#sparkchamber 042423 — Rachel Kroh
The fire may go unrealized … until the spark. Today #sparkchamber is thrilled to welcome artist, Rachel Kroh, founder of and printmaker at Heartell Press. Women-owned-and-operated, Rachel’s Indiana-business offers letterpress cards, art prints, and gifts — sold in more than 800 gift shops, museum stores, florists, bakeries and bookstores worldwide — based on her own hand-carved woodblock prints.
Her path to being a professional artist was a winding one, though, and confidence was hard-won and a long time coming. “I did a lot of studying — I have two master’s degrees, only one of them in art — and had a lot of different jobs … from Pan Greaser and Nanny all the way up to Community Coordinator and Executive Director] before I made the plunge into self-employment and business ownership.”
The tipping point to take that leap came in 2012 when her mother was diagnosed with stage IIIC ovarian cancer. Living across the country from her mom, Rachel struggled to find ways to connect with and support her from a distance. She made cards for her, “and people saw them in my studio. I was surprised by their positive responses to them.” Around the same time, she learned about the National Stationery Show and the wholesale market for greeting cards. She focused her energies on developing her first collection.
Her mother’s illness taught her an invaluable lesson. “I began to understand that life is too short to put off doing what you really want to do. That experience also taught me the value of a truly thoughtful, meaningful, and well-designed sympathy card … which is something I’m still chasing down.” With tremendous success! Art critic Jerry Saltz described her paintings and sculptures with the words “radical sincerity,” and unabashed wholeheartedness is a thread that runs through all of her work.
“I have slowly and steadily built Heartell over the last eight years. I have two kids now, and there was the pandemic. My mom died in 2019, a full eight years after the doctors first gave her less than a year. Her spirit lives on in my work, and I’m grateful every day for everything she taught me, and all the ways she helped me make my dreams a reality.”
1.] Where do ideas come from?
Ideas for greeting card designs come from my own relationships, from things I want to say or wish I could say or wish I had said, from things I want to hear. Color is a big part of my process for designing a new collection, a limited palette is a powerful tool for generating imagery. Spending time outdoors, especially in gardens of any kind, always results in new designs. Eating and cooking food is also a deep well of inspiration for me. I think all the ideas already exist, they are just circulating in and between us all the time. Developing a creative practice is all about honing your ability to filter them, grab onto them, make them your own. I keep a lot of lists, do a lot of sketching, take a million photos. The best ideas are the ones I have over and over again.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
My itch is more of a wound — the pain of separation. Everything I make is an effort to draw people closer to me, to each other. I want to create connections strong enough to overcome the forces of entropy that threaten all human relationships.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
I wake up early and think about where my children are; my next thought is about my work. The rest of the day is a dance between the two, sometimes it is more of a brawl. It has never required effort for me to get into a state of wanting to create, on the contrary I struggle to turn it off or turn it down at least, to live my life and enjoy my family and remember that my value is not actually tied to my creations or accomplishments. I started out a hare and my lifelong project is to learn from the tortoise. Habits and routines and systems and processes are my lifeline now. My secret power is a panoptic ability to concentrate on what I'm doing — it is the opposite of ADHD. It can be crippling if I let it because the world completely falls away when I'm drawing or designing. I strategize from sunup to sundown about how to harness it for good and not let it become destructive.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
When a design becomes useful to someone else and the deadline I’ve agreed to arrives I’m done because I have to be, otherwise I would go on making changes forever. My husband has taught me about the principle of diminishing returns, and I've worked hard to absorb that idea and apply it to my work.
