Retiree News

From the age of 15, Brenda Fristoe knew she wanted to follow her passion for art. But when it came time to choose a career, she picked the reliable field of accounting over a lifetime as a “starving artist.”

Even while working in accounting, tax preparation, budget analysis and finally as a tax field auditor for the City of Winchester, her love for art lived on. When Fristoe took early retirement in 2015 to care for her father, she also began taking art classes. After her father passed in 2019, Fristoe and her daughter Staci started Create & Celebrate Art, teaching children and adults how to make and share their own art.

What is your approach to teaching art to people?

My daughter and I started with online classes for kids, where we highlight an individual artist and then go into that artist’s techniques. Say for example Grandma Moses, who did landscapes with people doing things. We have each student do a landscape scene similar to the artist, step-by-step, and go slow enough for everyone to follow along. Before the class, we give parents a list of everything the kids need, and we try to make it reasonable in cost.

For live events we do trending stuff, like ceramics and pallet boards. We had an event where 50 women came out to the fire department in Clear Brook to do pallet board art. Part of the proceeds were donated to the fire department, and participants took their art home.

What’s it like running a business with your daughter?

We’re partners. We decide everything together. We each have our own strengths. She’s more geared toward the children’s side of the business, while I’m more geared toward adults and visionary experience. We send out a monthly subscription box [of materials] to adults. It’s a surprise every month. So, we meet and decide what to do for the next three or four months.

What kind of art speaks to you?

When I went back for art classes, I found that I really loved detail-oriented work. Every artist has a style if they take the time to find it. My style is detail oriented, probably because of my accounting background. I like portraits, detailed landscapes, detailed houses, detailed pets. I prefer vivid colors, not muted, not minimalist. There’s nothing wrong with that—everyone is different—but once we as artists find our style and embrace that about ourselves, we flow.

How can art enrich the lives of those who create it?

Art not only helps you express yourself, it also has an effect on your outlook and your emotions. On our Create & Celebrate Facebook page, we do something called art journaling. Twice a week we do this live, step-by-step, to help women destress, using a different technique each time. It can be doodling, mixed media, using things around the house, pointillism. Say you draw a hummingbird and then add dots of different colors to fill in the hummingbird—it’s relaxing and therapeutic. We have people participating online who are widows, young people, people with health issues, people who just watch because it’s relaxing. Art can be such a stress reliever.

How has this experience shaped your retirement?

I would challenge anyone who had a childhood dream of doing something to go for it. It’s so rewarding when you finally achieve your dream. Having an art show of my work and my daughter’s is the ultimate. It’s so satisfying. God gave me a vision for the business—we want you to create and celebrate your work—that’s why we chose this business name. “Create” and “Celebrate.” You can do this and celebrate the fact that you can do this. There is no greater feeling than seeing someone open up and see that they could do things they didn’t even know they were capable of doing.

To learn more, visit the Create and Celebrate Art website.