Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Fenerty. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
I’ve always been someone who likes to have multiple irons in the fire, and for a long time I kind of got off on how many different things I could be juggling at once. In my early twenties, I had endless energy. At 23 I started teaching high school English at my old high school with almost no teaching experience. Every day felt like an endless stream of creating lesson plans from scratch, learning how to act as an authority figure to kids five years younger than me, grading, and conversations with parents. Art is free therapy, so while my days were filled to the brim from 6AM-5PM, I needed my down time. After dinner I would hit my sketchbooks. Somehow I was creating the most I ever had while also being the busiest I had ever been. By 25 (after the encouragement of coworkers), I started an Etsy and began selling prints and stickers, as well as taking on actual commission work. The groove I was in at that point in time feels like something out of a dream now.
When my parents decided to open a brewery when I was 26, I immediately knew I wanted to be a part of it in some way. It started with concept logo sketches, and by the time the doors opened in 2018, I was occasionally helping with label designs and bartending weekend shifts. Eventually my role began to grow more and more there, and then the balls started dropping.
By December 2019 and at the age of 28, I was officially starting to feel burnt out. I could burn the candle at two ends, but I couldn’t find the third end I desperately needed. I was passing up projects because I knew I needed to focus on my teaching job, but then would be resentful towards my career for detracting from the stuff I actually wanted to do. I loved being in the classroom, but hated the time it took up outside of it.
I had come to a crossroads and needed to pick something to give up. Teaching was something I knew how to do after six years. I was confident in my abilities, I loved my coworkers, and I loved working with the kids. Art fed my soul, provided me with an outlet, and somehow was making me money. The brewery was my family and an opportunity to grow something together. Giving up any of them felt like a weird betrayal.
But somehow I found myself in my former headmaster/beloved boss’s office in February of 2020 to let him know I would not be signing my contract for the following year. I was going to give my art and the brewery my full attention and see where they could take me. I really, really want to say that I stuck by this decision, but, you know who arrived on the scene a month later.
In the face of COVID, suddenly my parents didn’t know what was going to happen to our business, I felt like no one would be spending excess money on art, and the security of a well-paying teaching job with full benefits felt like the coziest of security blankets. In April I called my boss once more and asked if he would be open to me staying for another year.
However, by the time August rolled around and we were preparing to head into the strangest year of teaching any of us had experienced, my gut was flaring up (literally). I knew that my heart was not fully in the teaching game anymore. The first week back I knew that I would not be signing my contract for real come the spring. And in one sense, the acknowledgement that I had made the mistake not taking the risk during that uncertain year gave me a permission slip to spend the year how I wanted (as long as we all were masked and six feet away from each other). I was ready to give up the lesson planning, grading, scope and sequences, competencies, parent emails, and hours devoted to recertification in order to make room to pursue my passions. The harder part to give up was the environment and relationships forged within my classroom. I made it my mission that year to make my classroom a safe space for kids to be kids and for healing and understanding to take place in whatever shapes made most sense. We wrote, we drew, we explored, we talked, listened to music, read out loud, and cut out lots of grammar practice. I leaned into what felt good not fearing repercussion because I knew I was leaving.
And despite it being my favorite year of teaching ever, I for real gave my notice in the spring of 2021. Freeing myself to teach in the way I had always wanted to allowed me to explore creative spaces in an even more vigorous way. My art flourished in that chaotic year, and there was a calm in my heart knowing I was parting with the teacher part of my identity in the most positive way.
People often ask if I miss teaching- of course. If I could do it again without all the red tape, I would. But if I had stayed in the classroom and given up my art or the opportunity to grow the brewery with my family, I would always have regrets, and that little resentful seed only would have grown. Leaving something that felt so safe and familiar was bittersweet and so scary, but the room it has provided for these other aspects of my life to grow is something I will forever be grateful for. I feel more authentically myself than I ever have, even with the plethora of unknowns that came with taking that leap.
Sarah, 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?
The other day I told a friend that I still have imposter syndrome sometimes when I refer to myself as an artist. She laughed and said but that’s literally the way I think about you, as an artist. Art has always been something I have loved. My first memories involve the smell of crayons and the feeling of Playdoh between my fingers. If the word “craft” was mentioned, my excitement was uncontainable. I remember one Christmas, my cousin who was an art teacher in Florida mailed us a ginormous cardboard box filled to the brim with various art supplies and I was actually drunk off the moment. I idolized my art teachers, was absorbed by every educational video shown to us about different artists, and wanted to cry the first time my mom and dad brought me to the MFA. Art has always been such a core part of my identity, but it still feels weird to refer to myself as an artist- like that’s a title earned and I’m going to jinx it or something by owning it. It’s cliche, but to be doing something I love so much not just for the love of it but also because there are people who want to pay me for it feels too good to be true. It’s not something I’ll ever try to do full time- I love our relationship too much to burden it that way. I am an artist, but I’ve been a teacher and an artist, and at the moment, I am a marketing director and an artist.
For the past six years, I’ve run an Etsy shop for my prints and stickers and have tackled a number of commission projects. I’ve painted murals, created labels, custom stickers, invitations, and painted large scale pieces. I’ve always been a sketcher, and for a long time not a painter, and especially not a painter who loved watercolor. I hated it for a long time, but then I realized that I’m not a patient person and I like to work in short and chaotic bursts, so watercolor was given a second chance, and it’s now one of the biggest loves of my life. I work primarily in watercolor and ink. I don’t follow the rules. I like to let watercolor do it’s thing, and then reign it in with my pen work. I like saturated and vivid hues with bright highlights. Color for me is intuitive. If you ask me to teach you how to paint, I can’t, and I won’t. You’ve just got to lean in to what wants to come out of you.
I love animals, and nature, and taking my own reference pictures as I get older. Sometimes the only goal of a piece is to make the viewer go “awww”. I like clean white backgrounds and hyper focus on the subject. If I’m going through some emotions and feels, I like to draw figures and fill in their outlines with the visual representation of those moods. Music plays a large roll in my work. My portfolio is varied and a little chaotic. My mom jokes that I have a split personality when I draw, like there are different people making these works.
I am incredibly proud of the branding I have produced for my family’s brewery, Northwoods Brewing Co. Those labels are the products of many conversations and shuffling of ideas. This is the first time in my life where my parents, brother, cousin, and coworkers who are like family have been a part of my creative process. I love putting our brains together. Creating labels is a type of design I am so pleasantly surprised to have stumbled into.
I love working with clients and coming up with end goals together. My favorite clients are the ones who truly lean into my style and don’t just come to me because I’m a convenient option. When they give me basic guidelines, tell me to run with it, and are so excited about the end result, that feeling is kind of euphoric.
At the end of the day, my art is my therapy and my way to unclog my brain and hit pause. I am so grateful for it, and just continuously happy and thankful there are people who are receptive to it.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
The one thing I hear more and more as my art reaches a wider audience is that a lot of people think creative talent comes down to luck or something you’re born with. I have the baby sketches to prove thats not the case, and also the humility to recognize that there are people INSANELY more talented than myself. Like, sometimes after falling down a rabbit hole of reels on Instagram, I have brief moments of wanting to burn all my art supplies. But then I don’t, and I look at my the place my art has arrived to at this point in time, and I am grateful and happy. I’m not painting or creating the way I am now because of some weird natural gift, it’s because I have spent hours and hours putting in practice and playing and failing in order to maybe put out some stuff I am happy about. The bulk of creators I know are constantly honing and sharpening their skills. And when we don’t use them, they get fuzzy like anything else. I think people are CALLED to create. It’s something in them that is attracted to the idea of visually expressing themselves and playing with it and putting the time in to figure out how they can do it in a way they are happy with. I’ll be the cliche person who says I think anyone can be an artist if they want to devote themselves to it. I could have been a volleyball player if I wanted to practice, but I didn’t. Behind every beautiful posts you see artists putting out, there are hours of practice that didn’t make the public cut. My art professor in college made us do a three hour sketch, and upon completing it, he had us wipe it away. People get hung up thinking things need to be perfect or they get too precious with something that they don’t allow themselves to just play and explore knowing that the end result might not be a masterpiece. Go play, go explore, fail a lot of times, and find your creative senses through it.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
Honestly, one of my favorite parts about being a creative is the community it has introduced me to. Being willing to share my work and put myself out there has connected me to so many other creatives in the process. Our crafts are all so different, but our desires to tell stories, make something with our hands, bring an idea to life, etc. connect us all in the coolest way. I love hearing about what inspires others or the ways in which they tackle their process. We all have such different processes, the individuality of it all is so exciting to me. Any time I get to be in a room with other creatives, I am so incredibly energized.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sarahfenertyart.com
- Instagram: @s.fenertyart
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-fenerty-8816928a
Image Credits
Image Credits to Abby Fenerty