This is the second post in a series of stories weaving Principles and Elements of Design, with Life and/or Spirituality. If you are interested in reading the first post, you can do that here . Over the course of my career as a K-4 Art Teacher, and later an Independent Illustrator, I have come to wonder if the principles and elements of good design are an inroad into feeling less confused about why the world looks the way it does. The Art Ministry story series is my attempt to share these ideas w...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 50
Hello Creative Friends, When you exist inside an artwork, for better or worse, everything that gets added to that work gets compared to the original work as a reference point. If you're happily painting a pink canvas for 30 years, and then suddenly decide it's more in alignment for you to change it to blue, those first strokes of blue will look "wrong." They won't "fit." They might look "disordered." Even if those strokes are heading in the direction you want to go. In this episode I expound upo...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 49
Hello Creative Friends, The crux of this podcast, my art, my business (and heck, my life) is making in tandem with something that is bigger. I first posted about this in 2022, and it was the most listened to episode of that year. I have talked about this on and off since, entirely in a positive way. In this episode I want to talk about the challenges that arise when you begin to prioritize creating in this way. We all are living in a world that still creates using external metrics. When you begi...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 48
Hello Creative Friends, This podcast is about the "soup" of our world. The stuff between the stuff. So it's no surprise that episodes like to delve into the vague, mysterious and abstract. However we live on a planet that also has stuff. Sometimes as artists it can feel seductive to condemn that stuff outright. In today's episode I recorded about one of the earthly things i used to outright condemn... My Day Job. In the episode I reference work from artist Sean McCabe, who has also removed his w...
Jan 23, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 47
Hello Creative Friends, This episode is a follow up to last week's Art as a Threshold , however as always it's also a standalone episode. In this episode I talk about one of the fundamental aspects of my work as an artist... My Art Kid. Not my human kid. Not an imaginary friend. The part of me that is a kid. The part that never leaves. The part that caretakes one of the most precious things I have as an artist... the gateway to 'something bigger.' She is the part of me that knows exactly what I'...
Jan 17, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 46
Hello Creative Friends, Happy New Year! As we cross the threshold from 2023 to 2024, I want to talk about another threshold we encounter… our art. This aspect of artistry is so rarely talked about, and even more seldomly acknowledged, that I wanted to begin The Secret Sauce year 2024 delving into it. Sources from the episode: YOUR ELUSIVE CREATIVE GENIUS https://youtu.be/86x-u-tz0MA?si=PoW6N87czV2xIF2j BIG MAGIC: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Magic-Elizabeth-Gilbert-audiobook/dp/B00U08ECQA/ref=mp_s...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 45
Hello Creative Friends, This episode is, in some ways, piggy backing off "Art Will Save Us" posted a few weeks back. But in other ways, it's a standalone episode. Creating is often a largely solitary act. Even those of us who create in groups, like perhaps a choir or theater, have a very solitary experience that can make us wonder: Does this even matter? Like, does my ability to paint a bowl of apples function in any larger system? Does it do anything outside of making a wall more colorful? In s...
Dec 19, 2023•58 min•Ep. 44
Hello Creative Friends, This episode was recorded on July 4th, 2023. I LOVE this episode. It's one of my favorite recordings on this podcast. I also included an introduction explaining why I tabled it for 5 months. I can't speak for everyone listening to this, but I know a fair number of us feel decidedly unfree in many aspects of our lives. We also live in a culture that for better or worse, equates "freedom" with "lack of limits." It can leave many of us, especially artists with profound limit...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 43
Hello Creative Friends, This episode is a nod to a holiday episode I did in 2020 around the Christian Christmas Story. That said, this episode has something for EVERYONE. Especially folks who aren't Christian, don't recognize Christmas, or have been wounded by religion. Are there ways the Christmas Story might be expansive enough to include ideas about making and birthing ANYTHING to save us... not just a human baby? This episode was intentionally recorded to piggy back on the last episode: Art ...
Dec 05, 2023•57 min•Ep. 42
Hello Creative Friends, This episode is a call. The culture has narrowly defined artistry in the past, and has limited the ways we engage with making things. It has become downright brazen to suggest that art can save us. But is it? This idea has certainly has been trumpeted from artists across space and time. But like many beautiful ideas, the practical implications get "lost in the sauce." For example: How does art save? Often it feels like a nice platitude, but in the face of really tough stu...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 41
Hello Creative Friends! This episode is about creative wounding... something we ALL know about. Why is art uniquely lovely and painful at the same time? How has the culture narrowly defined artistry in the past, and how has that limited the ways we engage with medicinal qualities of making things? Have you found yourself so drawn to making certain things, and simultaneously certain you have no business doing those thing? Can this kind of wounding have an artistic purpose in and of itself? This e...
Jun 08, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 40
Hello Creative Friends! This episode is especially for ME this month. In fact, almost all of these episodes are for me... and by proxy YOU, because we're all doing this shit in the same sauce. Whether we know it directly or not, what we're contending with in our lives at this very moment is 100% relevant to what every other person on this blue and green planet is contending with... more or less. This episode is about a stage of every creative work, whether it's in life or art. THE UGLY MIDDLE. T...
May 26, 2023•56 min•Ep. 39
Hello Creative Friends! This episode is for everyone who feels like an imposter making things... So Everyone. Myself included. Especially myself. As we navigate a time of massive collective change, the stories we tell around artistry are changing too. One of those stories is about "who is an artist, and who isn't. Who should be making art, and who shouldn't." As old stories around these topics shift, so is the ground under our creative feet. How are new stories around artistry better prepared fo...
Mar 30, 2023•57 min•Ep. 38
Hello Creative Friends! It's been over two months since the last episode. I've been in a period of great transition artistically, and as I navigate what that looks like, I've been asking myself a lot of questions about what being an artist means to me. For most of recorded post-Renaissance history, the Arts have been relegated to the entertainment section of society. When a Broadway actress steps out onto the stage, she's thinking about entertaining the audience... less commonly is she thinking ...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 37
It's 2023, Art Friends! We are opening the new year with a sweet episode about January, the year ahead, and making change. I believe artists are being called to expand into new ways of thinking about creative change. Rather than big sweeping swing for the fence that leave us exhausted and poised to fail, how can we lean into the power of change that "simply happens on it's own" in small bits over time? This is a big deal for artists in 2023. We've been taught a lot of unsustainable things about ...
Jan 06, 2023•46 min•Ep. 36
Hello Creative Friends, Is Art Making and Life Making always active? When we think of an artist, we think of someone painting, composing or dancing. When we think of someone living we think of them out and about, working, running errands, and traveling. The truth however, is that massive creative aspects of our art and lives are not active. They are quiet, internal... pregnant with something. The culture does a poor job of educating us on this aspect of making life and art. Whole societies of pe...
Nov 17, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 35
It's election season! In this episode I take on the beastly challenge of using Art to expand our perspective on voting, considering candidates, issues, and politics in general. Disclaimer, this episode offers far more questions than answers, however they are questions that are largely absent from our shared political discourse. They are also questions that (if we can hold them) might serve us tremendously as we make decisions about how we vote. Art can be a fantastic anchor for reframing how we ...
Oct 26, 2022•42 min•Ep. 34
Hello Creative Friends, We are living through some doozie of times. I suppose every generation has said this, but WOO what a few years we've navigated. Art can be fantastically supportive at how we look at things. In this episode I deep dive into Impressionist painter Claude Monet and his art as an anchor for how we can look at our own art, our lives, and the world. Full disclosure, I'm a trained artist, art educator, and business owner. I am not the beefiest when it comes to art history. This e...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 33
Hello Creative Friends, In 2016 when I launched my illustration business I posted a light comparison to "what I imagined" was a similarity between birthing a business and birthing a baby on social media. Woo! Was that a touchy subject! A lot of parent friends had an opinion on that one... and they were spicy. Interestingly however, parents who also worked for themselves all agreed: Business and Babies were similar. This episode is about one of the similarities I've noticed now that I have firsth...
Oct 11, 2022•56 min•Ep. 32
Hello Creative Friends, I'm excited to back for this episode. It's been a minute. In this episode I talk about a topic that's near and dear to my heart: Using art making as a model for making tough decisions. In April of this year I shuttered most of my art business, even at the height of its success, to focus on my new son. No one was more surprised than me, to make that decision. Big decisions often bring up a lot of turmoil. There have been large decisions in my life that have absolutely wrec...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 31
Hello Creative Friends, I'm excited to back for this episode. It's been a minute, and I'm hoping by late 2021, Secret Sauce will be getting a new facelift and more regular content for YOU. In this episode we talk about how "THE HOW" in our art-making is just as artistic as the WHAT. I tell some stories about how I've seen this play out in my own life and career, however as always the stories are about YOU. I'd like to make a case that when artists focus on how they make things, it's a game chang...
Jul 05, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 30
Hello Creative Friends, In this episode we talk about our propensity (and when I say "our" I mean YOU, ME, EVERYONE's) to create the things we purport to deeply dislike in the world. AKA "Hate." Hate is an overused word, but I think in this context it's good to talk about. I tell a few stories about how I've witnessed this play out in my own life (yup, steps down off the pedestal over here, I'm guilty of this all the time.) We all are guilty of it. Art isn't just creating beautiful stuff. Art is...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 29
Hello Creative Friends, Comedian Bo Burnham famously said: "If you can live life without an audience, you should do it." In this episode we talk about sharing our art with an audience. Sharing art and our creative lives online has become almost as ubiquitous as breathing or eating. It happens so often it feels normal... but is it normal? Or is sharing with a large audience of potentially millions of people day in and day out very abnormal? What is lost when we extract an image for consumption, b...
Mar 02, 2021•57 min•Ep. 28
Hello Creative Friends, In this episode we talk about using our Intuition to make things, whether it's art or a LIFE. Over the last centuries the logic and analytical mind has been valued in art (and the culture) far more than the intuition. Intuitive styles of art-making were viewed as "low art," or not art at all. I share a story of how I reclaimed my own connection to intuition through my time as an art educator, and the way that 8 year olds blew my mind open around what it means to be an art...
Feb 02, 2021•53 min•Ep. 27
Hello Creative Friends, I'm thrilled for you all to meet Jade. She has a lot of wisdom to share, and I love listening to her, because when she drops knowledge you know that she earned it through living courageously. In this episode we talk about the origins of her jewelry making at Volta Joules, racism, social justice, metal music, being yourself and so much more. Jade's Secret Sauce is her ability to be truly unapologetic in her expression... artistically and in her life. Just being around Jade...
Jan 25, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 26
Hello Creative Friends, It's been a minute. I've been navigating some big new changes over here that I'm excited to share very soon. This is episode three of season two, and something I've been mulling over for weeks, as I think about my place in this space and time as an artist. In this episode I share one of the most artistic things I've very witnessed in my life... and it's not a painting, or an art show, or even a cool movie. SPONSOR: This episode was sponsored by the Intuitive Drawing On-De...
Jan 21, 2021•43 min•Ep. 25
Hello Creative Friends, This is episode two of season TWO! We are kicking off our first guest of season two with wildlife photographer Mark Anthony Munoz. Y'all I'm very excite for this episode. Mark is a fantastic storyteller, and has tremendously valuable insight on being an artist, monetizing work, and my favorite topic of all... BEING YOURSELF. Mark's beautiful work is (in my option) anchored into his ability to be authentically himself. You'll see what I mean when you listen. Park of Mark's...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 24
Hello Creative friends, Welcome to Season Two! This episode is sponsored by the Holiday Card Making for Comfort Workshop happening December 19th from 1-3 pm CST. I spent a lot of time the last few months thinking about what this podcast wanted to be in 2021. This episode feels like the perfect initiation into a new season: December. To me, December is the most artistic month of the year. It's the month that new things get born. It often doesn't feel that way of course. We're too busy shivering a...
Dec 07, 2020•55 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Hello Creative friends, In this episode I tell the story of my art education thesis research at the University of Texas in 2010-12. I partnered with the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX to lead a summer art-making workshop with public school art teachers. During this workshop I led a study that wanted to answer the question: "How can art-making help art teachers reflect on their professional life?' The answers... like most Science... was not what I expected. SUPPORT THE PODCAST We have been o...
Oct 26, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 23
Hello Creative friends, In this episode I dive into one of my biggest fears that I think prevents a lot of makers from going directly into a fine art career, or working for themselves... the very real concern of marrying my deep love for making art with the often brutal concerns of capitalism. In regards to this concern: I've found a lot of solace in an unlikely place. That place was the question: "Why do I Make Stuff?" As I have learned to authentically answer that question, I found that baked ...
Oct 12, 2020•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 22
