Meet Mar Mcintyre

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mar Mcintyre a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mar, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

What brings me to the word resilience?
When I’m in my workshop I have complete control of my environment refurbishing and creating furniture art. It helps me adapt to stressors, maintaining psychological well-being in the face of adversity.
I get to plan the way a piece of furniture starts and how it’s going to end up.
There’s a whole ritual behind it. Beginning with the cleansing, operation of repair, sanding, painting, staging and photography.

This emotional connection to furniture art is not a mere coincidence but is rooted in the way our brains interpret visual stimuli. Majestic and unique pieces of furniture can induce feelings of awe and wonder, making viewers feel happiness and joy in the presence of something grand and profound.

Emotions evoked by working in my workshop are fundamentally and essentially different from an emotion stirred by a situation in my life. It is a means of meditation and can give a level of that dopamine rush that I desire. An aesthetic emotion arises in a controlled relationship with a piece of furniture. An object I create is bringing a presence before my clients. That presence comes about through the qualities of its medium, not in the open flow of life events. The character of the medium controls the experience through the artist’s control of the form. We always hear the Latin line, “Ars longa, vita brevis ist” (Art endures, life is brief). That reminds us that it is always about time.
The point about that is not that we might envy an aesthetic object for its fate to outlive us, but that we ourselves experience time quite differently through working on a piece furniture than through the passing moment in worldly life. The experience we find before furniture preserves us from the shock and loss of what actually happens to us out in the ordinary realm. We can always relive the aesthetic moment. We can listen to a piece of music again as it shapes the time in which it plays for us and return to it again and again as long as we live. And we can stand before furniture art and visit the theater to watch a performance of a play or a dance, in repetitions without limit. Or we can read a poem or novel again, or simply recollect it once we have absorbed it into our minds.
That is why aesthetic emotions can figure in our lives as a kind of knowledge, and why that knowledge can figure in our lives as pleasure.

That is what brings me, the artist and the client together being resilient to the unpleasantness of life and to be able to recover quickly from difficult situations. . Furniture art is joy and brings great comfort to all of us.

It’s quite therapeutic in every way.
In the world where I derived from I had no control and no choice. I was shoved here and there. With no questions asked. I hated it and it’s imprinted on me now to be absolutely with the of attitude “I do what I want when I damn well please”.
In my life I did not get any closure with family on anything. Nothing.
We might desire closure after a romantic relationship ends, for example, or after a parent dies to help us deal with our grief. In other cases, we might want closure after ending a toxic relationship with a friend or family member. When searching for closure, the main goal is to get answers to unresolved matters.
There are just so many chapters in my life where closure wasn’t a choice.
Refurbishing furniture and creating art helps me deal with those emotions I never got to process and felt in the end I was abandoned. Simply recycling a piece of furniture that comes into my workshop beat up, neglected and broken can give me closure through giving that piece of furniture a second chance to go into a clients home looking top notch with a smile on it.
We have to be resilient, we must be resilient as it will create a well being of humility.
Specifically, people who are humble tend to have greater happiness and life satisfaction while also experiencing less depression and anxiety.
Being bitter and holding in anger is not the answer to anything. Finding a therapeutic way to deal with life situations as being creative can be the most rewarding path in moving forward.

Furniture art helps me be able to have closure by the process of creating and putting out a great piece of furniture.

I’m 52 years of age now and I can say I’m not out to impress no one. If I’m liked, oh yay. If not, okay.
Owning a furniture store I always hear statements of I bet you have the most amazing new and trendy pieces of furniture. No, my home does not match and I have mix of vintage and modern furniture. My home is a collage of my favorite things pertaining of for example a uranium collection and my 2 chihuahuas that I spend all my time with. Oh and that guy I’m married to that I have mentioned.
Two years ago, we removed all the carpet in the château with 20 foot tall ceilings and a cathedral window turning my home into a painting studio itself. At any given moment if you were to stop by my home, and enter the domains you are more than likely going to see a couple pieces of furniture receiving paint or a piece against the staging wall to be photographed.
It’s always a circus and a cycle of turning pieces out.
A Bold Journey has definitely taken its course in my life events and my transformation.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

My name is Mar McIntyre and I specialize in refurbishing vintage furniture and creating furniture art. My husband and I live in rural Missouri close to the Ozark Mountains. We live on twenty acres of wooded land and Sparrow Creek runs through our property. The land is our sanctuary and has been home for 22 years.

Living in the country puts us closer to nature and away from the hustle and bustle of the city. We also have easy access to all of the outdoor activities that we love, including fishing, hunting, hiking and gardening in our greenhouse.

This is where my workshop is located and I work from.

A little about my background is a stairway of stepping stones as I gained knowledge through all of the different schooling and jobs I took on. After graduating high school I attended modeling school at Hoffman’s International Modeling and Talent School for my love of the fashion industry and attended floral design school at Stuppy’s Mid-America School of Floral Design because for the love of horticultural in my early 20s.

Fun Fact about me…. I rode the school bus when I was in elementary school with the world famous American fashion designer the wonderful Jeremy Scott. He was a great companion to sit by while riding the school bus to town from our country homes.

I went on to win four state (Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas) Floral Design Competition for my casket piece I designed called, “Welcome to my Garden.

Also working in cabinetry in the mid 90’s gave me the wisdom to know how woodworking and furniture construction would benefit me in the future.

I have been refurbishing furniture and creating furniture art since 2015 and started my own business in 2023.

One thing I witnessed was vintage and antique furniture coming back from our deliveries to our furniture store and being asked by the customer to be disposed of or donated. I seen a chance to start creating again and to recycle something that would end up thrown a way or put in the back of somebody’s garage.

Repurposing is such a great trend that is popular right now and I have great respect for it.

My grandmother was a huge recycler. We would attend auctions and estate sales together frequently. I would watch her from as a young child take something like a picture frame and turn it into a beautiful wall hanging. She didn’t have much money and learned to make the best of what she had.
So a mixture of all these influences was a huge inspiration for me to be an entrepreneur and use my creative mind to become what I do to this day.

Someone I want to mention here in this interview is a lady by the name of Annie Sloan. I use her chalk paint to create my furniture and home decor pieces I recycle and refurbish. Honestly I started with her paint since day one. It has become a proclivity to my routine of painting. I have tried other paints, and I always go back to the good true paint that always does what I want it to do for me and my creativity.

She is another great artist and mentor. I call her the Godfather of chalk painting furniture. She 100% supports her community and customers. Annie has shared many of my creations on her social media. In 2025 I will be able to meet her in person and I’m so very excited to meet her.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

My life has been menagerie of a “jack of all trades”. If a job criteria sounded interesting to me, I tackled it. I have been a florist all the way to working in cabinetry. And anything in between. There’s no way I could have just stuck to one work field! I’m a Sagittarius and have a gypsy soul.
Don’t feel you need to work one particular industry. I say the more you know the more you are going to be multi-talented and have a high level of intelligent. Know at little bit about everything! Have many irons in the fire!

That whole thing of being taught you need to go to college as soon as you graduate high school is not for everybody. I watched many people waste money on going straight into college from high school and not even making it through the first year.
It certainly wasn’t for me. Glad I didn’t waste my time or money there.

My advice to all that are starting out would be to follow your heart. Don’t listen to people that aren’t supportive and might laugh at your ideas in the path you want to take. Don’t settle for less to make everyone happy. Most people are okay with you being mediocre. That makes them comfortable. It’s nothing against them. That’s the nature of humans.
People come and go in life and I’ve seen more go than stay so it’s your choice.
They may not understand and that’s okay.
Set your intention and wake up everyday with gratitude for your life. The universe will do the rest.
Never stop learning. Life is all about learning from the time we are born until death. Look at every situation as a learning experience. This will help with a tendency of blaming others, help with not playing the victim card and taking soul responsibility for your actions and consequences.
Something I always look at for guidance and practice is the Eight limb Path of Yoga. It is worth checking out if you have never heard of it.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

My most helpful and biggest supporter has been my husband and best friend, Shawn McIntyre.
Shawn and I were married in 2004 and it was the best decision of my life to marry my soul mate. We compliment each other and we are in it together to win at this game called Life. There has been challenges and great achievements throughout our marriage. We are family and nothing will ever break that bond.
Coming from a dysfunctional family background taught me that if I wanted a good life in the future do not repeat the mistakes my parents played out in theirs.
My parents weren’t very good at communicating and teaching me to prepare for an adult life. They came from dysfunctional family backgrounds that are heartbreaking and I do have empathy for them that they just couldn’t be the parents they should have been.
My father was a life long alcoholic, drug addict and narcissistic in every way and my mother is mentally ill with receiving many shock treatments and multiple medications that has left her brain damaged and with dementia.
I was an only child and it seemed I had to become an adult at an early age.

When I married my husband and started a life with him I was on a journey to find knowledge and an understanding of a right path that would send me on track to be proud of. He taught me financial responsibility and gave me a stable life without lies and deceit.
He opened a furniture store at the age of 21 years of age and it is still in business to this day. His business has been active for 33 years now.
I joined my husband at his furniture store in 2012 when his partner decided to retire.
I witnessed a great amount of vintage furniture pieces being brought back to the furniture store from deliveries to be disposed of after customers had bought new pieces for their homes. I seen a chance to refurbish and recycle them. I sold them at our store at first. When Covid hit the economy took a turn for the worse and I was encouraged to start an Etsy store and sell from there. I still display my furniture refurbishments and art at the store but my main source of business is through Etsy. In my journey of refurbishing furniture I can have a bad habit of second guessing my creations. As a child I was told don’t seek a career in the arts even though I have always been artistic and always gravitated towards work that were in the arts.
Being neurodivergent and working office or factory type of jobs stressed me out and I literally never felt I was nurturing my soul in a job that made me proud. I needed more.
At the furniture store I seen a chance to just do that. I started taking those pieces home and refurbishing and painting them in all different styles. I use Annie Sloan chalk paint and have always utilized her paint to create my creations with. With my surprise people started buying pieces from me and was sharing my work on social media. Etsy has been a great outlet to reach a bigger audience and I now ship my creations all over the United States.
My husband is my biggest fan and supporter. In my tendency to second guess myself he reassures everything I paint and create is 100% right on. I tend to be my worst critic and at times will want to stop midway through a project and start all over. But he doesn’t let me. This has taught me that I am an artist and I have the skill set to go with the flow and turn out a beautiful one of a kind piece of furniture that someone will purchase.

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