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Elizabeth Schaefer Endener | Episode 560
Elizabeth Schaefer Endener started working with clay in high school but did not pursue it as a career. Instead Elizabeth got her degree in Biology and worked at a variety of places trying to find the right fit. Elizabeth got involved with the organic and sustainable food movement, working for and managing some start-up companies including local food cooperatives and a small organic farm. Elizabeth’s entrepreneurial spirit grew and decided that what she wanted more than anything was to combine her two passions, both of which involved transforming the earth. So, in 2015 Elizabeth set upon starting a business creating and designing a beautiful line of pottery, as well as growing a little cut flower garden and raising butterflies.
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How much does reading help your personal growth?
When I go to the library I am actually not a big fiction person. I go to the art section, the gardening section, and probably the spirituality section and I tend to read as much as I can on things that I think I lack in. So for a while,I was a very disorganized child for example, my room was always a mess and as I got older I realized that I really needed to become more organized. For awhile I was reading books about cognitive therapy and about how your thoughts are connected to your emotions. I started purposefully giving myself positive thoughts through affirmations and stuff like that and I think that it kind of sparked something inside of me that my main goal in life is not job security, we talked a lot about paying our bills, but it was about I wanted to wake up in the morning and be excited about what I was going to do that day. And I think that with pottery it is so vast that you can never stop experimenting. I guess I did go to school for science and part of me just loves tinkering and doing all these experiments with different clays and different ways of making a form or whatever. It just satisfies something in you that makes you feel like a little kid again and that is the same way with being in a garden. I just started raising butterflies, for example, in the studio, and it just brought back being a little girl frolicking through the fields and looking at all the bugs. Nowadays we have all this technology. I think that when you are able to be open to learning new things it makes life exciting again. I know what it is like to work in a job where those things are not being met, where you are stuck in an office and just doing the same thing all day long and you are just bored out of your mind and just watching the clock waiting for it to get to that time so you can leave, you know what I mean? My days aren’t like that, they are exciting.
Is it important to be interested in a variety of fields?
With me specifically, I can’t answer this question for every body else except for me, and yes. With my specific business and interest, I am growing plants in my greenhouse and I am watching them grow into a flower and I see that flower and I am inspired by its form and that gets translated to design that I use in my work. So yeah, it’s really important to be looking at all these different aspects of things that I am really interested in.
How important are the informal relationships of other peers?
As informal as it is it can become actually personal when I am interacting with people on the internet. It is important because that is my business first of all, I am not actually talking to a human being I am usually my customer service skills are usually through email and direct messaging, but the community that is created even though it is informal and you are not actually talking to that person, you are creating a relationship that you wouldn’t have in your town. We feed off of each other, at least on social media we see what that person is doing that day and we comment, Oh that’s beautiful. And maybe you incorporate a piece of that into your work the next week. So even though it is informal, especially for artists who work in their own studios that might be the only sense of community that many of us have.
How critical was the focused formal part of your education for your success?
I am glad you asked that because a lot of what I had been doing was so self-guided. I was teaching myself to make functional forms and learning most of the stuff from YouTube and the internet, but there were certain things that I lacked and it wasn’t until I took a class and their was an actual woman, her name is Cynthia, I called her my business guru. To have that relationship with a woman who was also a mother at the time and for her to say, Oh honey, why are you putting cracked items on your Etsy store for everyone to see. Take those down. I needed someone to look straight through what I was doing and be like, No.
How important is making room for your own creativity to flourish?
Before I created a permanent space for my studio, I moved my studio about four times since 2015, since I started because we rented from different places and this is the first time I have owned a home, my husband and I. I made a point to put together my studio before the decorative botanical brand was ready. I hate to be, it was like I had to tend the soil first. I wanted to be a successful artist and I wanted to create something that was beautiful that people really enjoyed and I made a point to create the space in order for me to channel the ability to create something like that. So the beautiful illustrations that are put on the mugs are only going to come to me when I am in the garden and that is how I work. I am staring at Monarch butterflies in front of me while I am drawing a Monarch butterfly.
People say that the key to success, and KEY is an acronym for Keep Educating Yourself. How much do you agree with that?
I agree with that one hundred percent. One hundred percent. It keeps you inspired, it keeps things fresh, it keeps the creative juices flowing, and the inspiration is just waiting there for you but you have to constantly expand your mind in order for that to happen.
Book
Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain
Contact
Instagram: @littlegardenpottery