We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicole Hanson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicole below.

Nicole, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

In 2022, my husband and I decided it was time to take a risk. After years of working within our respective degrees, we decided to take a summer off work and pour into our passions and see if, just possibly, we could turn them into our jobs. For me, that meant investing more time and energy into becoming a full time artist.

After the summer, and realizing how much we had thoroughly enjoyed the new pace, we decided to stretch it. It would involve more risks, and we were ready. We each took a part time job, tightened our budget, and spent the rest of our ‘work time’ on our businesses.

It is paying off! My art business is growing, I am finding limitless opportunities, and I am on track to become a full time artist.

Nicole, 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?

As long as I can remember, I’ve been creating.

I’ve also been pretty entrepreneurial. I remember once, as a kid, our neighbors hosted a party in the summer. I quickly decided to take advantage of the heat, drew pictures, folded them into paper fans, and sold them to our neighbors’ guests!

For a long time, I only drew in black and white because color was so confusing to me. I struggled to mix colors together and end up with the color I intended. After a while, and some practice in high school painting classes, I switched to acrylic painting.

And in 2018, I switched to watercolor. I am a messy painter, and I was living in my first apartment which was fully carpeted. I wanted to get the security deposit back, so I decided to try watercolors, imagining the splatters would be easier to clean. What started as an economical move ended up revealing my favorite medium to paint with! I haven’t gone back.

I am a visual learner, and I recently decided to hack that knowledge. I’ve started connecting the images and stories I paint with truths from the Bible, to help me remember to choose to live in line with the gospel. This is now an important part of my business. Since all people, visual learners or not, process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, I realized other Christians might benefit from these paitings, too.

That’s why I share these connections between the painting and the Bible with my followers on social media and the collectors on my email list. Now they, too, have that visual reminder to live out the gospel in every area of their lives.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I mentioned earlier that my husband and I agreed in 2022 to step back from our careers and dive into building our own businesses. This was a breath of fresh air for me, because I had already been building my art business for three years before this, on weekends and after work. With our risky decision in 2022, I suddenly had plenty of time to get everything done!

It wasn’t easy to get to that point, there. Before, when I painted and marketed in evenings and on weekends, I would have months with no sales. This was discouraging, and I felt confused. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do differently, how I was supposed to be able to make it all work.

And yet, with persistance, working whenever I could scrounge up the time, I kept plugging away until I had even more time to dedicate to it. And here we are!

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I am a Christian artist, yet I don’t paint traditional religious pieces or iconography. My goal is to create art that doesn’t look obviously “Christian” and yet is so filled with meaning that Christians are encouraged to live according to the gospel and remember who God says He is.

In early 2024, I am working on a series about lonliness, community, and God’s nearness.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nicolehansonart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicole.m.hanson
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicoleishansonart
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nicolehansonart
• Other: Subscribe to my email newsletter for collectors: https://subscribepage.io/jwOyZA

Image Credits
Nicole Hanson