artist | What's Your 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

Kelli’s Story
Painting is my livelihood…and at one point I fought it tooth and nail. Now don’t get me wrong, art has resonated in me always. I remember spending hours as a little kid taking chunks of tree bark and whittling them into shapes on the rough surface of the sidewalk, my days punctuated by more cat doodles than I care to admit. I drew for the sake of drawing; made for the sake of making. That’s just what people do right? Have lunch, make art, breathe, make art. Simple.

So where was this resistance? The fighting against? It came with the approach of “artist” as an identity. But I didn’t want to be an artist! I wanted no part of that world I perceived to be of sucking up and selling out. No sir. Not my thing. And so began the epic, losing battle of denying my true purpose. I floated and fumbled through my early twenties, painting but refusing to show the world.

It was when I was finally decided to go to school full-time—or more specifically when I was introduced to oil in my painting class at UNO—that my entire creative world exploded open. Here was a medium that allowed me to say what I wanted to say! To paint what I saw on the backs of my eyelids! I can liken it to writing in the dirt with a tree branch; it works well enough until someone hands you a pen and paper.

With the right tools in hand, I began exploring and painting, quite literally, the stuff of my dreams; simultaneously learning about art throughout the past, how to talk about my work, how to talk about myself in relation to it, contemporary artists, and the power of double espressos. The change happened slowly and quietly. I didn’t even realize that I had returned to that magical place where art and artist are inseparable until someone asked me not so long ago, “So, what do you do?” To which I simply and easily replied, “I’m an artist.”

About Kelli
Kelli McDanal grew up between Nebraska, Oregon and Pennsylvania, moving to back to Kearney Nebraska near the end of High School. She went on to spend several years in Sedona, Arizona before returning yet again to our beautiful state, and has resided in Omaha now for more than four years. She is continuing to work toward a BFA in Studio Arts/Painting, as well as a BA in Art History. She plans to balance working as an artist with the pursuit of an MFA in painting and hopes to ultimately teach art at a college level, thus happily remaining in school forever.