An Artist and a Business Man Are My Livelihoods

Bob’s Story

All through my life, whether I was painting, creating advertising, or facilitating leadership groups, I’ve always identified as an artist and always seeking to integrate my thoughts, feelings and ideas with others to demonstrate how the arts helps us to live life fully.  I will always believe that art is what holds society together.

This philosophy was rooted in my early childhood. In school, art activities were my favorite classes. Fortunately my teachers and my parents noticed and encouraged me. I grew up in various communities in Southeast Nebraska. In first grade, living in Sutton, I remember my mother introducing me to two older women who gave watercolor lessons in their attic on Saturday mornings. I loved it and from that point on I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. As a junior at Hebron High School, I was fortunate enough to attend the Allstate program at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. It was a defining moment and from that point the arts have defined who I am. I worked as an artist in New York in the 60s and early 70s then came back to Nebraska and began my career in advertising while continuing my studio art at home. I founded Culver & Associates in 1983 and it grew to be the largest ad agency in Nebraska and was recognized as a regional INC Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year in 1994.

My artistic interest has also motivated me to be involved with various arts organizations across the state including Nebraska Arts Council, Museum of Nebraska Art and recently the Nebraska Cultural Endowment. A healthy community needs a healthy arts infrastructure. We also need to increase our focus and support for the arts from preschool through high school. Research has shown the importance of creativity in every walk of life as well as preparing our young Nebraskans to be at the forefront of innovation, critical to the success in the business world.

I feel fortunate that I had the opportunities to be an artist, think artistically and apply my artistic notions and ideas to everyday life. I encourage others to do the same by bringing the arts into their family activities, their businesses by attending arts events, going to museums and finding their own artistic gifts.

About Bob

Bob Culver is both a successful artist and businessman. As an artist, Bob is an accomplished painter, studied with nationally known artists and is an active member of the Arts Community. As a businessman he is the Senior Consultant at Culver Consulting specializing in strategic business consulting and leadership development programming. Also, he was vice president of Leadership Learning Transformation for Lincoln Financial Group. Before his career at Lincoln Financial, he built one of the largest advertising agencies in Nebraska and was an INC. Magazine Entrepreneur-of-the-Year.

Bob has a B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska. Twice, he received residency scholarships to Kent State University’s Blossom Center Program. He has studied with internationally known artists including Wayne Thiebaud, Phillip Pearlstein, Frank Gallo, Richard Whitney and Alex Katz. Upon graduation from the University of Nebraska he moved to New York City to apprentice with Red Grooms, a leader in the Pop Art movement of the 60’s and 70’s. He assisted Red with many installations as well as starring in one of Red’s Ruckus Films called Hippodrome Hardware. While in New York, he also taught drawing at the Educational Alliance. Returning to Nebraska, Bob created the Culver Marketing Group. The Culver Marketing Group grew to be the largest Nebraska based advertising agency and was chosen by the Omaha Chamber of Commerce, as one of Omaha’s Top 25 fastest growing companies. He received the Chamber’s Small Businessperson of the Year in 1992. Bob was also honored as the Outstanding Alumni of the University of Nebraska Lincoln Fine Arts College.

While at Lincoln Financial, he co-created the curriculum and was on the faculty of ICAN’s “Defining Leadership for Men” program. He partnered on a marketing case study with members of the faculty at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management and taught marketing theory in the Omaha Small Business Network’s FastTrac Program. Bob is certified in Emergenetics, Essi Systems EQ Map, Center for Creative Leadership 360 tools and Edward de Bono’s “Six Hats Thinking”. Bob is a LIMRA Leadership Institute Fellow (LLIF), conferred jointly by the LIMRA Leadership Institute and The Wharton School of Business

He serves and has served on many community boards including Opera Omaha, Omaha Symphony, Public Arts Commission, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha Creative Institute, Museum of Nebraska Art, Nebraska Special Olympics, Omaha Chamber of Commerce, Omaha Theater Company for Young People, Friends of Joslyn Castle, Girls Inc. and co-founded the MEDICI group, a fund-raising organization for the department of Art and Art History, University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

 

 

Arts Advocacy Is My Livelihood

Gretchen Peters serves on the Advisory

Board of the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

To learn more about what the NCE does: http://www.nebraskaculturalendowment.org/

Forest Floor

There is something about hanging art on a wall in your house.  It reflects who you are, what you’re interested in, what you see as beautiful or provocative. It can hang there for a really long time, or just a while. It is part of the whole space. There’s the furniture and rugs and books but when the art goes up, it makes the space come to life, it makes the soul.

Appreciating and learning about visual art, and all the arts, can be a lifetime exploration. Living with art and seeking out art makes us all more interested and interesting. It’s for everybody.

It is so important to educate the whole child, the whole human being.

To make it possible for everybody, it’s important to teach little kids about art so they can make their own creative choices about what goes up on their walls, or the sounds that go in their ears or the sights on their screens. In the current learning cycle, students are drilled with rigorous repetition of words and numbers and are missing the joy of creativity and invention. It is so important to educate the whole child, the whole human being.

Frost on Hosta

As for the way I make art, I work with nature’s forms, making representational pencil drawings in blocks of color and movement. Like Georgia O’Keeffe’s floral explorations, I am interested in shapes of color that travel the eye on the page. And then adding light and shadow to shift over those surfaces to build depth and interest.

About Gretchen
Gretchen Peters is an advocate for the arts. She volunteers for the arts, makes art and teaches art.

She taught art at Gering High School for 35 years and now makes art derived from her surroundings using colored pencil as the medium. She has received numerous awards for her teaching and drawing skills and her works are in collections across the country.
She serves on the boards of  Humanities Nebraska, Judicial Nominating Commission, West Nebraska Arts Center, Theatre West and the Advisory Board for the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.  Gretchen’s  previous board work includes: Nebraskans for the Arts, Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Gretchen earned degrees at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Chadron State College. She works and resides in Gering, Nebraska.

For inquiries about Gretchen Peters’ work email gpeters4@charter.net

Painting Is My Livelihood

Celestial Navigation, 30 x 36, mixed media and acrylic on canvas

Bud’s Story

“Livelihood” is an alteration of the Middle English word, livelode, “course of life,” first recorded in the 15th century. And in that sense, painting is my “livelihood,” my course of life. “When all else fails, I always say, paint a flower,” I like to say. I’ve always loved art, artists, and their contributions to culture but only began working at it in 2004 at the age of fifty-three. I’d always wanted to be an artist –so after ending a long time career as a union organizer, I started painting day after day and night after night. Ten years and thirteen hundred plus paintings later, I’m still discovering creativity in myself that I thought I had, but needed to dig down to, reveal, and express. I am now semi-retired and paint whenever I can. I teach writing part time at Metropolitan Community College, maintain a social/political commentary blog, play my saxophone in an oldies rock and roll band and in a jazz quartet at my church, and sell the occasional painting.

I like living in a synesthetic and creative mix of music, and painting, and writing. Combining mixed media and paint melodies and color metaphors and visual sounds in a silent explosion of color on a multi-dimensional flat canvas satisfies me. With touches of Van Gogh, Matisse, Dufy, Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollock, Lee Krasner, Stuart Davis, Peter Max, Merello, and others, I try to weave together these sensory threads of life into my work.

Living in that place between memory and hope, I continue to explore the desire for meaning we humans experience

Living in that place between memory and hope, I continue to explore the desire for meaning we humans experience—that searching for patterns we can recognize, that comfort zone of the familiar. And yet I find that many of my pieces exist in that world between the recognizable, safe, comfortable — and the illusory, discordant mysteries of structure and form. Some of my works capture the frustrating lack of clarity and meaning we too often witness or experience, but most lean toward the world of comfortable pattern and include the lighthearted whimsy of creation. Sometimes after a long day or week of working on abstract compositions or contemplating the meaning of life, the relativity of perception, the inadequacies of language, and the devaluing of knowledge, I need to paint a flower or a sailboat on the ocean, a happy dog playing a saxophone, a chicken, an abstract world-scape, or go play a round of golf.

My Studio, 30 x 36, acrylic on canvas

I like to say my work has been exhibited at Joslyn Art Museum, and it was, but really it was just a one night only fundraising silent auction dinner in the Atrium! Nevertheless……….

About Bud
Bud Cassiday graduated with M.A.in English from the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 1976. He has exhibited his work at several fine art galleries in Omaha and Eastern Nebraska. Bud has been a guest artist at The Omaha Community Playhouse Stage Right art auction. The Backwaters Press has featured Bud’s work as the cover illustrations for two of its poetry publications. Bud’s sketch of the Durham Science building at UNO has been featured on the cover of several UNO Algebra textbooks. Bud regularly donates his art for non-profit fund-raising events.

Bud was an honorary judge for the YWCA’s Children’s Art Against Violence contest in 2007 and 2008. Bud’s art was featured in 2012 at the UNO Criss Library H. Don and Connie J. Osborne Family Gallery and in 2013 at the Dr. Joyce Norene Wilson Gallery at Bellevue University. Bud’s work can be seen at UNO’s Criss Library, Midlands Hospital in Papillion, Ne., as well as corporate and non-profit organizations including Zaiss & Co., The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation office, and The Nonprofit Foundation of the Midlands. Bud’s liturgical art hangs in the sanctuary at First Central Congregational United Church of Christ at 36th and Harney in Omaha. Hundreds of Bud’s paintings are in private collections.

www.artbycassiday.com

Painting Is My Livelihood

Lotus 64″ x 50″ Oil on Canvas

Christina’s Story
My mother worked full-time as a nurse, but she was also a very talented artist. She always had a little studio in the house. I was attracted to that from an early age. She was my mentor from the very beginning. I grew up on Long Island, next to the woods and the Long Island Sound. Mom would take me to MoMa on Sundays. I have always been exposed to the arts.

When I was about 9, she gave me a choice and asked if I want to go horseback riding or take ceramic lessons, and I chose ceramics. I took lessons with Lillian Dodson, a wonderful woman, and as I grew into young teenager I helped her in the studio in exchange for lessons. My original pursuit was ceramics.

Cache, 48″ x 48″ Oil on Canvas 2013

Then I went off to college in Vermont for a couple years and my professor thought that if pottery was what I wanted to pursue, I should go to the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. When I got there in the 1980s, contemporary art was changing, as it always does, and was very installation and multi-media based. My studio was in the painting department. I realized my work lent itself to painting where I could explore form there. I have been painting ever since.

IIn 1985 my fiancé and I came to Nebraska for a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and I have made Omaha my permanent home ever since. Living on a sailboat on and off for 8 years I have always considered Nebraska to be my anchor. I’ve always believed in the arts here, and have seen the explosion of culture. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed. This is a place where if you want to go and be involved in something you can, whereas in larger cities it’s difficult. There’s opportunity here. This is the land of space and time. And time, in our culture especially, equates to more freedom. And freedom equates to more time for the creative mind.

This is the land of space and time. And time, in our culture especially, equates to more freedom. And freedom equates to more time for creativity.

Surface 48″ x 72″ Oil on Canvas, 2011

In my work, there’s always been this connection with nature and water. When I became ill in 2006, there was this shift and my whole life changed. A lot of my work today—although it still has a basis in nature and botany and oceanography and science—has a spiritual nature to it in the sense that there is a connection about how we as humans in so many ways disconnect ourselves with the world and universe. My work attempts to give us the opportunity to contemplate our connection to the rest of the universe and our environment. And there is such similarity between the ocean horizon and Nebraska prairie horizon where land meets the great sky. That’s why there’s a landscape painting tradition in Nebraska. Our relationship with nature is very strong. Through my work, I hope some people have a greater connection to our environment.

Through my work, I hope some people have a greater connection to our environment.

Photo by Bryce Bridges

About Christina
Christina Narwicz bases much of her work on the natural world. Although often abstracted, the painter’s organic themes clearly reference botany, the Caribbean Islands, the constantly changing environment as well as her own garden. Narwicz has exhibited nationally and internationally in both solo and group shows at venues such as Artemesia Gallery (Chicago, IL), Galerie Shulgasse (Wurzburg, Germany), Garden of the Zodiac Gallery (Omaha, NE), among others. Her paintings have been featured in publications such as Metropolitan Home, Omaha Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review and The Omaha World Herald. Awarded Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mid-America Arts Alliance as well as three individual Artist Fellowship awards from the Nebraska Arts Council. Narwicz earned her BFA from Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics and currently lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Narwicz was nominated for the 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation award.

 

Freedom of Expression Is My Livelihood

Gerard’s Story
I come from a colorful culture. Everything was so vibrant: the talk, the walk, the art. I feel like that history gives me these senses to find things and information. When I was figuring out my path, it was about discovery. Discovering myself, others, peers. I’m studious, I’m a people watcher, and there’s a reason for it.

The hip hop culture was a big inspiration to me. People around me didn’t really approve, they asked, “Why do you want to be different?” And that just added firewood to the fire. But hip hop was the first time we were able to take something and create our own identity within the culture.

My goal is to educate hip hop’s core values and principles through art and be an ambassador to the culture. And I want to focus on the positive. I like to use art to mentor kids and catch them early on, like with the kids who are into street art and graffiti. We share a common interest.

Hip hop is the inspiration, but the message is about the under-privileged, their voices are not being heard. There are a lot of things happening in poor communities, a lot of realities that are not being shared.  A lot of abuse of power. Injustices. I can’t drive through North Omaha without getting pulled over. That gives me my passion, my drive. I want to be able to use my voice to help the people. That’s why I paint faces. That’s why I paint elephants.

My work today is changing so much. It’s all a dialogue. Painting on canvas is just like having a conversation with someone. It’s that discovery. There are highs and lows, different energy, active lines, brushstrokes, messes, textures, layers.

My golden principle is to follow my heart and not doubt it.

About Gerard
Gerard Pefung came to the U.S. from his native Cameroon as a teenager in 2001. Drawing on music and cultural influences, he continued nurturing his talent and by his twenties developed a sharp style all his own. Over the last few years his impact on the Omaha street art scene echoed through the Midwest. His work is found on walls and buildings throughout the region, and the events he coordinated have showcased his medium, encouraging the larger community to embrace urban art.

Pefung has drawn on his success to mentor youth and advocate on behalf of public art with a variety of organizations including The Kent Bellows Studio &  Center for Visual Arts, The Joslyn Art Museum, Children’s Square, Girls Inc., Omaha Public Schools, Norfolk Public Schools, and the Omaha Police Department. You can find some of his decorative murals at restaurants like Taita, Pig & Finch and Berry & Rye. When he is not painting or mentoring, he is chilling.