A Brush With Life
Casual conversations with artists, musicians, farmers and so many other creative, fascinating folks from southeast Minnesota. Let's find out how they got here, what inspires them, what challenges them and how they work.
A Brush With Life is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
Episodes
28 episodes
#27 Hawk Talk - with Kirk Payne
Kirk Payne is enraptured by raptors! Kirk is a practitioner of the ancient sport of Falconry - training wild hawks to hunt for quarry. He is also an ardent conservationist, protecting and promoting the expansion of the k...
#26 Metamorphosis into Iron Butterfly - with Deb Majerus & Joel McDonald
Deb Majerus and Joel McDonald share the surprising story of love and flowers literally growing out of the ashes, as they launched Iron Butterfly Flower Farm.
#25 Making a Great Impression- With Tamsin Barlow
Tamsin Barlow is a full-time Printmaker and Painter, who also squeezes in a couple of hours teaching Zumba exercise classes every week.She painstakingly carves her design into a linoleum block, rolls ink onto the surface, and presses it ...
#24 Going Wild - with Jeff Feece
Jeff Feece lives right in in the city, but he can listen to the tree frogs trilling at night, watch hawks hunting in his back yard and he sometimes finds the dried nymph shells where dragonflies have hatched out in his tiny pond.
#23 - Bucking Tradition, with Cassandra Buck
Cassandra Buck never met an art medium she didn't love. She is a painter, muralist, jewelry-maker, weaver, embroiderer, and more - and she often combines those traditional mediums in untraditional ways. Cassandra is not one of those artis...
#22 - Extreme Green - With Robin Greenfield
"Be the Change You Wish to See in the World." That pretty much sums up Robin Greenfield's life and philosophy. Once a successful businessman and aspiring young millionaire, Robin had a revelation about how his lifestyle was ha...
#21 Fiddling Around - with Teresa Walter
Teresa Walter grew up playing classical violin, and she was really good at it, but she took a 20-year hiatus from music to focus on family and career. When her daughters were grown, she picked up the violin again and started to play casually at...
Happy Holidays, Dear Listeners!
It has been so much fun creating these podcasts, interviewing so many fascinating folks, and sharing the conversations with you! I appreciate you, all of the guests, and the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, who awarded me a grant to laun...
#20 - The Road to Crossings at Carnegie - with Marie Marvin
With plenty of guts and gusto, Marie Marvin turned an old Carnegie Library in Zumbrota, MN, into a hub of creativity. The building was bursting with art, whimsy, artists working, children learning, sometimes even people doing yoga. ...
#19 Siren Songs - Of Trombones & Mermaids, with John Sievers
John Sievers is not one to toot his own horn, but he does let it slide. John is a trombonist who plays in many bands, a poet who writes a haiku a day, an English professor, and Rochester's most enthusiastic music booster. In this ep...
#18 Enamored by Enamel, with Amy Johnson
Amy Johnson is an enamel artist who creates copper and silver jewelry with gorgeous, colorful glass designs fused to the surface. Amy tells us how she discovered this art form, her process, and how making art helped her survive and heal f...
#17 - Little Homestead in the City - with Heidi Kern
As a young girl, Heidi Kern was inspired by "Little House on the Prairie" and dreamed of creating a self-sufficient life where she grew all her own food and sewed her own clothing. As an adult, she wound up living in the city but sh...
#16 - Well-Versed in Community - with Jean Prokott
Jean Prokott is Rochester, MInesota's Poet Laureate! As the community's official artistic wordsmith, she writes poems for community events and creates an annual poetry event for the public. She is also a teacher of English and Philosophy ...
#15 - It's a Big World -with Oliver Books
Oliver Books is passionate about all things sound. He is a singer-songwriter who performs solo and in a 7-member band called Oliver Books and The Big, Big, World. He has worked in music production and movie production. in the ...
#14 - Raising Her Voice - with Leann Eriksson
LeAnn Eriksson speaks softly but carries a big voice. Music has always been a huge part of her life, beginning with growing up on an Iowa farm, playing the flute in school and singing in the Lutheran church choir. Since then ...
#13 - Dreaming, Playing and Creating with Susan Davies
Susan M. Davies Sue Davies is a painter who approaches her work from many directions - abstract, animals, landscape, sumi-e,meditative, whimsical...but the constant is color: rich, vibrant, exuberant color. You sense that she...
#12 - The Zen of Daring to Be Darin - with Darin Podulke-Smith
Darin Podulke-Smith is an artist, improv actor, stained-glass creator, banjo-player and Buddhist priest. In this episode, we talk to Darin about banjo practice and the practice of Buddhism, and what it takes to become a Zen priest. He also desc...
#11 - Deb D'Souza - Putting the Pieces Together
Artist Deb D'Souza is devoted to the ancient art of mosaic and has traveled the world to study it, but she also incorporates innovative techniques. Mosaic is a patience-testing process than can take 40 hours to assemble thousands of...
#10 - Eva Barr, the Dream Acres Dream Maker
Eva Barr puts the culture in agriculture! Eva and her partner Todd started Dream Acres Farm, near Wykoff, Minnesota, as a land collective where they built all the timber-framed farm buildings, taught heritage farming techniques, farmed wi...
#9 Drawing Us In- with Lynette Yencho
Lynette Yencho has a lifetime of experience as a commercial artist, from drawing school buildings and class ring designs at age 16 and for Jostens, to designing collectible figurines, to being agraphic designer for the Minneapolis Star newspape...
#8 -Life About Face w/Kevin Ian Reid
Kevin Ian Reid was the Orofacial Pain Specialist at Rochester's Mayo Clinic for 26 years. He had never studied art, but in order to cope with the strain of working with so many people suffering from pain, he began painting, especially abs...
#7 BlueGrass Songs & Prairie Grass Paintings - with Becky Schlegel
Becky Schlegel grew up in South Dakota singing classic country music. When she moved to Minnesota, she fell in love with bluegrass music and with her banjo-pickin' husband, Heath Loy. Now Becky is a singer with a voice as sweet as nectar...
#6. The Colorful Land of Judy - with Judy Onofrio!
Judy Onofrio's work has spanned from firing ceramics to burning huge structures in fiery performances, elaborate, quirky brooches to elegant sculptures assembled from bones, celebrations of nature to divas, acrobats and other colorful character...
#5 -In Focus! with Suzanne Szucs
The first time I met Suzanne Szucs, she was dressed in the most sumptuous, colorful, exotic clothing you can imagine, dancing at Squash Blossom farm during our Cow Puja festival. That is just one facet of Suzanne's life - she also&n...
#4. Carving a Joyful Life - with Kevin Ewing
Kevin Ewing recently retired from his career as a teacher and is now devoting himself to his favorite pastime - woodcarving. He is not just whittling away his time - he creates elaborate, elegant pieces inspired by architectural and histo...
