We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kaitlin Schreiner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Kaitlin , thanks for joining us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
When I was in high school I took my first art class when I was a sophomore, it was required. This was always my favorite class and I looked forward to it every day; We did clay work, drawing, print making, oil pastel work, pencil shading and point perspective (I hated this the most!!). My next year in art class we did our first painting assignment, which was a 24″ x 24″ ceiling tile that we projected a flower onto and then painted them with acrylics for the main hallway in the high school. I was immediately hooked. At this time, I was allowed to take online community college courses and I would finish that work as soon as I could and race upstairs to the art studio to work on my painting. There was something inside me that felt the most peace I had ever felt doing anything and it felt like home.
The following year I did my first oil painting and I loved this even more. I loved being able to work on a piece and come back to it and keep building and building, my painting was an owl. My art teacher Mr. H pushed and pushed me on this, telling me “no it’s not done yet, keep going!”). He taught me patience and how to really put time into the work. While we were doing our oil painting in AP art my senior year, I would always sit next to my friend Leah Griffin. She reminded me of a real life fairy, she was painting a portrait of a girl with a river on top of her head and animals coming out. She was and is maybe the coolest person I’ve ever met still. She talked about fairy tales like they were real and she frolicked around and wore crowns on her head and had the coolest music taste I had ever heard before. She was fearless, and weird, and decorated her room like a forest. We had assignments that took us to the woods to take pictures and observe nature for our work and pretty soon her and I were spending lots of time outside at parks and drawing and just enjoying art, books, music, and Gods creation. She made me want to believe in more than what I saw around me and to create the world I wanted to live in inside my head. She revived the things inside me that I used to love as a kid and gave me permission to take hold of them again.
At this time of course, it was time to pick something to study in college, and I never really considered Studio Art or Painting as something that would be acceptable to study that would turn into a “real job”. I chose to study Fashion and Textile Design at North Carolina State University, College of Textiles. This was an amazing program and I truly learned so much about Photoshop work, Fabric Print Design. Jacquard and Hand Weaving, etc. I learned how to take criticism, complete projects on my own time, to be disciplined and self motivated, and trust the process. At this point I was still completely mesmerized by painting and I couldn’t let it go. I began every single one of my textile design projects with a painting first and then I would take it into CAD and turn it into what the assignment actually called for. Over spring breaks and time at home I would paint in my room; I painted whimsical portraits of female characters from books I was reading at the time and still felt so at home with stories and fairy tales and God’s Creation, thanks to my friend Leah showing me how cool it is and that stories are not just for kids. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Professor J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings has shown that the connection between fairy tales and children is not nearly so close as we think. Many children don’t like them and many adults do. The truth is, as he says, that they are now associated with children because they are out of fashion with adults; have in fact retired to the nursery as old furniture used to retire there, not because the children had begun to like it but because their elders had ceased to like it”.
As a kid, I always had my nose in a book everywhere I went and built fairy houses in my backyard with all the neighborhood kids. I was more interested in the magical imaginary worlds I was reading about than the real world around me. Everything made sense to me there. Until recently, I had not realized how much the things that we love and do when we’re kids are everything that we need to be doing when we’re adults. I’m reminded of how Madeleine L’ Engle puts it “The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked children only”. It is our calling. I just recently completed a collection of paintings surrounding the concept of our Earthly Home, Heavenly Home, and Make Believe Home (where our inner child feels safe).
Fast forward to my senior year of college I was still completely obsessed with fairy tales, the outdoors, and things unseen and the same fairy girl in all my work. I was driving to Charleston SC from Raleigh every other weekend to see my fiance, my creativity was on fire and I never felt more myself. We spent time cooking, walking through marshes and swamps, and reading. I was grounded, spending quiet time with the Lord every morning, doing yoga, I was happy as could be. My senior project had to be a compilation of the things I had learned throughout my four years into one cohesive collection. I decided to create a home textile collection for a studio apartment called The Lost Girl. It was perfect and it was everything I ever wanted to create. I watercolored all my motifs and got to work on them in CAD. I created a duvet cover with a map of Neverland on top printed on Cotton Sateen with accompanying euro pillows, throw pillows, and tea towels. The star of my collection was a 48″ x 60″ jacquard woven tapestry with chenille yarns of my Lost Girl painting (a self portrait I did the spring of 2016). My jacquard fabric design ended up being the main image to advertise the whole senior textile show.
During this time I was trying to find a job after graduation. I tried everything from a Peter Millar internship, Belk internship organizing their textile files, and a start up t-shirt company. All of these things left me incredibly unsatisfied. I interviewed with Belk again, interviewed with a fabric company, nothing worked out. I started emailing interior designers in Charleston to be an assistant because I knew that’s where I wanted to move as soon as possible. None of these things worked out, finding a job seemed impossible even with my degree and education. Eventually I started asking myself what would I want to do regardless of what my program is telling me I must do (find a job in my field no matter what and if I don’t I’m a failure). I prayed and prayed during this time to find the right thing that would allow me to move to Charleston.
Finally, I realized the one thing I have always wanted to do was work in an art gallery. I loved painting and ever since I first visited Charleston in the spring of 2015 and saw the art galleries something clicked in me. I went online and saw that a gallery was hiring in downtown Charleston and called them up to inquire about the job on a Wednesday. After we hung up I had an interview that weekend and got hired the day I interviewed. I was thrilled.
In May of 2018 I moved to Charleston the day of my last exam and started working at the gallery a week later. For the first six months I learned how to sell the artwork of a local artist, frame prints, box and ship artwork, and do gallery administrative work. I thoroughly enjoyed this work and had nice coworkers. I ended up leaving 6 months in due to an overbearing boss who watched us on cameras all day. My anxiety was through the roof constantly so I left the gallery. For three months I took another retail job where the sales floor was competitive and the girls gossiped behind each others backs. I told my husband that I could feel my light going out and I was crushed and my heart hurt after so much turbulence in my career. My creative spirit had flat lined. Feeling like I had no other choice I went back to the first gallery in the spring of 2019.
At this point I meant business and I picked up my artwork again. In the spring of 2019 I developed my current website and chose the business name Kaitlin’s Whimsy, it was time to take my work seriously and learn everything I could at the gallery. I stayed at the gallery for four more years and learned so much. I got really good at the job. I was stretching canvas prints, dry-mounting canvas prints. texturizing canvas prints, building custom frames from molding, held the highest sales, and essentially was running the gallery by myself. I really enjoyed the work! This is where things really became a problem, I became too independent and successful at the job that when people left the owners did not hire someone else. I gained the owners respect and they really liked me and I liked them but I was underpaid, unprotected, and overworked. I asked for raises to match the level of work I was doing and never went higher than $15 an hour with minor commission pay. I worked most holidays except Christmas day and Thanksgiving day. I felt so trapped. I do want to say that there are parts of this job I did really enjoy at the time. I feel no ill will towards the owners and they were very generous at times in other ways that were not financial. They treated me like family at times and I’m grateful I had a job at all.
The other side of this is that my creativity was flourishing and my work was improving immensely every day. It’s like I was training and did not know at the time what I was training for. Every morning from 7 am-8 am I spent time praying and having quiet time with Jesus, getting my soul right and prepared for a day at the gallery. From 8 am-8:30 am I spent time painting, working on my website, and creating content for instagram. My free time on the weekends was spent gathering photos of local marshes and breathing in the fresh, healing air of the low country for inspiration. I created my first collection of works consisting of 15 “Whimsical Marsh” scenes. I sold my first painting for $20 to my high school english teacher, I was thrilled!!
Meanwhile, things at the gallery were getting worse. Since I was there by myself so much I was constantly fearful of who would walk through the front door that day. The only thing that alerted me to someone coming in was a beep in the back of the gallery where I worked. I would walk all the way to the front and just hope and pray that someone normal had come in. Sometimes it was homeless men, others it was registered sex offenders. but mostly the people were nice and normal. Homeless people would vandalize the windows, riots were happening downtown, and it was out of control. I was struggling financially and working so hard for them and had unpaid lunch breaks where if the door beeped I would have to stop mid sandwich and help the customer.
Through this time I found the most beautiful moments of worship in the back of the gallery because I had nothing left to do but surrender to the Lord to help me through this. My pastor Levi Lusko always says that worship that hurts like hell, heals like heaven. I was worshipping in the back. finding joy in singing praises to the Lord and on my knees praying through the hardest moments of fear. I discovered podcasts that I listened to while I worked by Emily Jeffords “do it for the process” that told me how to have my own art business and the book “Walking on Water” by Madeleine L’ Engle connecting faith to art. Inspiration was everywhere.
Fall of 2020 I moved into my first art studio in the loft of our house and started really feeling like a real artist. Christmas of 2020 I did my first art show and sold a few pieces! I set up one table and brought all the work I had created the last couple years. I spent all of 2021 painting things from marsh scenes, florals, swamp studies, and abstracts in the mornings before work. I sold all my pastel marsh originals at my next art show at Deep Water Vineyard in December 21′. This time I had two tables, a couple canvas prints of my new marsh scenes (most of them sold!). Around this time I was praying fervently that the Lord would allow me to become a part time artist, it was everything I dreamt of.
January of 22′ came around and I was desperate to get out of my gallery job but did not want another job because I knew I wouldn’t be happy there either. I wasn’t sleeping well and constantly having nightmares about my next day at work. Early in the morning one January day I heard a voice in my head say “if only I could get into my local farmers market every Saturday and make money there I could probably leave my job”. I know this was the voice of the Holy Spirit and thus began the most beautiful unfolding of events that I could not be more grateful for. I reached out to my local farmers market, which might seem like a strange place for me to try to sell my work weekly, but I had a great feeling about it. They responded a few days later and told me to come try the market and see how I would like it. I was terrified about how I was going to explain to my boss that I needed a Saturday off. In February of 22′ I did another market at Hum Grocery on Wadmalaw Island the weekend of Valentine’s day and had my most successful market yet selling raw canvas pieces I had dyed with indigo from Pluff Mudd Farm and framed prints of my marsh scenes. I had a really small inventory of things to sell and I still made $1,200 that day. After this I knew it was time to make some changes and dip my toes in the water. I approached my boss and told them I needed to go down to part time to be an artist of my own. I felt liberated, ecstatic, and so grateful for what the Lord had done for me!!
February 26th of 22′ I did my first farmers market where I now set up every Saturday and have been ever since June 11th of 22′. Around April of 22′ I was reading the book “Forward” by David Jeremiah and it said the following, “if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair….commitment , thats the key. Choose on chair…like Pavorotti, you have been blessed by God. You’ve been blessed with talents, resources, and a dream for the next phase of your life. Once you’ve prayed about that dream and set the right priorities to achieve it, your next step is to focus your life on that one main thing”. That April I chose my one chair and never looked back. My husband was incredibly supportive of this decision and the Lord was providing for us through his job too in new ways. His hand was over us in all the ways possible. I told my bosses a month in advance that June 10th would be my last day at the gallery and their response was essentially “do you think you’ll make much money?”. God had done it, He had gotten me not only to a part time artist but FULL TIME. Something I will never ever take for granted and still don’t. Today I am happy, healthy, safe, and provided for by my Father in heaven. On my last day at the gallery, I got in my car and thought “I am so incredibly thankful that I will never have to wonder who is walking through the front door of that gallery ever again”.
Shortly after going full time, the farmers market was in full swing and going so well. One day a woman approached me at the market and asked if I would like to be a vendor at the Kiawah Mingo Point Oyster roasts on Monday nights in the summer. This was a huge blessing and I knew the Lord was blessing me for my obedience and faith to leave my job by giving me this opportunity at the time I needed it most. The summer of 22′ was the busiest and most fruitful summer ever. I was selling my original paintings for real money now from a couple hundred a piece to $1,000, lots of framed prints, and hand painted ornaments every Monday night for three months. I was walking away with great money and no longer struggling financially. Being an artist the income is always incredibly up and down, it is not always like this. There are really awesome weeks, really bad weeks, great markets, and disappointing markets. All of them always worth it. Every morning I wake up excited to go to work and do what I love. It is truly beyond anything I could have ever thought to ask or imagine. I have the luxury of setting my own schedule, spending as much time with the Lord as I like in the mornings, taking care of our home, being a less stressed wife, cooking meals, and implementing crucial time of solitude and rest.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am a conceptual oil painter in Charleston, SC! Over the years I have painted marsh scenes, abstract pieces, and portrait pieces. This past year I feel like I really stepped into the work I’ve always been meant to create, a combination of abstract, portrait, and landscape work. I find my inspiration through prayer walks, anything that is going on in my life spiritually at the time (favorite bible verses, books, etc.), things unseen, and fairy tales. In order to create the work I feel called to I believe the only way for me to do this is combine all these different styles. I hope to evoke feelings of the Lord’s light and peace, wonder, whimsy, and a sense of nostalgia gently stirring within. Painting like this allows me create in a sort of puzzle form and let the work come to me organically and in visions through a slow process. It is much how C.S. Lewis describes his writing, “I don’t know where the pictures come from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he ‘makes things up’. When you ‘have an idea’ could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?”. I aim to create pieces that connect deeply to what is going on with me at the time, but also that makes the audience sit and stare and see their own world unfolding in front of them.
Kaitlin’s Whimsy is a brand that encompasses all the things above. On my social media I love sharing exactly what is going on with me at the time; Favorite bible verses, new books I’ve discovered, places I have visited that reminded me of other worlds and then I connect all those things to my work. My most popular sellers are my oil marsh scenes and prints of them sell the most often at each market and online. I also create oil painted Whimsical Marsh ornaments throughout the year, notecard sets, printed journals, and now tote bags! One of the newest things I’ve added to my lineup are my 3″ x 4″ Scripture Mini’s. These are tiny oil, marsh studies on Rives Cream Paper with my favorite scriptures written on the backs and framed in a gold glass standing frame.
My day to day looks like waking up at 7 am, making coffee, sitting and reading my bible, journaling, praying, snuggling my two cats, and then going for a prayer walk. From 8:30-9 I work on social media posts. Around 10 am I come upstairs to my studio and do all the things that need to be done for my next market; Bundling notecards and journals, framing canvas prints, packing everything up, putting stickers on bags and making price tags. Around noon I break for about two hours for lunch and rest. This is a crucial part of the day, because I do not think anyone can do anything well without proper rest. Around 2:30 I go back upstairs and do any creative work I need to do; Painting my own collections and projects, painting ornaments, commission work, or creating email campaigns.
I typically do a market every Saturday and over the summer I do markets every Monday night too at Kiawah. This is the busiest time of year. I enjoy taking on commission work, especially work that is more conceptual and less painting from a photo. Most of my sales take place in person at markets, but this past holiday season my website really started taking off which is very exciting! I hope to move more towards internet sales and less markets at some point so that I have more time for my painting. This year I am hoping to step into offering more painting classes! I did my first test run with friends back in October and it was so fulfilling and they had a great time. I think this will become a large part of my business in the future.
I am not in this for the money, I do this because I love it and I know it’s what the Lord is calling me to. My goal is to bring others close to Jesus through this work and how I conduct my business; To tell the truth about his faithfulness in my life and be a light where I can. My first and best always goes to the Lord, however much He tells me that is at the time. My focus is not to become famous, successful or anything like that but to live a simple, humble, beautiful life doing what I love and serving the Lord however He calls me. Someday I hope to live on a beautiful piece of land, working with my hands, being with all the family the Lord decides to bless me with, and just enjoying the Lord and this beautiful life.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Walking on Water by Madeleine L’ Engle, Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, Of Other Worlds, The Chronicles of Narnia Series by C.S. Lewis, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. Sermons and books my Levi and Jennie Lusko. The Faith and Art podcast by Ellie Sikes and Grace Manning. The Do it for the Process podcast by Emily Jeffords.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Doing so many markets!! This is so important if you are a local artist starting out. People will take your card, follow you on social media, come back to you time and time again for purchases. The locals are so important to be successful. At my summer Kiawah event people come back to me year after year because they are excited to add on to their print collection! Just showing up is so important, there is never a market that isn’t worth it. It could turn into a possible commission, future internet sale, or customer referral to a friend of theirs. Also email marketing! I was shocked to discover that people really do still read emails and not only that they are excited to receive them from artists. This is a less noisy platform where you can catch someone who is willing to sit down a read what you have to say. It feels like a quiet safe place that is almost not a part of the internet. Consistently showing up here as well makes people trust you and see your work ethic too.
Contact Info:
- Website: kaitlinswhimsy.com
- Instagram: kaitlinswhimsy
Image Credits
Suzannah Reece