Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ethan Heberer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Ethan, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I reckon it is all meaningful, that is really the only thing that has kept me doing it for so long. I knew, even as a young guy, that a life of making the stuff I thought was cool was probably going to mean I wouldn’t have a lot of money. So I guess I’ve always stuck with that; making what makes me feel good. Making art is really just my way of understanding my life, my thoughts and stuff. Without it I wouldn’t really feel like I was living. It’s been like that for as long as I can remember.

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?

Dang, where to start. I’m 32, born and raised in Marthasville, Missouri. After high school I earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Art from the Kansas City Art Institute. After that, my now wife and I moved to Los Angeles, California for a while, then moved to Seattle, Washington, and we just moved back to Missouri the summer of 2022. After my undergraduate degree I really wanted to invest in my relationship with the work I was making. I felt like I was too focused on the end product, achieving something I desired. I spent a lot of time wondering what else I could make that wasn’t meant to achieve anything. It was about how I felt in that moment, having fun, and feeling free. When I first moved to LA was when I started my Etsy shop, Flowering Peace. That’s where the name came from; the idea that I was always growing towards some sense of tranquility through the work. If I had some thesis for everything I make, that would be it. I really, really lean towards having an obsessive personality, I get hung-up on stuff and will fall into loops of doing and re-doing. I sort of become my own worst roommate, in my mind. Sometimes it gets so gnarly that I can loose hours and days and weeks just worrying about one little-bitty thing that went wrong. I’ve basically always been like that, to some degree. But, when I was younger I would kind of hide behind making the, “perfect,” thing. But now I want to learn how to embrace the things that go wrong, to take the time to reconsider the reality I’ve constructed. So the work I make has less to do with what you’re seeing and more to do with the atmosphere it puts off. I don’t really think I’ll ever get to a place where I got all my mental-junk sorted out, so I figure I’ll let it all out for everyone to see as I make my way through.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Making art really makes me feel connected to my life, to the world I’m in. I feel like I’m contributing to life in a positive way. For my future kid, my family, my friends, and billions of people I’ve never met. I really do think the coolest gift we get as humans is consciousness, but it is also the most painful and complicated mess to make sense of. Even a normal, boring day can feel like some mental punishment for no reason, or cause, whatsoever. A split second of a song, a movie, a book, or a painting can offer such a giant momentary pause for happiness. For the person making it and for the consumer. That kind of anonymous relationship art offers is my favorite part of life.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I really feel like people are starting to invest in handmade goods now more than in recent decades past. The nostalgia that comes along with analog goods like vinyl records, VHS, and paper books that really don’t, “need,” to exist anymore has some cool subconscious effect on how we consume and think about art. The internet really does liberate us to wonder what is out there that we haven’t seen, what might bring us a new sense of joy and belonging. I love that stuff. I think people genuinely want to support the things they believe in and communities they love. As a whole, the art market does sort of present itself as a binary world of famous and not, but it ain’t really that way. And the more people get out there and support the artists around them the more interesting and beautiful the world will be.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.etsy.com/shop/FloweringPeace
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/floweringpeaceshop

Image Credits
Portraits by Rachael Heberer