Meet Brad Ewell

We were lucky to catch up with Brad Ewell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Brad , really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

We have many purposes throughout the seasons of our lives. When I look at my artistic journey and its purpose I believe I’m still working this out. What I’m sure of is that if you told me five years ago that I’d be where I’m at today, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’ve lost count of the creative false starts I’ve had over my life. I was always drawn to be creative. As a kid, I doodled, loved the art of comics and movies, the storytelling in music. Those things have resonated with me throughout my life. I was also raised by two very practical parents. They never discouraged creative endevaors, it’s just something that just wasn’t discussed much as a career or part for one’s life. My dad was an athlete and business leader. My mom was very business oriented. Because of this I spent the majority of my life pushing those creative urges to the side for more practical things. Then in 2019 my world got turned upside down. I was 48 years old when someone contacted my wife through AncestryDNA trying to figure out who I was related to them. It took a little over 24 hours to find myself on the phone with my dad hearing the last words I expected to hear. “Well Bradley, you’re adopted and we’ve been trying to figure out a way to tell you.” Over the next year as the shock subsided and I went into reunion with my biological family, the lifetime of creative urges finally made senses. I came from two creative people. My biological mother did all kinds of arts and crafts. My biological father had been a draftsman who went on to learn to paint watching Bob Ross videos and wood turner. With an understanding creativity came as a natural part of my life, I decided to lean into it more. The problem was I already had a full time job and a family, and I was still getting to know a whole new family that had accepted me. This didn’t leave much spare time to start following all of my creative urges. Then in 2023 I injured my knee and spent over 6 months in a locked out leg brace and off work. Suddenly I found myself with all the time in the world and very little I could do other than sit up in bed. My wife had purchased me all the tools I needed to try out linocut printing, because it was something I enjoyed when I was in high school. Over that time I allowed the overwhelming urge to create to be my daily driving force. I went through resources, designed my lino blocks, carved, printed, and repeated. In the time I wasn’t creating I studied other creative methods to see what else I might want to try out. All of this to say, I understand now that my purpose is to create and when I’m in the flow state of following my purpose life is good.

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?

I am winding down my police career and will retire next year. With that there are many projects that I’ve worked on in my spare time that I will dedicate more time to. The project I want to tackle fully first is a memoir. Learning I was adopted when and how I did had some deep impacts on the trajectory of my life and took me to and through some things I never expected. Now that I’ve come out of the other side of that, it’s a story I’d like to share with a wider audience. Part of this journey has been getting involved with a. group called Right to Know that helps others that have had some type of misattributed parentage. Working with that group has allowed me to meet some amazing people and I’ve gotten to walk with others through the early stages of their DNA surprise. Working with others is what has made me want to write a memoir. Brene Brown said, “One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through and it will become someone else’s survival guide.” I’m not here to say I got everything write on this journey but I’m sure people can learn from both my mistakes and successes. If my book helps one person get through their DNA surprise, it will have been worth it to me.

I have also fallen in love with photography in the past year. Recently I heard someone say, with iPhones, everyone thinks they are a photographer. I’d take that in a slightly different direction and say with iPhones everyone is a photographer now. I see this as a unique challenge. People can take pictures of anything they want with very little effort. For my photography to speak to them in a different way, I have to show them something different from what they can photograph themselves. Whether that’s taking macro shots to show someone things going on around them they haven’t noticed, capturing light rays and bursts in a desert sunset, or setting up a still life shot my hope is to let you see something differently than you have experienced it before. I’ve also started to experiment with alternative photo developing processes such as cyanotype and gum bichromate. I look forward to improving my skills with those and learning others.

For my print making, I intend to stick with pop culture like I have in the past. I’m a huge horror movie fan and my first linocut print was Jack Nicholson from The Shining that I printed on book pages from the novel. Since that time I’ve done several other Shining Characters, Hannibal Lecter, Samara (from The Ring), and a few others. I intend to continue this with other movies and books I’ve enjoyed. For print making I used Procreate for most of my initial drawing and have enjoyed using it as its own creative tool for making digital art. As an example, I had a friend recently who suggested doing a series or album covers or bands or songs. I made eleven pieces drawing in procreate or with my own photography. I enjoyed this series and I plan to build on it. When I work on these pop culture pieces my hope is to take the viewer back to a time when they saw that movie or heard that song and bring the memories from that moment back to them.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three skills I believe I brought into this journey that have helped me along the way are: being a lifelong learner, resiliency, and humility. The first, being a lifelong learner, is a double edged sword. It’s easy to get so busy learning that creating goes by the wayside. I’ve had to learn to balance curiosity and learning with play or creative work. I prefer to consider it as play because I enjoy the process of creating. I believe that art is important and necessary in the world. I also realize I’m in a unique space of not having to create for a living. Instead I get to create for the love of the art. Seeing something that didn’t exist come into the world through my hands is an amazing experience. For me this is where the best art comes from. I make things that I find interesting. I can’t make things with the hope you’ll find them interesting. The best I can hope for is to create something that will resonate with someone’s soul in the way it did with mine. That’s where the magic of art happens. The second, resiliency, is a long cultivated mindset. I’m not talking about resiliency through a traumatic event even though it’s related. What I’m talking about is the ability to make some absolute garbage and being ok with that. I’ve made my share of things that in the end, I stepped back and just hated, and that’s ok. I understand it doesn’t say anything about me as an artist. Those moments can come from a variety of sources: not being true to my artistic voice, still needing to master (or at least improve) on a skill, or it may just be a bad day. In those moments, I step back and do my best to assess what went wrong. Is it something to try to improve on or maybe it’s time to scrap the idea and start over. I can always go back and try again later. The most important thing is to not let that kill my spirit. Finally, humility, it’s hard to put yourself out there in your art and have to hear others feedback about it. The important thing is to understand that feedback is just one persons thoughts on your work. Let the sting pass and see if there’s anything you can learn from the criticism. I’ll be the first to say that it’s not always possible. But if you find yourself saying, “they just don’t get it” every time you hear criticism, it may be a good time to check if it’s time to work on cultivating some humility. My art work isn’t going to resonate with everyone, neither will yours. Not everyone’s work resonates with me. But I firmly believe what. a friend of mine told me, “every piece of art has a collector, it’s just a matter of them finding each other.”

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

The Creative Act – A Way of Being by Rick Rubin I can’t promise these are in the book because I’ve lost count of the hours of podcasts and interviews I’ve listened to. Here are three of my favorites.

1. The title of the book The Creative Act – A Way of Being. Sums everything up. Creativity isn’t just about the times I’m photographing something or carving a print. Creativity is my way of being or how I inhabit the world. I affects everything. How I see, hear, think, interpret, etc. Inhabiting the world with a creative mindset is what fuels my creative process.

2. I make art for me. Do I want it to resonate with others? Absolutely, but that’s not the goal. My goal is to make art that speaks to my soul. If it resonates with you that’s awesome. If it doesn’t, no worries, someone is out there making something that will. The best art I can make is what speaks to me.

3. “The goal of art isn’t to obtain perfection. The goal is to share who we are. And how we see the world”

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @cut_and_shoot_art
• Facebook: Cut and Shoot Art
• Other: Cutandshootart@gmail.com

Image Credits

For my profile pic – Lena Skahill