Sustaining Craft

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) status,” Bearden explained. “It just wasn’t moving fast enough for me when I tried to actually start the business, so I kind of let it just sit there and nothing happened until 2014.

She taught drama for a bit, then worked for the city until 2014. “When I started Bearden Productions, I was still working at the city, and it would just be on my heart every day as I was driving to work,” Bearden shared. “And I’m like, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be going to work.’ I just knew I was not supposed to be doing it. I just knew in my heart, this is not something I’m supposed to be doing. So I remember, that one particular day, I was crying on my way to work. I went to work, I sat down, and I’m still crying. I’m working. During my lunch, I said, ‘Ok, if I do this, I’m going to need a building.’”

She found the space, renting a dance studio in the basement of a church for $300 a month. “And it was ours,” Bearden said. “Just that simple, just that quick. Like all within a week. I thought about it, I moved, and I did it.”

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Special Guest: Legenia Bearden.

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 Arkansas at Little Rock with a degree in graphic design and a job. The job started as an internship in 2013, over her senior year of college. A professor had emailed her about the position, suggesting she apply. “I saw it and I was like heck yeah,” Raines said. “It’s an internship, they just want part-time, this would be perfect for my senior year or over the summer, whatever. So I was actually in Hawaii when I found the email on my honeymoon. My husband was still asleep so I got up super early and luckily I had my laptop with me and I finished my portfolio and sent my resume. And I sent it to my current boss now and she emailed me back the same day.”

They scheduled an internship after her return. Jet lagged, Raines thought she’d bombed.

She began the internship at Colliers International soon after while she finished her degree, working 20 hours a week while going to classes. “They didn’t have a marketing department at all about a month before I started,” Raines explained. “And then my boss said, ‘We have to have a designer.’ And so now I’ve gotten to do everything from photography to web to social media to actual graphic design work.”

Read more: http://hewandweld.com/katy-raines/

Special Guest: Katy Raines.

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 have been familiar due to her previous work, while Food and Farm offers opportunities to learn additional photography skills. “We’ll do the farmer’s portraits and try to pull a story from their farm and situation,” Childs explained. “With the cattle and corn, I’m just doing a documentary kind of style. A lot of the time, with these shoots, I don’t get to choose what time of day or what situation the cattle or the corn is going to be in. So it might be in the middle of the day. I’m trying to make the best use of whatever’s happening. And that is its own specific challenge, but I love figuring things out like that, it’s kind of my favorite thing. If it were super easy all the time, I don’t think I’d enjoy doing it. I like being thrown into a situation and having to figure it out.”

Special Guest: Katie Childs.

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 little napkin for my Sprite, and I see a Chinese proverb in a magazine that says, if you give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. And I realized that exactly had happened to me. I had been given that opportunity. I had been given that chance to-- not only I was fed for one day, but I was actually given that opportunity. I realized, that’s exactly what I gotta do in my village. What if? And it started with that. Why if, why not? Why do I not bring their coffee, they grow coffee already. That’s what’s they’ve been doing for 60-plus years, ever since I’ve known them. What if I can get their coffee in the hands of my friends and family in the states? And then all of a sudden, I bridge the two, and while bridging the two, we break poverty? I was like, that’s it.”

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Want the full article? Head on over to www.hewandweld.com for more.

Special Guest: Geovanni Leiva.

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 Berlin. Everything had barbed wire. There were armed guards everywhere, and so it was just kind of a terrifying place through a five-year-old’s eyes, but you don’t really have the vocabulary to deal with that. And then to be a sick kid in a military hospital with mostly adults around you, not a children’s hospital. It was kind of an unfriendly place. And there were noises at night and things like that, and my father was a police officer. so I knew there was danger and boogeyman out there but I didn’t have a vocabulary for it, so even as an adult I have a hard time coming up with that vocabulary, but I don’t have a hard time coming up with a visual vocabulary to describe it. And by allowing them to come to surface from my subconscious, it kind of allows me to embrace them in a different way as an adult and kind of be playful with them and be grateful that I had such a vivid imagination from the way we lived and grew up. I lived in the heart of fairy tales. We traveled in Bavaria and the Black Forest was around there, and the birthplace of Hansel and Gretel. And all of these kinds of bizarre folktales that we grew up with that were basically cautionary tales to children to mind their moms, but it was kind of a wonderful place.”

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There are a few ways to find Diane's art in person: she'll be at Art on the Creeks in Rogers, Arkansas on Sept. 29; she'll have some work in the Fiber Arts Show on Nov. 2, and at the Gallery 26 Holiday Show. She also has a booth at South Main Creative.

Special Guest: Diane Harper.

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 the rug and say they never happened,” Ferneau said. “Something I’ll say to people, if they look at it through a peephole or somewhat of a closed mind, it will piss them off, but whenever I see somebody fail, and they come and tell me about it, usually complaining, I just ask them, ‘Did you learn anything? What did you learn?’ And sometimes, if they’re already aggravated, they’re quick to think I’m being condescending with them, but literally I’m asking a question. ‘What did you learn from this? Okay, it might have cost you x amount of dollars, but what did you learn from it?’ When my cooks burn something or they mess up a stock, or just little weird things that cost me money, I’m investing in that person right there. ‘What did you learn from this? It was an expensive mistake, so tell me you learned something. ‘Cause I just don’t want to just fire you.’ It took me a long time to get there. You have to put your ego in your pocket sometimes.”

Special Guest: Donnie Ferneau.

And they keep their product lines interesting, even taking special orders. “We have these really unique niche scents in some of our candles, so they work really well for historical reenactors, but they’re not going to sell to somebody else,” Reeves said. “We have a state park that we contract to that deals with historical reenactors all the time, and one of their properties on the park is a jail. We designed an entire line of candles just for their jail, scents that would have been in a jailhouse in the mid-1800s to early 1900s when it was operational.”

One of those specialty scents is called The Sheriff. “It kind of smells like this dirty man that’s been smoking a pipe,” Reeves explained. “When I smell it, I get the thought of the cowboy with his feet up on the desk, and the big sheriff badge and a hat over his face, sleeping while his prisoners are in the cells behind him. That’s what it conjures for me. Many of our scents are like that. You can smell it and you can conjure this idea of what it is supposed to be in your head.”

But not everyone can smell the candles. “A lot of men can’t smell,” Reeves explained. “I didn’t realize this until I started dealing with men on a regular basis. Men, blue-collar workers, a lot of them can’t smell because they’ve worked around chemicals their whole life. Or they’ve worked around major smells their whole life. My dad is a maintenance man at a roofing plant. My dad can’t smell anything. Asphalt’s burned the inside of his nose. So he can’t smell candles. My dad can’t smell when something is cooking. And he’s not the only one.”

Special Guest: Tabatha Reeves.

Crafting a single piece of pottery can take up to three weeks. There’s the design stage, then the piece is created on the pottery wheel and must dry completely before it goes into the kiln. “If that moisture, as it leaves the clay, if it is rushed, it will crack in the kiln,” Quintanar explained. “It has to be bone dry, that’s what we call it when all the moisture is out of the pot. That takes days.”

The firing takes a few days, and then the pot is glazed and fired again. The kilns at the arts center are massive and can fit a couple of thousand pieces. With about 200 students and teachers creating throughout the week, it still takes time to fill the kilns.

Now, Quintanar is working on his end-of-residency show and experimenting with colored clay and colorful slips. “I want the show to be really bright and colorful,” Quintanar shared. “I’ve been making my own clay and mixing up my own slips, which are colorful slips that are applied on the surface.”

Slips consist of clay with water added and can be painted on a piece of pottery. Quintanar has been focused on experimenting for four months and has found some trial and error in the process. “I’ve had a lot of failures recently, after the firings, losing the colors,” he explained. “I could show you tons of tests of little white cups that are supposed to be purple and pink and blue. … I really finally think I’ve come upon a direction that might work. I haven’t so much thought about the forms yet. Like I said, I want it to be functional. So, of course, there will be bottles, jars and cups and possibly bowls. But there’s so many design elements to choose from, so I need to do a lot of brainstorming and drawing and sketching for those things, but I think it’s going to be really exciting. It’s going to be really colorful if it all goes well.”

Special Guest: Adrian Quintanar.

Collier started reaching out to local businesses, starting with Geri’s Jams and Jellies. Today, the market carries produce and products from businesses such as Fennel and Fire, Teaberry Kombucha Co., and the Farm at Barefoot Bend. “It’s a lot of local people that are really, really good at what they do,” said Duvall. “We’re able to bring it all together. Our big draw is definitely produce. People come out for tomatoes more than anything else, but it’s a way to showcase some of these other people that don’t have storefronts.”

While the market no longer sells produce from the McGee garden, the family has found creative ways to create other Me and McGee products. “In produce, inevitably, there’s a ton of waste,” Duvall explained. “So, my mom and grandma decided that they wanted to try to do pickles and salsa just because we go through so many tomatoes. It just took off.”

The market is open all year, except for January, which distinguishes it from a farmer’s market. Vendors also aren’t required to be on the premises -- Me and McGee staff explains products and handles all transactions. As the market continues to grow, Duvall works to refine the focus of the market, which was a business tool he learned while working in real estate. “Really looking at what’s working and what’s not and making sure that we’re doubling down on what’s working,” Duvall explained. “The creativity and the hardwork and the sacrifice was my family. I didn’t do any of that. But just making sure we’re on the right path and we’re treating everything like a real business--that’s been the change in the past year.”

Special Guest: Logan Duvall.

When Long moved to Florida, Godbold and Cook divided the remaining responsibilities. While they at first tried splitting the baking and the decorating, they found the workflow wasn’t efficient. Cook, who has a degree in business, took over the finances, taxes, and practical business needs. Godbold took on all of the baking, decorating, social media, and marketing.

Special Guest: Suzanne Godbold.