Featured ACArtists
Each month we feature a new ACArtist with a unique inspirational message for our members. Read their short profile and if you would like to learn more just click on their picture below and go to their detail page to learn more about their life, their work, and their passion for what they do and who they touch with their art.
Russ Peters
Faith Fired Pottery
My handmade pottery is both earthy and modern. I'm influenced by my southwestern and New Mexico roots. The area where I grew up instilled a strong modernistic style in me and a love of color that is actualized by my wife Merri Peters’ flare for artistic design. I have been making pottery since my high school days and started selling my work at art festivals since the mid-80’s. In the past few years, I have continued to attend the major Art Festivals in the Midwest and throughout the Southwest and West Coast selling both functional, and artistic pottery that has taken first prize in competition and graded shows.
Faith Fired Pottery is enhanced by my life-long mate and better half Merri Peters, who’s artistic glaze techniques and painting puts the finishing touches on our designs and makes the mud-slinging that I do into art. In recent years Merri and I have increased our repertoire to include artistic vases, lamps and wall hangings.
I am also one of the founders of the Association of Christian Artists (www.ACArtists.com) and I spend a lot of my personal time not on the potter's wheel communicating and promoting fellow colleagues on the website when when I am not spending time with my family.
Bob Blower
Glass Blowing and Bobbles
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Justin Vining
Studio 654 - Custom Fine Art & Prints
My story begins in the fall of 2007, I had just left an incredible job as an elementary art teacher to attend law school with my brother, who is three years younger. Prior to law school I did not pursue my own artistic endeavors, I just had a passion for art. However, right before finals during my first semester, I very much needed an escape from the books. I picked up a paint brush and subsequently painted a series of work that was much stronger than anything before. Since this time I passed the Indiana Bar Exam, practice a little bit of law but have continued to focus on creating full-time.
I grew up on a small family farm in Northern Indiana and helped farm the very land that three generations of Vining’s had farmed before me. During the late 90′s, with the emergence of larger corporate farms, it become more difficult to manage a small farm and like many of other small family farms in America, we stopped farming. This happened in January of my senior year of high school and I can vividly remember the day of our auction. Watching your barns being emptied and everything you have come to know disappear in a day is not something easily forgotten.
Needless to say, this was a difficult time for myself. In the years to come I reflected upon this experience through my artwork and painted a series of old abandoned farm houses trying to express the longing and sadness I have, not only for our lost family farm, but generally, to the end of the era of small family farms dominating the countryside. So, over time these abandoned farm houses in my paintings have evolved and taken new life in the more simplified forms that are common in my work today.