We were lucky to catch up with Kelly Schaub recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kelly, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

I started in a creative field and spent almost 30 years working with nonprofit theatres, but my full-time income (mostly freelance) was on the business and management side of theatre and the creative side was often more for my personal fulfillment than for the remuneration. About 10 years ago, I started my “second career” as an artist. As with my time in theatre, I’ve pieced together a living, sometimes with odd jobs that were totally unrelated (and often a little bizarre). I’m please to say that 100 percent of my income now comes solely from creative endeavors and I’ve never been happier. At almost 60 years old, I am still just “getting by” but I’m in a very good place in my life and I love most everything about it. I have realized, quite recently, that I truly have to shift my mindset. As a freelancer, I was able to cobble together enough projects to survive, but never really enough to thrive. I’m now working on mindset and setting loftier financial goals and really doing the work required to get to a more comfortable place. When you are a self-employed, one-person business, it can be more challenging than living paycheck to paycheck, as often I don’t know where the next dollar is coming from or if I’ll be able to cover the bills next week. I finally got to a point where I no longer want to live like that, and am making major changes in my business, but it all really comes down to mindset. Selling art, getting into exhibits, and teaching locally are unpredictable sources of income. But, in 2020, I started teaching online and have grown that business, and with the right investment of time and energy, I am now seeing that I can have bigger goals and a more stable income. I am doing the work and am already beginning to see positive results, but it isn’t easy changing a mindset that has been with you for a lifetime. I do think mentorship is so valuable and I’ve only recently started working with some true mentors. I’m already seeing the possibilities and I’m so excited to grow a sustainable business that allows me to be creative and continue to work for myself, but without the constant struggle to make ends meet. Mindset and mentorship are really where it’s at, especially when you are going it alone.

Kelly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a mixed media collage artist in Rockport, Texas. I love the accessibility of collage. This is why I teach – no preconceived notions, no “I can’t draw/I can’t paint” excuses. The materials lead the process. My vintage materials lead to narratives and my abstract work focuses on color, composition, and movement. With a background in live theatre, I love the ephemeral aspect of vintage collage materials. Two main influences from the theatre world continue to guide my work in collage. First, there is the ephemeral aspect of a theatre experience. Each performance is different and will never be duplicated exactly ever again. Second is the collaborative nature of the theatre, where artists with a range of skill-sets come together to enhance and strengthen each other’s work. The audience is collaborator, too, often heightening the experience and informing the transient nature of the art. When I discovered collage, the ephemeral papers, the layers, the beauty in collaborating with the original source material, all grabbed my heart. When I discovered encaustic a few years ago, I thought I’d just like to enhance my collage work a bit. Little did I know that the qualities of encaustic wax would take over a great deal of my artwork and experimentation. I love layers. In theatre, it was layers of storytelling, along with lights, costumes, set design, and often music. In collage, it is layers of precious papers. Add to the papers, the luminosity and wonderful textures that can be achieved in encaustic work, and I feel like I will never run out of creative inspiration. In addition to layering wax with collage materials, I’ve begun creating more sculptural work. So many themes can be explored with such simple materials. The lowly piece of vintage paper and some melted wax can create such beauty and such mystery. I’d like to continue to explore these materials and push my techniques to the boundaries for a future solo exhibition. I envision a recreation of nostalgic moments in a tangible, yet fleeting memory, by combining real, tactile, paper reminders of our past with the somewhat dreamy aesthetic of wax. I long to express our stories and histories with layers of papers, wax, color and texture. Common objects and everyday documents will rise to a higher level and the familiar will become a feeling, a reminiscence, and a possibility. Looking forward and looking back as I experiment with these humble materials will draw people in to the narratives, while they create their own mysterious endings.

Three and a half years ago, I created my first online class. I hosted a Scrap Exchange, and launched a yearlong online class, Collage Alphabet. After many years of thinking about teaching online, I jumped in. The people in the online course creation field told me that if I made something once, I could sell it over and over again, making money while I slept. So I tried it. And while I’m still so very proud of the concept and training in Collage Alphabet, I have to tell you that my initial goal in April 2020 was to get 30 students in that class. (It was the beginning of lockdowns and the world was in such a state of flux, that I thought 30 was a very realistic goal.) Guess what? It took almost one year to get to that 30th student. Yikes.

In the meantime, I started adding more classes and more opportunities. I created Collage-Lab 101 as a series of Facebook Lives, and was excited to actually get student comments in real time. Then I started doing free Play Dates on Zoom, where we could talk and I could see their faces! And that was a game-changer. I started creating more interactive classes on Zoom. And my first monthlong challenge, Treasure Trovember, was born. And I realized that I did not just create an online course platform, but something much more important – I’ve created a community!

The next step in that journey is to make Collage-Lab.com sustainable. My wonderful, international collage community is at the forefront as I launch a membership program. I want to show up and serve my members with classes, challenges, information, conversation, and to keep building that community.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

My background for thirty years, before moving to Rockport, Texas, was in live theatre production and administration. I took my entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen into my current art practice, which has allowed me to pivot and reimagine solutions without getting approval from a board of directors or employer. When COVID-19 began changing everything in our world, I kicked my practice and related activities into high gear – I saw this as an opportunity to get some things done that I’d always wanted to do.

When the world went into lockdown in early 2020, I decided to look at the time as a sort of “intermission”. With my theatre background, I know that intermission is a bit of a break for the audience, but there is a great deal that goes on backstage preparing for the next act. I vowed to myself to make this intermission worthwhile, and to put in the work, to set the stage for whatever this “new normal” is going to look like.

I had begun to build a collage-specific resource site, and had announced the first event, a Collage Scrap Exchange and Online Exhibit, when lock-down orders began happening around the world. With collage artists from all over the globe signed up to participate, I pivoted, asked them if they wished to continue, and decided to remove all deadlines. I still ended up with over 80 international artists participating, some of them waiting up to 12 weeks to receive materials from their partners, due to postal slowdowns.

I created a free tutorial, as a small gift to my online community, in response to schools closing and kids needing activities. I then created a free online collage class, again to give back to the collage community, and as a promotional tool for a larger online class.

I continued to build a website full of resources for collage artists, along with building a supportive artistic community through a Facebook group. I then launched a year-long online collage course, with 26 bi-weekly lessons.

Next, I hosted an International Call for Collage Artists, selecting 26 international artists and 26 artists from the United States to create two volumes of collage art, which I designed and published. I’ve now published over a dozen collage collections, sharing my passion for collage with the world.

I have also been able to take my online successes into our community for World Collage Day last year – hosting a variety of collage activities throughout Rockport.

I’m now pivoting back to my business management roots and doing all of the things to grow and sustain my online business. I continue to pivot artistically, learning and teaching new techniques, exhibiting locally, nationally and internationally.

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

As I’ve identified areas that I need to work on personally in my creative business, I find that support for artists is lacking, across the board. Society does not recognize the value in creativity and they tend to take it for granted. It takes education and a mindset shift for people to value original art over “décor” from big box stores. It takes education and a mindset shift for people to recognize the creative workers behind their favorite Netflix shows and their favorite fashions. We still see the “starving artist” stereotype when a young person expresses a desire to go into a creative field. We still see the “hobby” mindset and a disbelief that people actually make a living as an artist, or poet, or creative.

Patronage and financial support of creatives is not a priority for many households. A mindset shift would lead to more people investing in creatives, through purchasing artwork, attending live performances, or contributing financially to an artist’s growth.

Mentorship opportunities can play a significant role in the growth and development of artists at all stages. Arts education programs should be fully-funded and expanded to include training and mentoring in all disciplines. Some of our greatest inventions, ideas, and cultural offerings come from a time when society did demonstrate their commitment to the arts and creativity.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kmschaub.com/ and https://www.collage-lab.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/powonwheels and https://www.instagram.com/mycollagelab
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mycollagelabpage
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/collagelab