Gabriel Shaffer: I grew up around folk and outsider art my entire life. My mom is Cher Shaffer and she’s one of the artists showing here tonight, but she’s also one of the most well known female self-taught artists in the country. So my entire life, literally from the moment I was born to this moment, I was completely saturated with folk and outsider art. And so with my particular work, I try to write a line between something that you can feel is completely instinctive and intuitive, but for the same token that it’s very well thought out too. So I try to kind of create a paradox of my art. You could look at and take one little piece and ingest it for a while, but then you could come back another week later and look at it and get something else from it. The longer you spend with one of my more serious paintings the more you’re gonna realize there’s actually multiple layers of things and ideas that are kind of going on top of each other there. New York arts magazine this year has an issue on July and August, it’s coming out, that they did an article about visionarist. But there’s most definitely a visionary aspect to all of my work. A lot of dream elements going in my work for sure, I get a lot of influence from my dreams.
Cher Shaffer: Well, what I do is something that I’ve been doing since I was a little girl. I started painting and drawing and creating little dolls when I was 5 years old. We’ve been pretty much nerve culture group since the beginning. And I now live on a really small farm in North Carolina, I still grow my own food, raise chickens, have llamas, rabbits, many cats and dogs and they all show love in my paintings. And then there’s some creatures that defy definition. In 1989, there was some folks, the Lam Pelt to write in a book about appalation artist, and I was featured in the book, oh appalature. And then there was a show with that book, it travel for three years, travelling the country. And it’s, the collection is installed in museums across the country now. Our job in the world is put our energy out no matter how bad, comes at what form, and to make sure that that energy is truly something that comes from the depths of our soul. And that in itself is quite a reward, because I’ve spent almost 40 years, and I’m still showing with really young artists and showing in venues, anywhere I want to. I think that, that’s the thing you always have to be fresh on what you do, try new experiences and make sure that you are always, always looking for the good things in life. There’s a lot of bad things, you can see those, I’m not appolianic, coz I’ve had a lot of pain in my life. But the pain has somehow morphed into something creative energy. I think when somebody has a great passion for what they do sooner or later other people recognize that passion and respond to it. And people have always enjoyed what I do. Sometimes they can't follow it, because it will, it’ll be a little bit different from their reality. But, I find that everybody will respond in one way or another, either positively or negatively. it’s okay, it doesn’t matter, either way, it’s good.
Ed Baltes: Started… started working for a steel company and had access to a lot of little intricate pieces of metal. So, I worked in there, I used to work with clay a lot when I was younger, so, I started to kinda take this metal and just weld it together. That was about three years ago. We all have kinda certain ways that we view things and that can come out in art, it can come out in athletic performance, it can come out in the way we behave. You know, if you have a dream, chase your dream.
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