We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cheryl Testut Cuellar a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cheryl, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

A very good friend invited me to participate in a community art project for the One Pulse Foundation. Lafayette and Rushford was recruiting local artists to decorate 49 ceramic doves, which they would sell in their store, donating all the proceeds to the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting.

It was May 2018…my husband had been battling Alzheimers for more than 8 years. I’d cared for him at home for most of that time, but had finally given in and placed him in a nursing home under hospice care. It had been a difficult few months for me, but I reluctantly took home a dove, and vowed to do something creative with it.

Several weeks passed, I had no ambition for the project, and before I realized it the deadline had approached. I came home from the nursing home late that night feeling emotionally and physically drained, but unpacked the dove and laid it out on the table. After staring at it’s blank white ceramic surface, I contemplated giving up. But I started sketching out some ideas, which led to a sudden burst of creativity. Staying up all night working on it…I felt like my husband was guiding me, and that creating this piece of art as a tribute somehow helped me put down the burden of grief I’d been carrying, at least for one night.

Cheryl, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I think I’ve always been an artist…there’s something about a picking up a pencil or a paintbrush that gives me a sense of possibility. I grew up on Long Island and studied advertising and fine art in school. I worked as a window dresser and sign maker in a department store, learned my way around a darkroom and a printing press at a printing company, and then did layout and typography for a local newspaper where it took a screwdriver to change a font. I taught myself to use computer design programs that were in their infancy at the time, and enjoyed a long career as a freelance graphic designer, remaking clients’ random thoughts into effective communication under tough deadlines with grace and humor.

In addition to designing on the computer, I have always worked on my own art, including acrylic paintings, wall murals and writing/illustrating children’s books. When Covid came about in 2019, much of my freelance work faded away, and I decided to retire. After so many years of designing on the computer, where precision and structure are necessities, I took classes in abstract art, which freed up my creative process.

I still do some freelance graphic design, but I’m focused more on acrylic painting and illustration. I’m currently working on a children’s book about the adventures of my grandson’s stuffed turtle. My eyes and mind are constantly open to new perspectives, new mediums and that, I believe is the heart of my creative energy.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In the late 90s, I was working for a unique dynamic, award-winning advertising agency that was owned by a person I had a lot of respect for. He was committed to excellence, creativity and ethics, and had carefully built a team of like-minded people. I loved his philosophy of teamwork and commitment, and although the work was hard, I was certain I’d found my permanent home.

One particularly busy Thursday, we were summoned to his office and he informed us that he was closing the agency immediately. There were quite a few active projects, and he intended to leave our clients and vendors with no notice and no recourse. Our client and vendor relationships were so valuable that I, along with one account executive, spent the next three months working without pay to wrap up projects for clients who had already paid for them.

Shortly after that, we began getting requests to produce new projects. So we founded a small design firm in my kitchen, and built it on relationships and excellent work, I felt the loss of the faith I’d had in my previous employer, but our new business grew over the next 12 years, and became the permanent home I’d been seeking.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

People think that creativity is the ability to draw or paint or sculpt. But I think that everyone is creative in some way. Creativity is more than being an artist…it’s about how you see things. It’s the ability to consider something in a new way, from a different perspective. If you can find a new route home to avoid a traffic jam, or put together a meal from what’s leftover in the fridge, that’s creativity.

I’ve lived in the same house for 45 years. One morning I went down the street to feed my neighbor’s dog while they were on vacation. As long as we’d been friends, I had never spent any time on this side of their yard. I was walking around with my coffee, waiting for the dog to finish sniffing around, and realized that you could see my house from a different angle from back here. And the street looked different too, as did the back of another neighbor’s house, who I never realized had a pool.

The point is that no matter how long you occupy a space, no matter how well you think you know it, sometimes all it takes is a walk across the street to see things from a different angle. Keep your eyes and mind open to new perspectives. Creativity lives somewhere between a problem and a solution. The ideas are always there, we just need to put ourselves in a position to see them.      

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cuellarcreative.com
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/cuellarcreative