Meet Rebekah Molander | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Rebekah Molander and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Rebekah, is there something that you feel is most responsible for your success?
Connection.
Connection is the most important factor. The connection between me and what I am creating, the connection between my collectors and what I create and the connection between me and my collectors.

Every now and then someone suggests you should paint this or that, whatever it is, it would look so neat in your style, but for me, if it’s not something I have a connection to, I can’t. Occasionally I have tried and people have liked it, but I always look at it and feel disconnected and uninterested, I don’t want to be disconnected to my work. I never see it as good or feel proud of it if I don’t feel connected to it. It all starts, for me with a connection between me and my painting.
From there it’s about another person connecting to it. People should only buy art that makes there feel something! And I don’t really care if they feel what I feel from it. If I paint it for some reason and they feel something totally different in it… That’s fine to me! In fact, that’s interesting me. I never liked those classes that asked you what a painting was about and then I would say what I saw and felt and then they would tell me, no, you’re wrong, the artist painted it with this in mind. How is what you feel when you see something ever wrong… if Art makes you feel something, then it’s never wrong!
I always feel like I’m so interested to hear what other people feel and see from my art…. And that’s the third connection, the one between me and them. Wether we feel the same thing or different things, that’s a conversation, that’s a connection.

Whenever someone buys a piece of my art, Todd and I always welcome them to our Art Family. They are a part of it now, they have supported our business and contributed to our Art Life, and we do these private, invitation only events in our studio and only our Art Family is invited and the more art we sell the larger our family gets and we do these events and the amount of people who come in our studio as strangers and an hour latter they have drink in their hand and are talking and laughing with each other like they are old friends…. That’s another connection. That’s a beautiful thing.

I’m an Artist… I’m in the connection business.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
What set me apart… I think the artist community is a little different than the rest of the world. I think a lot of the world is in a big competition, this guys trying to beat that guy to the top… and I don’t think I’m part of that competition.
I’m not competing with the other Houston Artists or any Artist, I’m just sitting in this room with my dogs and my music everyday and I’m trying to put myself on canvas…. I’m just here drawing a line around my thoughts and feelings.

They way I make art is I see techniques or styles I like and I think wow, how do they do that, and I sit in my little room with my dogs and my music and I practice. I mix paint and I texture canvas and layer things and it looks sorta terrible, and the next day I get up and I do it again… over and over and over again until I get, and then I keep doing it until I not only know what I’m doing but I understand why this works and that doesn’t and how I’m creating what I’m doing, and then once I understand it I ask myself how now that I can do this, what do I want to use it to say.

Is it easy… no… I spend most of my days failing. I make more bad art than I do good art, but I still love it every day. I’d rather spend my day making a mess at something I love than winning at something I don’t care about. And every time I try something and fail at it, I learn from it. Sometimes you have to get comfortable failing. I learn a lot a more from failing than when I do something and it just works… when I fail at first, I know what I did wrong and why it didn’t work, when I just get it right I’m left wondering what I did and can I repeat it?

I recently painted this boat, and I’m learning to work with micro lighting and wiring the lights myself an adding small lights to some of my paintings, so I painted this boat at sunset with this working light on it, and that sounds like the challenge because the light was new for me, but that’s not where I struggled, I struggled with these clouds I painted. I lost track of how many hours I put into these clouds and in the end the colors were really pretty, they were definitely clouds, and I felt good about the piece and I put in my studio.
So now I’m sorta obsessed with clouds. Todd drives me around and I’m staring out the window watching them, I can’t stop. So I keep painting things with clouds… keep trying to figure out their secret, I’m pretty good at shading, but over shading makes them look thick and heavy, like little floating rocks, that’s just weird, they have distinct edges but they aren’t solid.
Practice and Practice and Practice makes improvement and sure enough, I’ve improved!! Well, now I’ve got this boat hanging in my studio and I’m looking at how far I’ve come and the clouds I’m painting now next to these first ones I did several months ago… well, now I can do better. So now I’ve taken that painting out of the studio and brought it home and I’m working on the cover up of the clouds and redoing the background smooth fade of the sky, and I’ll tell you, covering up a hard line is a lot harder than putting that line on canvas in the first place, but if I can do better now I can’t have this piece that is no longer my best in my studio. At the time it was my best, but now all I see is what I did wrong on it, because now I know more, now I know what I’m doing. I can’t just leave this there hanging on the wall, not now, for my collectors, when I know I can now do better.
So circling back, the only person I’m in competition with as an artist is myself.
No, it’s not easy, but yes it is my favorite thing.
How did I get here, by practicing, by getting up every day and try over and over again until I got it. By knowing practice only makes growth and improvements, perfection is not the goal, but the more I practice and learn, I do feel it’s my responsibility to my collectors and myself, to sometimes pull past work and go back and make it better if I know more now then I knew then and I can. What do I want the world to know about my brand… I am always putting the best of me out there. If I’m sharing it, if I’m hanging it on my walls, it’s the very best of me and if I figure out how to do better, I have no problem pulling something off the wall and making it better. My art is me, we’re always growing together.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Actually that’s a funny question because I was just in this situation. A very good friend of ours was in town just the other week and I brought him to Sawyer Yards.
Sure a lot of cities have an Art Scene and a lot of them will do some sort of Open Studios or Art Walk events, but until you see it people don’t really get what Sawyer Yards is and how amazing the Houston Artists as a community are.
My studio is in the Winter Street building, which is the building that started Sawyer Yards when it opened in 20025, which has grown over the past nearly 20 years and Sawyer Yards now takes up 10 buildings over several blocks and is The Largest Creative Campus in all of the U.S.
So we started at our studio 2101 Winter Street Studio C120 and from there we walked our campus and in went in studios that were open, and took in the art the lines the hallways and then went across the tracks and had lunch and drinks from the third floor patio of Tejas Brewery and were able to look out onto the downtown skyline. After that we walked if of back across the tracks to the Silos and then to Silver Street.
This was just a random day that they happened to be in town for and we got to see a lot of art and go in a few studios, but if you can come out on a Second Saturday, that’s the day to come. The Second Saturday of every month all the artist across the entire Sawyer Yards campus open their doors and people are invited to walk the building and go in and out of the studios and talk to the artists. It’s really more than you can see in a day, especially if you stop at the restaurants tucked all through out and grab a drink and snacks. 
It’s my favorite thing. 
To see this many people and everyone is just doing their own thing. Going from studio to studio you are never seeing the same thing twice. Hundreds of artist, all creating in their own way. It really is an incredible thing.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I absolutely did not get here without a help, and a lot of love, and a lot of encouragement. I feel like I have a whole team behind me, and that team keeps growing, The further I go, the more people I’m lucky to have in my life supporting me and cheering me on!

Where to start is much harder than do I have help!
I think the place to start is my collectors, as a whole, let’s talk about what I call my Ground Level Collectors. If you are part of this group, you know it!!
This year I moved into my very first solo studio space, and I built this wood and resin bar in it, and I named the bar Ground Level Tribute Bar, and I wrote the name of every person who has bought a 20×20 or larger size piece of art from me on the side of it as a way to one thank them for supporting me and my Art Life that I love so much, and two to remind me I have this amazing team cheering me on every day, looking for me to succeed. It took me somewhere between 4 and 40 years to get here, and every name on that bar, every person contributed to it. 
4 years ago I was just a girl sitting in the spare room of my house painting with my dogs, it’s because of all of these people that I get to actually call myself an artist and that I am where I am. It’s collectors buying your art and supporting you that turn from just a girl playing with paint into a real artist. This is all I ever wanted to be, and these people are the reason I really am an Artist.
Shoutout One easily goes to my collectors, my Art Family…. They changed my world. They push me and challenge me and support me and encourage me. They are what it’s all about.

I will never stop thanking my buddy Rod Ryan and his team Alex and Tessa and Chile form the 94.5 Buzz Radio Station…. He never thinks he deserves a thank you, he always says it’s my talent, what did he do… he opened a door for me I didn’t know how to find. He didn’t even know who I was and he talked about me on his radio show in August of 2020 and that’s how I sold my first painting, to a lady named Keli who I’m proud to say I still keep up with. That’s the day I became a real Artist, and I will always be thankful to Rod and Keli for opening that door for me. I didn’t even know where the door was much less how to open it, they did that for me, and they didn’t know me and they had no reason to, they just did it.

Anyone who knows me at all knows my third thank you is saved for my husband Todd and our son Spencer. I don’t even know where to begin with the amount of Love and Encouragement and Support I get from them. I guess we can start with how they’ve let me transform our house in to a working artist studio that we happen to live in. If you don’t think it takes a lot of patience to live with an artist… well, you’ve obviously never lived with an artist!
Our Spare Room is now My Studio, Our Formal Living Room is the Resin Room and Large Scale Pieces Room, Our Formal Dining is now the Drying Room and Gessoing room, the Living Room is the Living Room, but it’s all the Canvas Stretching Room at times, the Back Patio is for Sanding, and the Garage is where we cut all the wood and Build the Frames for my Canvases… and anything left in our house, is probably an “Art Experiment”.
But these two are in for it all. Whatever crazy thing I’m doing, they live and work around it, and what’s more is they are proud and excited for it. 
I couldn’t do this without them.

I always say, yes, Todd and usually Spencer show up for me at every event, they help me carry and move art around, Todd works in the garage in this crazy Texas heat with me and we build the frames together, but all those things aren’t really what Todd does for me, what Todd really does for me, is Todd Gets Me. I get to be me because I of him.

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