Creativity Q+A with Randi Ford
Northern Michigan is painter Randi Ford’s subject, from Sleeping Bear Dunes to Pictured Rocks. Her work is inspired by these natural places — so much so that the 34-year-old artist moved to Benzie County last summer so she could live and practice where she find artistic and spiritual nourishment. You may already know her work: […]
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Creativity Q+A with Judith Shepelak
Judith Shepelak’s road toward a full-time studio practice came after she’d worked as a paralegal, then a graphic designer, then a landscape designer. In between she raised her children. For the last two decades, her creative focus has been on ideas and subjects that interest her instead of a client; and she executes them all […]
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Creativity Q+A with Carrie Betlyn-Eder
Artist Carrie Betlyn-Eder, 68, first visited Leelanau County in 1968, as a child with her siblings and parents. She watched the moon walk from a house in Leland, and got a taste for the place [“It just got under my skin”]. In 2022, Carrie and her husband, Mickey, relocated from St. Paul, Minnesota. Carrie, a […]
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Creativity Q+A with Margo Burian
Leelanau County artist Margo Burian, 61, has carved a niche for herself in the cultural landscape. Her atmospheric paintings of the the locality’s land, sky, water, and historic farmsteads are known and coveted by a wide range of fans and collectors. She began her professional life as a commercial illustrator, and has traveled from depicting […]
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Creativity Q+A with Alice Moss
The outdoors comes indoors to the Lobby Gallery at the Glen Arbor Arts Center. By The Side Of The Road is a series of abstract, mixed media landscapes out of the imagination of painter Alice Moss, 67. Moss has been watching, and walking, and thinking about the roadside and woodlands of Leelanau County since the […]
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Creativity Q+A with Matt Schlomer
Matt Schlomer, 51, is finishing his 11th year of teaching at Interlochen Academy of Art. He is a conductor, and he is a teacher of saxophone — and, he is the founder of Sound Garden, an out-of-the-box approach to bringing musical performance to people wherever they happen to be. It’s a way of planting musical […]
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Creativity Q+A with Nancy Crisp
Nancy Crisp, 81, taught visual art to all ages, and abilities, in public school and private institutions, from the 1960s until 2003. Her own visual art education began in junior high, guided by a teacher who grounded her in the fundamentals. Now, her painting practice unfolds in a home studio she shares with her husband, […]
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Creativity Q+A with Larry Fox
“I’ve always built things. I’ve been a maker since I was a little kid,” said Leelanau County artist Larry Fox, 69. And the things he has built — sculptural constructions in Poplar and Baltic Birch — have found their way into homes and corporate settings across the US. A veteran of the art fair circuit, […]
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Creativity Q+A Video with Jessica Kovan
Benzie County artist Jessica Kovan’s mixed media work is now on display in the GAAC’s Lobby Gallery. The Birds Are Watching, Kovan said, “asks viewers to pay attention from the vantage point of local bird species.” Kovan combines the personal with the political in this series of mixed media, avian vignettes created on cardboard. She took on the subject of local birds “in hopes of establishing a sense of interconnectedness between all beings.”
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Creativity Q+A with Royce Deans
Royce Deans’s creative life has been a “crooked trail” of work in graphic design, and illustration — a not-so-straight path toward a process-driven practice focused on painting and printmaking. “I’ve identified as a painter even before I got out of art school,” Royce, 66, said. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is a well-known […]
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Creativity Q+A Video with John Hartig
A conversation with John H. Hartig, Ph.D, author of the 2022 book Great Lakes Champions, the story of 14 people who loved the Great Lakes so much that they devoted their careers…
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Creativity Q+A with Cynthia Marks
Leelanau County, Michigan, artist Cynthia Marks, 71, has been “making art for 50+ years, a startling and comforting thought,” she said. “I am consumed by using clay to conceptualize most any thought in a form or surface, generally drawing from my everyday life, art history, and nature.” Cynthia hand-builds vessels and pots from terra cotta […]
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Creativity Q+A with Laura Hood
It was never a question of IF Laura Hood would play an instrument, but WHICH instrument she would end up playing. It was all in her genes, and part of her familial inheritance. Hood, 61, makes a wide range of music with her horn and guitar. She performs and teaches — at The Leelanau School […]
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Creativity Q+A with Mary Beth Acosta
A Feral Housewife, an exhibition of collages by Leelanau County artist Mary Beth Acosta, take up residence in the Glen Arbor Arts Center Lobby Gallery January 6 – April 21. View it in the GAAC Main Gallery or on line. Working under the creative nom de guerre “The Feral Housewife,” Acosta uses simple, familiar tools […]
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Sky Stories with Mary Stewart Adams
As part of the GAAC’s Telling Stories exhibition [January 13 – March 23, 2023], Gallery Manager Sarah Bearup-Neal talked with Northern Michigan residents about stories told in the sky and on the ground. Sky Stories: Every Monday morning, at 6:45 and 8:45 on Interlochen Public Radio, Star Lore Historian Mary Stewart Adams tells stories about […]
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Creativity Q+A With Mark Mehaffey
Mark Mehaffey relocated to Leelanau County five years ago. He lives in a house that bumps up against the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — a fitting locale: A large portion of Mark’s work focuses on the landscape, although like so many things in this artist’s life, Mark is a guy whose creative work refuses […]
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Creativity Q+A with Mary Fortuna
Traverse City artist Mary Fortuna, 66, draws on a number of inner resources to fuel her creative work — chief among which might be a self-identified weirdness. Over the years she has found teachers who encouraged, and helped her cultivate and fully embrace it. Today, Mary translates weirdness into an array of soft sculpture beasts, […]
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Creativity Q+A with Scott Lankton
Blacksmith Scott Lankton [left] was “hooked on hot steel” the first time he worked with it. The Leelanau County artist, 66, went on to find a vocation in the forge, pounding metal into domestic objects of great beauty. Scott Lankton also found that this old art + craft form can be put to use in […]
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Creativity Q+A with Dorothy Anderson Grow
As part of the exhibition Ropes, Ribbons, Twigs, and Things in the GAAC’s Lobby Gallery, Traverse City artist Dorothy Anderson Grow talked with Sarah Bearup-Neal, GAAC Gallery Manager, about the venerable art of printmaking as she practices it with 21st century tools and materials. Dorothy maintains an active practice focused entirely on printmaking. Working in […]
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Creativity Q+A Video: 99 Clay Vessels Project
Alison Kysia is the creator of the multi-media visual art and storytelling project 99 Clay Vessels.
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Creativity Q+A Video: Baskets of the Anishinaabek
In 1987, the Leelanau Historical Society began documenting, interpreting, collecting, and preserving birch bark and quillwork baskets, and black ash baskets.
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Creativity Q+A with Lauren Everett Finn
Painter Lauren Everett Finn, 64, isn’t shy about mixing her media. In any given composition, the Benzie County artist [pictured left] might develop an idea by collaging an element to the canvas. Or, add some marks made in pencil, crayon or oil stick. Lauren uses “whatever’s handy” to bring to fruition the idea she wants […]
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Creativity Q+A with Lindy Bishop
Landscape painting is the focus of Lindy Bishop’s practice. Lindy lives in Elk Rapids, the town in which she was raised, in the midst of a region where the landscape is described with superlative adjectives. Lindy’s interest in land transcends recording its glorious, natural features. She views landscape painting as a vehicle for talking about […]
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Creativity Q+A with Meg Staley
There has never been a straight line through Meg Staley’s career. But every experience — from sale clerk, to department store clothing buyer, to printmaker — has factored into the creative work she now does. The Leelanau County artist hand builds women’s clothing. Each piece is a composition that allows Meg, 70, to bring to […]
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Creativity Q+A with Melonie Steffes
Melonie Steffes, 48, learned by doing. And by reading library books about practice and process. And by finding other makers to mentor her. Her paintings are filled with bears, insects, mushrooms, and other woodland influences that describe the world of the body and mind in which she lives. In both subject and presentation, Steffes’s paintings […]
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Creativity Q+A Video with Linda Alice Dewey and Anne-Marie Oomen
A conversation with painter Linda Dewey and poet Anne-Marie Oomen about their collaborative project On The Precipice, a small exhibition of four paintings and four companion poems…
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Creativity Q+A with Kaz McCue
Kaz McCue’s lives as an educator, studio artist, and regular-guy-walking-around-the-place blend seamlessly into one another. Everything is connected. Everything cross pollinates, whether it happens in the studio or the classroom. The 59-year-old Leelanau County resident works in many media, unconfined by a single material or technique. As a art student in the 1980s + 1990s […]
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Creativity Q+A with Karen Anderson
Karen Anderson came “out of the womb searching for meaning.” The Traverse City writer has found it in a bowl of oatmeal, buckle snow boots, canoeing the Manistee River, and the historic neighborhood in which she’s lived for several decades — among other places and things that, at first blush, seem mundane. But it is […]
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Creativity Q+A with Bob Downes
Bob Downes, 69, “always wanted to be a novelist.” And, that is what he became. Bob Downes is the essence of peripatetic. The author of seven books, many of which were written on the move around the globe, calls Traverse City his home base. He is as inspired by writers from the canon as he […]
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Creativity Q+A video with Rodney Martin
Woodland Studies is a series of black and white photographs by Grand Rapids photographer Rodney Martin. The region’s woodland, rivers and natural areas are well documented by all manner of visual artist. In this case, Rodney Martin has elected to make images in black and white – a creative departure worth exploring.
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Creativity Q+A video with the Big Heads Corp.: Papier Mache
As part of the GAAC’s PaperWork exhibition, we’re in conversation with two people for whom the old art of papier mache is foundational to their work – Dorienne Sherrod and Sharon Morris of the Big Heads Corp.
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Creativity Q+A video with Mary Beth Acosta: Collage
Leelanau County artist Mary Beth Acosta works in collage, under the creative nom de guerre “The Feral Housewife.”
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Creativity Q+A video with Geo Rutherford: Artist’s Books
The genre known as “artist’s books” is not easily defined. People have been making beautiful, artful books for centuries. But “artist’s books” defy convention, and occupy a niche all their own.
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Creativity Q+A with Shanny Brooke
Shanny Brooke, 42, is a classically-trained singer who found her way into visual art + painting after she hit a career/life roadblock. A package of student canvases and a tin of children’s watercolor paint opened a new door, which included opening the doors to Higher Art Gallery in Traverse City, Michigan in 2016. The gallery […]
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Creativity Q+A with Nick Preneta
Nick Preneta, 37, works in wood. Green wood. Mostly with his chain saw. Notching and carving and creating marks, both intentional and serendipitous. The Leelanau County artist, trained as a furniture builder, began to explore the aesthetics of non-functional wood shapes and objects when he started looking at the scraps he was generating. This interview […]
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Creativity Q+A with Shanna Robinson
Shanna Robinson, 63, moves fluidly between media. “I’m a fiber-sculptor,” she said, “but I work in whatever medium suits my idea at the time.” The Horton Bay resident, newly retired from academia, lives a five-minute walk from Lake Charlevoix, and it’s this part of Northern Michigan that suits her temperament and feeds her work: translating […]
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Creativity Q+A with Lynne Rae Perkins
As part of the GAAC’s Everyday Objects exhibition, we spoke with Leelanau County author + illustrator Lynne Rae Perkins. Lynne, 66, is the author of 14 books for children, including the young adult novel Criss Cross, for which she received the 2006 Newberry Medal for excellence in children’s literature. In May, her 14th was published, […]
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Creativity Q+A video with Michelle Stitzlein: The Art of Repurposing
Ohio artist Michelle Stitzlein is a creative force whose sculptures elevate familiar objects to a new level of art.
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Creativity Q+A Video with Steve Palmer: Maker of Fish
As part of the GAAC’s exhibition Everyday Objects, we’re in conversation with Leelanau County artist Steve Palmer – maker of mixed media fish from found and antique objects.
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Creativity Q+A with Susan Thompson
Benzie County artist Susan Thompson believes “Art is a gift that is meant to be received and that touches others. Art is an essential and primary means for mutual understanding, belonging, and commiseration.” She brings these beliefs to life through many media including works on canvas, paper, paint, collage and sculpture. This interview took pace […]
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Creativity Q+A with Susan Tusa
Photographer Susan Tusa learned her craft in the days before digital, and plied it in the field of print journalism. She was a staff photographer with The Detroit News; and The Detroit Free Press, from which she retired in 2012 after 22 years. Susan is the recipient of numerous awards, and has exhibited her work […]
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Creativity Q+A with Michelle Tock York
Michelle Tock York, 60, is a sculptor working in clay, and with a wide range of intriguing found objects — from organic finds [e.g. driftwood gleaned from the beach] to trinkets and forgotten objects scavenged from antique stores and other treasure troves. Her goal? To turn all these disparate materials into “cohesive” works that tell […]
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Creativity Q+A with Nancy McRay
Nancy McRay, 65, is “a fiber artist … mostly a weaver” of tapestries who pushes the medium out of its historic, domestic context, and into the Capital “A” Art world.
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Creativity Q+A with Terry Wooten
Terry Wooten, 72, is an oral poet, a bard in the truest sense. This Antrim County artist has authored more than 500 published poems, and memorized 567 poems.
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Creativity Q+A with Angela Saxon
Angela Saxon, 59, is a self-described “mark maker.” That’s her calling and the basis of her creative practice, which is about seeing more, getting beyond the surface of things, and depicting layers of time in her paintings, prints and drawings.
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Creativity Q+A Video with Joan Richmond
Traverse City artist Joan Richmond responded to the COVID shutdown in her Northern Michigan town by going to work in her studio. She created 60 collages, a selection of these abstract, color-and-line composition are exhibited at the Glen Arbor Arts Center.
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Creativity Q+A with Jesse Hickman
Jesse Hickman, 65, moved to Northern Michigan from Chicago, Illinois more than 25 years ago, wife and two small children in tow. The creative opportunities that Chicago offered this visual artist were weighed against the challenges of raising children in a city.
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Creativity Q+A Video with Paul Stebelton: Author of Writer’s Block
The Glen Arbor Arts Center presents an interview with Paul Stebelton. Traverse City poet and proprietor of Landmark Books, a bookstore, and Landmark Press, talks about his 2018 chapbook “Writer’s Block.”
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Creativity Q+A Video with Crystal Neubauer: Pushing Through Creative Block
The Glen Arbor Arts Center presents an interview with Crystal Neubauer. Wisconsin visual artist + teacher working in mixed media, talks about her 5-Minute Strategy for pushing through creative block.
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Creativity Q+A Video with Joan Richmond: Collage
Traverse City artist Joan Richmond responded to the COVID shutdown in her Northern Michigan town by going to work in her studio. She created 60 collages, a selection of these abstract, color-and-line composition are exhibited at the Glen Arbor Arts Center.
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Creativity Q+A Video with Fleda Brown: Writer’s Block and Not-Writing
The Glen Arbor Arts Center presents an interview with Fleda Brown. The Traverse City poet and author, talks about writer’s block and not-writing.
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Creativity Q+A with Colleen Kole
Colleen Kole is “an artist who uses textiles.” She hand dyes her fabrics – makes her own materials – and with them creates abstract, contemporary quilts.
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Creativity Q+A with Cherie Correll
Cherie Correll, a mixed media artist living in Benzie County, retired in 2010 after decades of teaching art in the public schools.
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