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

Steve, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us about a time where you or your team really helped a customer get an amazing result?

I had the honor of painting #the13electricals outdoor art exhibit

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

Murals

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

I was talking to my sister the other day and she was having a hard time, like a lot of us do these days. They lost a family cat about a week ago and it looks like they are going to lose another here soon, all due to what old age does to all of us, and she told me she was just worried about how my 8 year old niece was going to cope through it and I found myself telling her,

“Dealing with loss is good for people. It sucks, but its good too. It teaches us. You learn a lot about yourself through loss and loss makes you a nicer person.”

I told her that those are good things, and that you have to look for the positives like that through the negatives and focus on those to get you through. I think a lot of my life has embodied that creed and a lot of my professional journey has come as reactionary to hard times, and I think that’s what people find inspiring.

I really started painting quite aggressively to begin with just to get through a divorce. I took it pretty hard and had no idea what to do with myself. Making time to be creative, I found, was a great way to move through the time needed to reflect, process my loss, and try to find peace. That took a while, so I ended up painting a lot! Again though, in these moments we search desperately to find the positives in the negatives, so I went all in on feeding my creative spirit and reinvesting in myself, and that felt good. I was reminded the importance of self love and started to see improvements in my work. I now had the time to teach myself new things and approach new techniques to get out of my comfort zones a bit. I also rallied around people who loved me, and took the time to reinvest in the relationships I had with others because I generally feel, that if you take a very conscious effort to always be a good person and treat people with dignity and empathy, and you work hard, eventually you will catch a break.

But when it rains it pours, and I would get my break, but not in the way I wanted.

In 2017 I was in a very bad car wreck where I broke my back. They threw me in a back brace, slapped a medical bill of $100,000 on me, and sent me on my way. I was in a lot of pain and I couldn’t work. Now I would be unable to pay my bills. I was lucky to be alive, there was that. It was at this very moment that the people I had rallied around and the relationships reinvested with over the years rallied around me. The love was immense, and I even had a friend offer me room and board during this time. I would stick to a healthy diet of patience, positivity, and quality nutrition, and would later heal in a manner that left the doctors actually quite impressed. But for now, my back is broken.

So now you go to asking yourself, well, what is in my control? I found I was actually much more comfortable standing in my back brace then sitting down. I’m sure it had something to do with the pressure on my crunched back vertebrae. So again, I found myself painting standing up! I was taking a new commission every few days to a week to keep money coming in, and when that wasn’t happening I was making jewelry, shoes, prints for purchase, third party merchandising, really whatever I could do to expand my brand exposure to new markets, and try to offer it a variety of ways, with the goal to increase opportunities to possibly have multiple sources of small incomes. You don’t have to be mobile to reach new opportunities, you just have to be inventive on how to keep going sometimes and be adventurous enough to put yourself out there. So I was still losing, but everything about what I was doing was starting to find purpose on its own and I would spend nights lost in my work and being creative. Along the way I’m making friends I might not otherwise have met, helping people celebrate and commemorate important people, places, and moments in their life. It all became very fulfilling and rewarding for me.

Oh, and Hello! I also started a paint party company during this time where I was able to have the unbelievable privilege of meeting my love and my rock, my beautiful wife, and now we have three kids, so yeah! Life is good, and its easy to see how the series of very unfortunate events that happened in my life were the things that actually led me directly to her. She’s truly the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and it was desperately searching for those positives within the negatives that kept me going and brought me to her. Just be patient, take a deep breath, and try again. Good things won’t happen to you on your own often. You have to be involved in the process.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

To create something, I think, is about the most powerful thing we can do. When people come to you for custom pieces, there’s something very intimate there and that deserves to be handled with care. There’s almost a level of fear and anxiety that goes into everything you do as a ‘creative’ because you are trying to do justice to a vision you can’t necessarily see yourself, it’s not your vision, its someone else’s, but it’s give and take and you’re putting yourself out there in a very intimate way as well. You have to do your best to really hear people out and not be afraid to ask questions, help them elaborate and develop their wants in front of you in real time, and that will always make the piece better, taking the time to try to understand the “whys” of the work, just as much as the “what”. That’s when you can begin to immerse yourself in it for yourself, and create something beautiful and free. The most rewarding part of being an artist is when you can either achieve these moments because ultimately it is for someone else. A lot of the time art is created as a gift. Maybe it’s a gift to a person, a loved one, or like the city mural and public park installs I was blessed to have done, maybe its for a whole community. You can really invoke true emotions that are very pure, and I’m not sure anything beats those intimate moments of interaction and stir within people in this shared experience that is life.

Thank you for having me and checking my stuff out.

@stevedefoeart

Contact Info:

• Website: https://starlocalmedia.com/planocourier/community-profile-steve-defoe/article_4e8d7ca8-1196-11ec-9742-43604d16d80a.html?fbclid=IwAR1l6a3sAU9NUsJ0HGoBZRDIIxU4VuiUXPC3bcbgH54cwlUHFE5oO5XQfiI
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/stevedefoeart
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/stevedefoeart
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/stevedefoeart
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCqYKr1Q0uDPGIXD3VhRMGOQ
• Other: You can find me on all social medias including YouTube and TikTok simply by searching for @stevedefoeart. I can also be reached at [email protected]

Image Credits
Additional Credits: City Mural location provided by The Town of Little Elm, Texas Additional Credits: #the13electricals by @stevedefoeart is a free to the public, year-round, outdoor art exhibit comprising of thirteen electrical boxes completely painted to inspire and promote diversity, pride in community, nature preservation, and more and is located in the Park of Little Elm, Texas Additional Credits: Bob Ross cutout provided by Vandeventer Middle School Art Program