Sustaining Craft

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 wate...

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 a...

Robert Bean, a Little Rock visual storyteller, is back on the Sustaining Craft podcast for the third time to share what he's been up to, how to gain separation from your art in a healthy way and get feedback, along with how it's impossible to have expression without practice. "Give the work space. I think part of the problem we have is that if you're stuck in a drawing; you're stuck in a piece you...

Hannah Allen Anderson is the florist and mastermind behind Petal to the Metal Floristry, and she’s looking to shake things up one stem at a time. She returned to Sustaining Craft to discuss her wedding, how she has continued to refine her style, and what special aspects she brings to her Valentine’s Day offerings. I first interviewed Hannah in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIRe3pyXR3E Inst...

Danielle Perrault is a holistic vocal coach, actor, and singer who knows the struggles of pursuing a creative career all too well. She had no intention of singing professionally when she first attended college as a psychology major. She made the switch to pursue nursing, and then stumbled into opera by way of elective courses when all of the classes she needed for nursing were full. Now, she is wo...

Liz Taylor-McMullen earned her bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in music performance before working for two years as a band director. She’d had to learn quite a few different instruments to teach band. “I was studying to be a band director, and when you do that, you learn how to play all of the band instruments to a certain level of proficiency, because you had to be able to get sixth...

Robert Bean has noticed how the rest of the world has realized how much they need the arts. “All of a sudden, they’re starting to draw, play music,” Robert said. “I’ve seen the stuff that says, ‘You don’t support the arts? What are you doing right now? You’re reading books. You’re coloring. You’re doing all of these things.’ And I’m 100% behind that. We should be funding and supporting the arts, n...

In 2016, when he came back to Little Rock, he found a job at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. “My old high school teacher was working with me and she was like, ‘Hey, I’ve been following you throughout your college years. I know you started doing pottery. Have you heard about the art center?’ And I was like, ‘No, what is that?’ And so I went there the next day.” He signed up for classes with Kelly E...

In the four years since we last talked, Morgan has moved on from her Muse series, which she focused on for two years. She's branched out into working on several different series, with focus ranging from Greek mythology to folklore to mushrooms. She's also teaching herself new methods and skills. "It’s fun trying new papers and different brushes and stuff because I’ve been missing out on a lot," Mo...

And then COVID-19 hit the United States. “A few weeks beforehand, my boss was telling me, ‘No one’s gonna, with all the stuff going on, no one’s gonna go to your show,’” Hannah said. “I was like, ‘It’s not gonna be a big deal. It’s gonna be fine.’” Ultimately, the exhibition was postponed until February 2021. “Then it just all gets taken away,” Hannah said. “I taught a lot of extra classes to have...

Growing up in the hearing world, Brandy Mimms didn’t realize for years that there was an entire other community she could participate in. “I grew up mostly in the hearing world,” Brandy explained. “So we have the deaf world and we have the hearing world. I grew up in the hearing world because my family wanted me to be hearing so badly. I appreciate them, thank you, but they never really exposed me...

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 attitud...

Joshua Kurtz joins Elizabeth Silverstein of Sustaining Craft for a follow-up interview. Over the years, Joshua has found that simply asking might lead to unexpected results, like when he asked his drama teacher if the school could perform the musical he wrote at age 17. Or when he needed to raise his rates as a professional Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master. “I realized at that point, ‘Huh, I’m...

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...

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 reco...

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 th...

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,...

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 mu...

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...

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) st...

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 Arkan...

Now, Katie Childs photographs over 30 weddings a year, along with family portraits. In 2018, she booked 35 weddings, but hopes to reduce to 20 yearly. That may prove challenging--she’s already booked 14 weddings for 2019. Childs also started working with the Arkansas Times this year, traveling to farms for Food and Farm, and working on family-based shoots for Savvy. Savvy has brought projects that...

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 littl...

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 B...

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...