Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kiersten Rucker. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Kiersten, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
Creativity is such an important thing to cultivate and explore. As an abstract expressionist artist I don’t want my work to feel forced or too repetitive. I may have phases where a particular media is really calling to me and I want to use it repeatedly, but then I get the urge to move on to something new. Occasionally it can be hard to decide what is next. In order to give myself a creativity recharge I often go to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and I also enjoy going to the Menil Collection, specifically the Cy Twombly gallery. I love going to the Museum of FIne Arts and getting lost in the galleries. I love walking room to room of new and older artwork and looking at how various materials are used in the work. From paintings, to works on paper, photography to sculptures, there is always something there that catches my eye and gets me excited to create something different.
One of the most important things for me is to look at the works of Art and think of what processes went into creating them and what materials were used to create them. I especially love observing the mark-making and the brushwork. This helps me come up with new (to me) ways of working with my materials. There are so many times I will see other artwork and say to myself, “You can do that?” I think we get to a point in life where we are pushed to “grow up” and be cautious of possibilities and going against what is expected. We begin to think that things must be one way or the other. This can seep into your creativity as well; when you see your supplies and think they can only be used in one way but in reality, there are so many different ways they can be used. It’s so important to view other artwork and see how others have broadened their use of these supplies and transformed them into different creative uses. This is why I find it so important to visit different museums and Art events so I can constantly see various uses of materials and remind myself that it is good to experiment new ways of creating Art.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
In 2019 I began my journey to pursue Art full time. Not only did I want to work on my body of work as an artist, but I wanted to share art with others by offering art classes for adults. Art has always been something that has followed me throughout my life. I enjoy finding a quiet corner and trying to doodle or make a painting. Art provides a wonderful emotional release, whether it is stress, sadness or happiness. I can always find an Art material I want to use to express those emotions. I also had a connection with Art and it was a long bumpy road before I recognized how much I wanted it to be my career.
In 1998, my freshman year of high school, I experienced the traumatic loss of my mother to breast cancer. I was fourteen and had four younger sisters who needed someone to help them get through managing life and grief. I pushed my grieving to the side and used Art as a way to work through it. I had an Art kit from Sam’s Club I got for Christmas that had all sorts of Art supplies in it. When I wasn’t cooking dinner or helping with homework, I would try to steal away and make small paintings with different lines and shapes. Focusing on those simple processes helped alleviate stress and take the edge off my sadness.
Being in high school meant you had to know what you wanted to do for a career and take the classes that would get you there. I enjoyed teaching people new things, even holding classes for my stuffed animals during school breaks when I was in elementary school. I also had a huge interest in Science and loved solving puzzles so for a time I wanted to be a Forensic Scientist. It was my mother’s funeral that steered me away from pursuing that as a career choice. I felt like I meandered through trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I started getting into Photography my sophomore year and joined the school newspaper as a photographer. I remembered how much I enjoyed Art class in middle school and gave that a try as well.
I only took one Art class in high school because the experience wasn’t what I hoped it would be. I hoped it would be as fun and exploratory as my 8th grade Art class, (Ms. Sunderland, wherever you are, thank you for making me love Art), but it was more about making things look realistic in different media. I felt that Art classes were going to continue to be this way judging by the artwork I had seen in the display cases at school. I struggled so much with realism and it made me push Art to the back burner and not take any other Art classes. I needed Art to be an exploration of media, technique and emotion. At that time, I wasn’t exposed to a wide variety of artists and I never got the opportunity to go to museums growing up. We didn’t have the internet at home (we couldn’t afford it) and I wasn’t sure of how to access different forms of Art. I didn’t think what I wanted to create had a place. I knew there were things I wanted to create but I was stuck believing I wasn’t allowed to.
I realized in high school that the way I made Art wasn’t necessarily in line with what was expected in my Art class at the time or what I saw others create.There was a big focus on being able to make drawings and paintings look realistic and I truly struggled with that. I realized I leaned more towards non-objective Art – I didn’t want to draw or paint realistically. I wanted to focus on colors, shapes and the way the brush strokes hit the page. Photography was my way to see the world as it is – I truly loved taking photos with 35mm film. When it came to painting or drawing, I wanted it to be different.
We ended up moving in the middle of my junior year and my graduation credits got all sorts of messed up. We moved in November before the semester was over and I wasn’t able to keep the credits for my core classes and had to take them all over again plus take summer school to catch up. I wasn’t happy. I had AP and dual credit classes I was supposed to take and now all of that was gone. I wasn’t able to do extracurriculars and I hoped my advanced classes would help me when it came to applying for college. Now I wasn’t going to have any of that. I started to not care about going above and beyond in school. I still got good grades, but felt like nothing mattered. I had worked so hard before and now all of that was stripped away.
Art was the one thing that made me happy. I was also super interested in music video directing and writing scripts. I had dreams of going off to Art school to help me learn more about the type of Art I wanted to create. I had found a college in San Francisco that had everything I wanted. It felt like the perfect fit! Unfortunately, my excitement dwindled at home when I was discouraged from applying. I was told the school was too far from home, too expensive, and “that city would eat you alive”. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I still loved Art so much and wanted to continue with it in some form, but the situation I was in made me feel that it wasn’t something I was allowed to do. I was panicking about where I was going to go. I had to stay close and couldn’t go out of state. A classmate helped me find a school nearby that he was also applying to. It still had Photography and some of the other things I was hoping to do. He helped me learn about the school and through the process of applying. It wasn’t San Francisco, but it was still a good school.
I graduated from Sam Houston State University in 2006 with a major in Radio and Television and a minor in Photography. My goal was to teach a media related class at the high school level and work with photography on the side but that didn’t pan out. It was just so hard to break into any media related jobs at that time. I also didn’t have a car and was only able to find work at a local dry cleaners.
I was still painting with my little assortment of Apple Barrel brand paints from WalMart and whatever brushes I could afford. When I wasn’t working I was reading Art books I’d find at Half Price Books and learning new techniques. I knew how much Art meant to me and I decided to shift gears to pursue teaching Art.I felt that this was the way I would not only be able to still work with Art, but be able to help others with Art as well.
I decided to go back to school for a second Bachelor’s degree in Art so I could learn even more than I had on my own. It was the best decision! I also worked through an alternative certification program so I could teach. I began teaching elementary Art in 2013, the fall after I graduated. I was so excited to be working with Art again and felt so lucky to be able to show my students all the wonderful things they could achieve with Art. I progressed to middle school Art in 2016 and that was a blast.
By 2019 I was still wishing for more time for my own Art. Something I didn’t realize when I started teaching was how little time I would have to create my own work. I enjoyed helping the students and preparing outside materials to help them in class. But I was spending so much time making sure they were set for success that I was letting myself fall through cracks. Even weekends were spent preparing things for my students. Throw in all the extra policies that seemed to change every year, meetings, paperwork, testing, summer trainings, and trying to handle some of the parents who thought your class didn’t matter and I was truly beaten down. I was burning out and needed to step away from teaching.
I knew I wanted to connect with people through Art but I wanted to change my approach. There are so many opportunities for children and teens to make Art, but what about adults? I knew I was burnt out and needed Art to help me heal. What about other adults? I wanted to create a low stress and carefree environment where adults could work with various Art supplies and not worry about having precise technique. I wanted to show some basic techniques with a class topic that allowed individual imagination and material exploration to thrive.
In late 2019 I started teaching Art classes to adults at a Houston area craft beer bar. It was so much fun! The adults reminded me of my students – they were nervous to make mistakes and unsure of how to start. I feel like that is such a huge shift that happens between the time we are kids to when we become adults. We lose that sense of exploration and taking risks. Life can be so hard and I enjoyed teaching adults to let go and let it flow through my classes. Unfortunately, those classes came to a halt in March of 2020.
Since then I have been working hard on creating more of my own artwork and selling it through my website. I recently started posting more of my work on TikTok and ended up selling a lot of original paintings and prints! I’m so thankful for that platform because it allowed me to reach more people. I had been posting on Instagram for so long but didn’t get as much traction as when I posted there. Now I am expanding my work to include prints of my watercolor paintings as well as greeting cards with my work on the front. Currently I sell my artwork through my website, Bella Graffito, but I really want to get back to teaching the adult Art classes again. I’m hoping to offer digital classes as well as in person classes.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three things that have kept me moving through my business journey with my Art have been my determination, empathy and love of learning. I always knew I wanted to help people and I wasn’t sure what that would look like. I knew I wanted Art to be a permanent fixture in my life and I was determined to make sure I was able to do that. In working with people throughout my time in retail and education, I was able to empathize with others and how they were dealing with stress. I knew how much Art helped me and I knew that creating a space for people to create Art as a means of stress relief was needed. It was difficult to navigate how this would look so I made sure to research options. I sought out advice from the University of Houston Texas Gulf Coast Small Business Development Center. I was able to get so many wonderful resources including one on one business advice and access to live and virtual classes. There were small creators I followed on YouTube who I learned so much from as well. I love learning and that helped me continue my research for how to establish my business. I still have a vision for what I want my revamped adult Art classes to be and I still use those resources to help with that vision. Currently I use what I learned to continue selling my personal artwork.
In navigating where I want to go next with my artwork and with the adult Art classes, I’m still early into my journey. A lot of reorganizing had to occur from March 2020 until now. The best advice I can give to anyone is to know your passion and do it for the right reasons. I would also add in writing down what your goals are. It can be easy to think about what you want and how you want to do it, but writing it down makes it feel like it’s more attainable and you can develop steps to get you where you want to be.
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
When it comes to my artwork, I want it to resonate with people who can look at the piece and feel emotion resonating from it. They don’t necessarily need to feel the same emotions I felt when creating it, but I want them to feel something that pertains to their own experience and draws them into the piece. I hope that my artwork finds its way to people who love color and want something unique in their home. On my website I have original acrylic and gouache paintings, original watercolor paintings as well as prints and greeting cards with my artwork on the front. I hope my work will reach more people as I continue to explore my artistic style.
For my adult Art classes, I want to help people who are open to exploring Art techniques. It is important for them to understand they won’t get something to look perfect the first time or maybe ever and that perfectly ok! We live in a world that makes us feel like we have to live one way or the other and have concrete answers to everything. Art helps you understand that there are so many possibilities and it’s encouraged to take a risk and see how it goes. I can honestly say that my Art process helped me take the risk to leave my job and begin focusing on something I love that could also help others. I can’t wait to start up the classes again!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bellagraffito.com
- Instagram: @BellaGraffito
- Facebook: Bella Graffito
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@bellagraffito
Image Credits
All photos taken by me.
