Secret Sauce

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...

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 "disordere...

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 creatin...

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 condem...

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...

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=PoW6N87cz...

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 ap...

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, equ...

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... no...

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 e...

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 bus...

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. T...

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 sh...

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...

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...

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...

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 trem...

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...

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 B...

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...

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 a...

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 gu...

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 million...

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 tim...

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 a...