Here’s something exciting: I’m hosting an artists reception at Sandhill Crane Vineyards on Friday, May 6 for my Artists In Jackson project.
My dear artistic friend Colleen here (one of the artists featured!) is helping me with event and art details. It’s a great location, and I can’t wait to throw a big party for all my new artistic comrades.
If you’re in Michigan this May, please join me!
“This place lacks confidence. That comes out in so many ways, and it’s important to me for people to recognize that they’re valuable.”
A few years back, while living out west, Doug Jones came across an art gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and noticed the gallery was featuring a single artist.
Doug was attracted to the work’s bright and bold colors, so he walked in. After talking with the gallery director, he found out the artist – who was selling his work for thousands of dollars – was from a little town in Michigan.
The town? Doug’s town. Our town. Jackson, Michigan.
That discovery got Doug thinking.
“There was this fire inside of me that wondered, ‘Why do I have to move away from Jackson? Why can’t someone make it as an artist here?’”
Now, it’s almost a mission for him: finding untapped potential and creativity, and letting it loose on the world.
It wasn’t always that way for Doug, a corporate lawyer turned community developer turned painter and art community organizer. He was going to turn his University of Michigan education into big money somewhere outside of Jackson.
But a couple of things happened that brought him back. For one, a trip to New York during college switched on the aesthetic part of his brain. For two, working at Lifeways helped him identify with the needs of the community, spiritually and artistically.
“I found myself surrounded by incredible history and remarkable talent in Jackson,” Doug says. “And people here didn’t seem to recognize it. So I started to encourage people around me to paint.”
That encouragement came in the form of live painting and art events – bringing creative people out of the wilderness, in a sense. It all comes from understanding what the power of positive reinforcement and encouragement can do.
“I remember what it was like when someone first took notice of me,” Doug says. “If I can encourage someone to do something positive, I’m passing on the beauty and blessings that I’ve been given.”
Personally, art acts as an outlet for the suffering and pain Doug sees in the world. Working with Lifeways and other non-profits, he saw and heard gut-wrenching stories from clients about pain and loss. He saw a tough guy break down in front of him, and he helped a girl struggling with suicide.
“I saw things that helped me realize how fleeting life can be,” Doug says. “With all the stuff going on around me, I have to get it out and do something with it.”
Doug recognizes the pressures that a small, blue-collar town can put on up-and-coming artists. Helping artists realize that what they’re doing is valuable? That’s the goal.
“That self-actualization makes my entire world better,” he says. “It lets me know that the generations that come after us will be better because of what’s happening today.”
While there is more happening in the Jackson arts community – a Public Arts Commission, more and more shows popping up, collectives (like his own, The Singularity) forming – Doug sees a lack of self-confidence in town. One way to help is to bring in more creative professionals from outside.
“People recognize what Jackson has on the outside,” he says. “We just need people here to feel that, too.”
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“It’s true for most artists, but I’m an extremely emotionally-driven artist. I want people to feel something when they look at it. I put my heart and soul into what I do.”
You don’t have to look far to find great talent, says Melissa Morse.
“All the real artists aren’t in the big cities,” she says. “They’re everywhere you go. And we have our own arena of talent here in Jackson.”
Melissa would know. As a painter and mixed media artist, she’s seen what it’s like to be an artist in the biggest city – New York. She traveled to the Big Apple in college and lived there for many years as an artist.
After several years in New York, she came back to Jackson wiser and embraced her home community.
“It was the best thing for me, to stay in Jackson and raise my daughter,” Melissa says. “Coming back here, you realize that you can run all over looking for a place to be happy. But if you have inner peace, you can be happy in Jackson.”
Melissa explores happiness, loss, and faith through her art. She’s also a bit of a self-made artist, stretching her own canvases and creating her own frames from recycled materials.
“I think it makes for a better product. You put more into it,” she says.
Putting more into her art is a goal, Melissa says, whether that’s trying out new styles or putting pieces together to make something new. It helps her express what’s inside.
“It’s true for most artists, but I’m an extremely emotionally driven artist,” Melissa says. “I want people to feel something when they look at it. I put my heart and soul into what I do.”
And as is true for most people, that heart and soul can go through dark times. That’s where art can help, like when Melissa lost her parents.
Melissa participated in Grand Rapids’s ArtPrize showcase the year after her mother died. Melissa doubted that she was even worthy of being there. But the year before, her mother encouraged her to participate in the event.
“There was so much healing in that,” Melissa says. “It was a difficult journey, but in the end, when I was there and sharing my story, it was just what I needed to do.”
Being an artist involves going through ups and downs. It’s true of creatives everywhere. But it is possible to be successful in Jackson, Melissa says. Artists just have to be willing to communicate and work together.
Take art shows. She notices that when there’s low turnout at an area show, it’s often because people are what she calls “touch lazy.”
“I see a little bit of procrastination,” Melissa says. “Someone will say, ‘Maybe I’ll go to it,’ and then not show up. Something needs to shake it up a bit.”
In her own creative life, Melissa is the opposite of lazy. Recently, she became an art teacher for kids at Ella Sharp Museum during their summer camp series.
“It’s the best kind of challenge, working with kids that age. But it’s so rewarding,” she says. “When you can learn as much as the other people are learning, I really love that.”
“I would prefer to make guitars and give them away, if it was feasible to do that.”
For Stephen Ziegenfuss, it’s easy to love wood.
Its strength, its smell, even its taste – wood is a noble material to work with.
That’s why Stephen loves to make it sing as a guitar maker. An engineer by training, he loves to shape and bend the material into sonic works of art for his Ziegenfuss Guitars company.
Stephen has been building guitars since college when he tried making his own bass. From there, he built more guitars for friends and family, especially the parents of friends who could help him pay for parts.
“They kind of paid for my education – they’d pay for the materials that went into it,” he says.
From there, he worked on repairing guitars, learning about their inner workings, and before long he had a name brand and a website set up to sell his custom bodies.
More than that, Stephen likes to make things with his hands. Woodworking was prevalent in his home, he says, and he’s always enjoyed tinkering and making. That’s how he got into engineering. It was his artistic side – both in guitar playing and photography – that helped shape his guitar projects.
It started pragmatically enough. Stephen remembers seeing a guitar that he would’ve liked to own, if it weren’t for the high price tag. What would happen if he tried to mimic the design and build his own guitar?
“There’s a certain group of people with my personality who say, ‘I’ll just build it myself,'” he says. “Making a guitar was the perfect crossroads of all those things: working with my hands, engineering, and music.”
That first guitar didn’t exactly hit the mark. But over the years, he’s built his skills up enough so that he can build his own guitar at the level that originally inspired him.
Business-wise, Stephen is working on forming relationships with artists and getting name recognition in the boutique guitar industry. It’s one thing to make a quality guitar, but it’s another to make yourself known to the instrument-buying public.
When it comes right down to it, though, Stephen makes guitars to participate in the magic of music making. And to get his hands dirty in the process of making.
His senses get involved, too: Stephen loves the smell and the taste of the woods he uses, like African sapele (tastes great) and rosewood (the smell).
“The variability of the material is so cool,” Stephen says.
Walnut, cherry, sassafras, spruce, ash, hickory, walnut – these are his raw materials, and he appreciates the engineering quality of wood, too. Stephen says that wood, as a composite material, is great to work with. It’s robust and durable, and its strength-to-weight ratio is top-notch.
This is why Stephen makes other things out of wood, like bike frames. Stephen says he could make a bike frame that competes with metal in terms of durability. And, he says, the ride on a wood-frame bike is really smooth because the material absorbs high-frequency vibrations.
“Certain days, you just feel inspired to build different things,” he says. “And I love using wood as my medium.”
Stephen, along with his wife and three daughters, loves the lifestyle that Jackson affords.
“The pace of life here, for us, is just right,” he says. “If I were somewhere else, I wouldn’t nearly have the time to pursue things like this. It’s such a tremendous value added to life.”
“I don’t like to be pushy with my art. If they want to come look, they can come look and bring their own viewpoint.”
Call Nicole Cure a natural. She never studied art, never felt like she worked hard at it, and even took a 10-year creative hiatus when her kids were born.
“I never worked hard at it. I was just born with a natural talent,” she says.
That talent is paying off now that Nicole runs a drawing and interior design business out of her home studio. She named the studio Ardis J Studio after her grandmother, Ardis Jane, from whom she inherited some of her artistic ability.
That natural talent does not mean Nicole doesn’t work hard on her sketches. She often spends 10 to 20 hours on each piece.
Her customers are now asking for more and more of her custom pieces and original work.
“It’s been fun and crazy busy,” Nicole says. “And I have more work than I thought I’d ever get.”
She says word of mouth is what works. After trying the art show scene for a few years, Nicole found it to be a slog, even if she got a custom job or two. Now, she’s called it quits on art shows, and her workload is still doing just fine.
Nicole works in her small studio in Hanover, which she built a few years ago as her kids went off to school. She found her basement studio cramped, and her handy father-in-law built it in no time flat. Nicole’s studio hosts little tots drawing lessons during the summer, where she teaches basic drawing techniques to first through seventh graders.
“It’s a blast,” she says. “You can usually tell within the first session if the child has a natural ability.”
For her work, Nicole draws inspiration from the world around her: kids, family, animals, and the rural setting. Customers ask her for lots of animal drawings, like horses and dogs.
“I think I’ve done every breed of dog 10 times,” Nicole says.
To experiment, Nicole dabbles in other creative projects, like furniture and interior design. The furniture thing came about because she likes to make her own pieces.
“I would rather not pay top dollar for anything. Furniture is really fun to me,” Nicole says. “I garage sale like bonkers. I love it – it’s a total addiction.”
In fact, if she were to do it over again, Nicole would concentrate on interior design work. She does a few projects here and there, using a style she calls “modern shabby chic,” but she really wants to redo an entire house.
“I use crazy colors. I just have an eye for it,” she says. “Like, my kitchen’s a bright teal. People wake up when they go in.”
Nicole’s kids have an eye for art, too, she says. Two may be better than she ever was. Take her oldest daughter, who draws all the time. Nicole calls her “phenomenal.”
Maybe there’s an art gene in there after all. Take a look around Nicole’s studio, and you will see four pieces hanging up created by her kids.
“I’ll never take them down,” she says.
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“It’s always related to nature, and silhouettes. I’ve had a love for silhouettes for years now. So when I realized when I put these two things together—bodies, hands, leaves—I was forcing myself to think outside the box. I wanted something that made you look closer.”
When Kaiti McDonough thinks of her photography, or life, or the artistic community in Jackson, she thinks in layers.
She started with art early, as a kid, crafting things with her mother’s materials. That, combined with her father’s love and appreciation of nature, makes her photography rich with depth and overlays.
Together with artists in The Singularity, Kaiti thinks of artists in many layers, too: experience level, professional or hobbyist, optimist or pessimist.
Even her career has taken on layers, from teaching to art curation to event planning.
Kaiti sees her main artistic outlet as photography. That started with a point and shoot camera in high school, posing friends in nature and getting lost on adventures. That all changed when she met Doug Jones. Could she do some live art photos for an upcoming show?
A digital single lens reflex (DSLR – the fancy ones with interchangeable lenses) later, and she was off making art.
Her style comes from, you guessed it, layers: double exposures, overlays, textures, blending one image into another. The idea came after she saw artists working on body paintings – making one idea on top of another. The photos do more than document a scene or a moment. They pull you in and make you think.
“It’s always related to nature and silhouettes,” Kaiti says. “I’ve had a love for silhouettes for years now. So I realized when I put two things together – bodies, hands, leaves – I was forcing myself to think outside the box. I wanted something that made you look closer.”
To achieve her style, Kaiti blends images mostly in camera, with a bit of Photoshop work.
“As soon as I discovered my camera had this option, I went to town,” she says. “This was it.”
Kaiti explores her creativity in other ways, too, like sewing and working with resin on wooden boards to frame her work.
Another form of artistic expression: working with other artists in Jackson and The Singularity to highlight the local creative community. Kaiti was one of the co-founders of The Singularity and has found her calling in organizing and marketing events. The idea of getting artists together and putting on a show – a hang-out session with meaning – was immediately appealing to her.
“I loved the feeling of bringing everyone together and doing something for an evening with all your friends,” Kaiti says. “Four and a half years later, I know what I want to go to college for. I want to know more about event planning and marketing while still working on freelance photography.”
As a fine art photographer, Kaiti recommends getting into local shows as they start, while they’re small and affordable. And to be consistent at getting your work out there.
“If you have a good product, and you can make a lot of it, get into small and big art shows – you have to keep pushing at it.”
She’s also optimistic about Jackson’s home-grown art market. With groups like The Singularity, the How Bazaar show downtown, and the growing collaboration between artists – as well as her own work to get more art in front of viewers – Kaiti sees it as a growth opportunity.
“Just seeing everything grow, artists being taken seriously, there’s a market for art,” she says. “There’s potential everywhere, in our artists and our city. Jackson’s so little, it’s growing right before our very eyes.”
Buy the Artists In Jackson book | Kaiti McDonough Photography
“I realized very quickly that being a studio art major would be a lot of fun for the artistic side of me, but I still had practical parts of me that needed to know things about business and finance.”
Cassandra Spicer made art her business. And business? It’s pretty good.
Cassandra owns and operates Beads to Live By on West Michigan Ave. after moving from downtown Jackson. There, she sells beads, materials, and jewelry-making kits, and holds classes to teach others how to make jewelry.
Along the way, she’s found success in embracing the practical side of her artistic talents, from taking advice from local business owners and from years of building a knowledge base in her particular art.
The art part wasn’t always so clear for Cassandra. In college, at Spring Arbor University, she pivoted from a fine arts major to taking classes in business and marketing.
“I realized very quickly that being a studio art major would be a lot of fun for the artistic side of me,” she says. “But I still had practical parts of me that needed to know things about business and finance.”
Cassandra also found that she was too much of a social butterfly to sit in a studio alone, working on art.
That, combined with years of working at Bead Culture in downtown Jackson, helped prepare her to be the artistic entrepreneur she is. Now she sells beading supplies and teaches classes to enthusiasts, and that tickles the social part of her artistic nature. Running a business is a bit of an art, too, because there are always new people to reach and convert to the beading hobby.
It wasn’t a sure thing in the beginning, but Cassandra thinks running Beads To Live By (with her husband Chris) is what she was meant to do.
“I always felt led – there was a directional pull to open this business,” she says. “And every turn we took, a door opened.”
Cassandra doesn’t just do beads and jewelry. She keeps the creative part of her brain busy with artistic projects. She finds inspiration in the works of others, trending fashions, and even Moroccan influences.
“Seeing a pattern, or texture, or something in nature – it’s one of the ways I come up with a design,” Cassandra says.
And no matter how much she tried to get away — at one time, she was an admission counselor for Career Quest — she always came back to beads.
“It’s a gravitational pull,” she says. “Some kind of need. Everyone has that in life, whether it’s artistic or not, to leave their mark on the world. This is my way.”
Buy the Artists In Jackson book | BeadstoLiveBy.com
“It feels good to have my stuff out there, and get the reaction. And even the not-okay reactions feel good.”
Jason Felde owes a big “thanks” to his wife, Stephenie.
So does the art community in Jackson. If it wasn’t for her, we may have never discovered Jason’s creative work.
The story goes that Jason never publicly displayed his work outside of small shows or at school. Then Stephenie stumbled on Jason’s portfolio, hidden away in a closet, and did what any good, enterprising wife would do: she started showing the portfolio around.
“It was one of those things where I had the support of my family, but no one took that extra step of pushing me farther,” Jason says. “I don’t think anyone wanted to kick me in the butt a little bit harder. So that’s where she came into play. And it’s been a snowball effect from there.”
The work garnered a positive response, and things started to happen for him. A show here, a call from Doug Jones there, and before he knew it — and after some more prodding — Jason was a public artist.
Jason’s artistic side was there from the beginning, he said, from scribbling in notebooks on road trips to art classes in high school. Now, his work draws on many styles and techniques, including painting (acrylics and watercolors), inking, and sculpting.
Since Stephenie “discovered” him, he’s attended eight to ten shows, and he’s often approached for more.
“It feels good to have my stuff out there and get the reaction,” Jason says. “And even the not-okay reactions feel good.”
Jason also works on commission pieces. One of his first was a pencil sketch of a friend’s grandfather. After seeing the piece, his friend’s mom sent him a thank you note.
“It was really cool to know that my work can touch people in that way,” he says.
Jason’s work touches people in need, too, like the cancer fundraising organization Twist Out Cancer. The organization pairs artists with cancer patients to create art based on their stories, with all proceeds going to cancer research.
Closer to home, Jason says Jackson’s creative community is very supportive of its home-grown artists.
“I have yet to come across an artist in Jackson that isn’t willing to promote you,” he says. “Or they’ll buy a piece.”
Visually, Jackson offers a lot of inspiration with its varied landscapes, quiet spots at the parks, and history. As an artist, there are lots of ways to draw inspiration.
“To be able to go somewhere like that to relax and create is amazing. I think Jackson is visually stunning,” Jason says.
Jason is working to get more of his work out in the world. He’s participating in more shows, trying different techniques, and exploring other artistic subjects.
Right behind him, Jason’s wife Stephenie is working, too.
“She has no problem volunteering me for art shows and projects,” Jason says.
“I’m just excited that he actually wants to show his work,” Stephenie says.
Buy the Artists In Jackson book | Jason Felde on Instagram
“They said, ‘You do have a style. You’re messy!’ My acrylics are really wet and all over the place, and I’m always covered in paint.”
Art, like life, can get messy.
That’s precisely what painter and mixed media artist Colleen Peterson loves about it. Besides being a creative outlet, getting creative is great stress relief.
“It doesn’t matter what I make, as long as I get my hands dirty,” she says.
It often starts with a blank canvas, which – for Colleen – is a scary place to start. Random bits of inspiration help her to get started: feelings, requests from customers, random items she finds.
Like the time she got creative with her boyfriend’s homemade beer bottle labels. Or the time she took a broken coffee pot and turned it into a piece.
“I didn’t realize I had a style until someone told me,” Colleen says. “They said, ‘You do have a style. You’re messy!’ My acrylics are really wet and all over the place, and I’m always covered in paint.”
Colleen dabbled with art in high school and liked it. She made comics, and even thought about fashion design and interior design as outlets. It was The Singularity that put her paintings in her first show.
“All I had was random stuff I made,” Colleen says. “I enjoyed it, so I just did it.”
Some of the emotions behind her pieces are messy, too, like the first time she ever sold one of her works. It was heartbreak that helped her make it.
And heartbreak that came after she sold it.
“I didn’t want to sell it,” she says. “I cried.”
Now, Colleen works mainly with custom pieces and requests, like the wedding centerpiece she worked on while we talked. Often, all she needs is a bit of direction to un-blank that canvas.
“One person I just had, she really likes peacock feathers, and she wanted purples,” she says. “So I made her something really cool that’s probably one of my favorites I’ve made in a while. And she was really stoked. It felt good.”
Colleen is big on customers being able to afford her art. She wants more people to come to Jackson art shows, too, and to help spread awareness about the arts community in town.
“There’s always people saying ‘There’s nothing to do,’ but all these other people are working really hard to put on a show,” she says. “It’s one of the most frustrating things to me. Support your community!”
She loves seeing the art community come together and seeing her fellow artists develop their talent.
“There’s a lot of people that complain about our town, and then there are people making it beautiful.”
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