Sophia Voelker of Black Butterfly Studio tells me about combining art and storytelling and even the stories of people that view it on Tom Ray's Art Podcast - Sophia Voelker: Painter and mixed media artist
Full episode here: https://www.tomrayswebsite.com/2020/10/sophia-voelker-painter-and-mixed-media.html
Sophia tells me:
Making a little career for myself on the side, but the other thing too is storytelling. Art through storytelling and I'm a very expressive person. I love color and I love being bold and the way to tell the story is through art and even music. But since I'm not a musician I felt my strength was using artwork to express how I felt. Where I've been, what I see, how I interpret the world.
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| Ruler of the Soul by Sophia Voelker |
And I've always wanted to continue doing that and now I've seen the realm of how art can affect people on every realm of life is amazing!
So being even in school and doing that small elective class I wanted to take off with it and continue from there. Finding the venue to do it. Actually going into public, my first art festival was in Henderson, the grain valley district and this was back in I believe the 1990's early 2000's. Even then I hungered for it. I kept on wanting to go for it because I thought people loved it and they said, what's the story behind this?
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| Gossamer Wings by Sophia Voelker |
And I would tell them, well this it's like looking at photos. So instead of me showing you a photo, I would paint something that I wanted to tell a story about because of an experience that I had or hearing someone else's experience and painting about it and creating artwork from there.
I wanted to tell stories, I wanted to actually give peace of mind to people's hearts and just let them know, hey this is how I interpret the world. This is who I am and not just with how I dress and my hairstyle but also through my artwork.
I love that you were like, you can't play music but you also weren't painting beforehand too so have you ever tried doing music? Because maybe you're just automatically really good at it!
Actually, you know that's a funny thing when we moved here there are a lot of things that we decided not to take with us because it wasn't necessary. My husband has this acoustic guitar he bought years before he met me because he had achilles tendon surgery and had to rest in between recovering. And he bought the guitar as a way to stave off boredom.
He was about to leave the guitar when we left Vegas, I said, don't you dare we can use that and if you don't use it the kids are going to use it. If the kids don't use it I'll use it! I could use youtube the miracle of youtube! I sat down one day and my kids and I decided, let's see if there's something on that we can try out.
Unfortunately, it's adult size not for children. I'm still trying to go back to learn but in my opinion, I think keyboarding is a lot easier than guitar. It's fine.
That's one of the things that when I make music I mainly use the keyboard. Because I'm like, well I know where the notes are I'll figure it out later and then I never do. So I always end up just sticking with keys.
My friend learned I don't know if he went to an instructor or if he taught himself? I forget which. But he is really good at playing the guitar so I thought to myself, you know if he can do the guitar then I will continue with learning how to do the piano for my children.
So see you do actually have the ability to play music! I knew that it couldn't be completely like you can't!
Listen to the full episode with Sophia Voelker on the podcast - https://www.tomrayswebsite.com/2020/10/sophia-voelker-painter-and-mixed-media.html