rogers, Arkansas on Sept. 29; she'll have some work in the Fiber Arts Show on Nov. 2, and at the Gallery 26 Holiday Show. She also has a booth at South Main Creative.

Special Guest: Diane Harper.

Episode 9: Donnie Ferneau: Building Relationships with Local Food

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 14:00:00 -0400

Ferneau is quick to point out that he has a good team. His method of management lines up with his own personal philosophy -- being able to learn from mistakes and move forward. “Competition is natural, and you always want to be the best, but I guess you have to be beaten down a bit or be born a little bit wiser to be able to take a step back and look at your failures, rather then brush them under the rug and say they never happened,” Ferneau said. “Something I’ll say to people, if they look at it through a peephole or somewhat of a closed mind, it will piss them off, but whenever I see somebody fail, and they come and tell me about it, usually complaining, I just ask them, ‘Did you learn anything? What did you learn?’ And sometimes, if they’re already aggravated, they’re quick to think I’m being condescending with them, but literally I’m asking a question. ‘What did you learn from this? Okay, it might have cost you x amount of dollars, but what did you learn from it?’ When my cooks burn something or they mess up a stock, or just little weird things that cost me money, I’m investing in that person right there. ‘What did you learn from this? It was an expensive mistake, so tell me you learned something. ‘Cause I just don’t want to just fire you.’ It took me a long time to get there. You have to put your ego in your pocket sometimes.”

Special Guest: Donnie Ferneau.