Laura Mrazik: Portland Art Gallery

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have in the studio with me artist Laura Mrazik, and you may recognize her from being not in the studio with me when we were first doing these podcasts virtually. So it's really a pleasure to have you here today.

Laura Mrazik: Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Lisa Belisle: I'm so thrilled that you've continued to evolve your art and you're working so hard at it. I am not really sure when you sleep, honestly, between the small children that you're raising and the full-time job that you have and the art that you're doing. What I understand is essentially you do this in the middle of the night, anytime you have. Talk to me about how you integrate all of this into your life.

Laura Mrazik: Sure. My children have a very solid routine, so when they go to bed, I paint. I think we talked about it the last time I came. I'm often thinking about what I'm going to paint next, and my paintings are on the easels in our living room. So I'm seeing or thinking about what I'm going to adjust to a painting throughout the day, or the kids are talking about it. I've also found that I played sports all through my life, and there's something about when you're a student athlete, your grades are better during season and you are more efficient with your time. You are more in the moment, you have to be efficient with your time. So I've found that this has actually improved my work-life balance in being able to be efficient with my time and be in the moment and have this set time for sort of meditation, to reset too. So it's really been helpful. Even though it takes up time and some nights I might stay up later than I probably should painting, in the long run it's been very beneficial for my balance in life.

Lisa Belisle: You're bringing up something that I often have felt, that I actually just like to have different aspects of myself doing different things at any given time. When I'm not entertaining my spiritual side, my physical side, my intellectual side, it's like, oh, well, that feels a little off balance. And then people will say, but I feel like you do so much, don't you get tired? And you're right, it's very energizing, and it's very balancing because you're just kind of always cultivating these aspects of self. I want to veer off to the side for just a little while, because you and I continue to work together on what we are calling connected care at this point, virtual visits, telehealth, whatever we want to call it. One of the things that you and I are doing right now is kind of crafting and creating care models around bringing digital health services to people in our communities. I'm wondering, that's such an interesting and specific and sort of one-side-of-the-brain thing, but it's also very creative. As you're doing your art, are you working through some of the stuff that is going on? Is your brain on the side working through some of the stuff that's going on as you're working?

Laura Mrazik: I think subconsciously I tend to release energy as I'm painting, not necessarily be thinking through the specifics. But it's interesting. In my day job at the hospital, I'm in the operations of implementing new services, and then also as we're designing these new care models, it's almost parallel to my work process sometimes. As my style has evolved, I'll spend the beginning of a painting having more detailed, focused, linear work, and then at the end I'll add in more organic palette marks or strokes. So it's having that balance. Annie Darling mentioned this in one of her interviews, that balance between the linear and the organic. I think you need to have both. It's apparent in work and also as you're creating in the painting process too.

Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I've seen with your art over time is that you focus a lot on florals, and you focus a lot on people, and a little bit with maybe pets. But I feel like those are maybe a commission sort of situation, and well-deserved for those who love their pets. I've seen the way that your flowers are evolving, and it's so interesting to me. I'm wondering if you've noticed the same thing over time.

Laura Mrazik: Absolutely. I spent a lot of time in the beginning wanting to have an accurate representation of a particular floral, and it's again similar to athletics. You learn the fundamentals, and once you get comfortable with the fundamentals, you can explore more. So as I've become more comfortable with paying attention to and observing the shape of a flower or the shading, I've been able to explore more with adding those organic palette marks or brush strokes. As I continued with this style, sort of a light bulb came on one day. I had worked through a painting I had already finished, or thought I had finished, and something about it just felt off. I went back to it. It was a day that I was home with my kids and I felt sort of scatterbrained, and I just put the colors that I was feeling at the time on my palette and put brush strokes and palette marks around the painting. I hadn't felt that satisfied finishing a painting yet. There's often a feeling, you don't know exactly when the painting is complete. And I felt completely confident the painting was complete. So I leaned into that and continued to paint what it may have been defined as finished before, and then gone back through and just sort of released. Sometimes the palette marks are finishing out the composition of the painting, until it feels finished. So I've been leaning into that much more, and I'm finding that it's much easier for me to say, yes, it's done this way. Because the day that that happened, I was home with the kids and running around, I had this miniseries titled the Mom Brain series. People really, especially mothers or grandmothers, felt that when you're in the depths of having toddlers and young children, you feel that fog of mom brain. So there's that organized chaos of there is this flower, but then also sometimes being able to represent in a painting the beauty amongst the chaos. So that's been really fun to explore.

Lisa Belisle: I remember vividly as a young mother particularly, although different stages now, the idea that somehow if you're parenting, that's its own form of creativity. Sometimes I would feel like, oh my gosh, now I'm not going to be able to write because all of my creativity is going towards these little beings that are running about. But it did end up being kind of just more phases in life, that the creativity, it just looks a little different. The energy is a little bit different. If you can, as you were describing, just kind of let yourself rest into it, then it's going to be okay. You're not really doing a right or a wrong thing here. You're just being where you are. So do you think that it takes confidence to be able to rest into that place?

Laura Mrazik: I do. And I think it takes being conscious of the effort you're putting in to do that. It takes work with anything for something to become a habit. It takes dedicating time and energy to committing to that.

Lisa Belisle: Absolutely. I happen to talk with artist Holden Willard, and he brought up the idea of imposter syndrome. I didn't really go into that very much with him, although I'm highly aware of imposter syndrome and I've experienced it more on the medical side. I think any doctor who has not felt imposter syndrome probably is in the wrong profession, because it is inherently a profession where you're never going to be perfect. But is that something that in any way resonates with you? Have you felt this at all?

Laura Mrazik: Absolutely. In the beginning I felt imposter syndrome in my art work, and throughout my other professional career. I do not have necessarily formal art training. I have continued to paint and learn. However, on my professional career, my healthcare career, I have gone through seven years of school to be where I am, yet I still feel imposter syndrome daily. So it's continually reminding myself that it's perception, and acknowledging it and then working through it, knowing that imposter syndrome can be felt regardless of your background and your experience, and everyone can feel it a different moment. So I try to acknowledge it and then work through it, knowing that it's probably a passing phase or something I'm working through right now. But absolutely, I feel it.

Lisa Belisle: I think it is really interesting, because you do have this kind of laid-out path to where you've gotten to on the one profession, the medical side, and then the other side is also a path you've been following. You've been working really hard to educate yourself, but it's not like somebody is showing up every day and saying, okay, welcome to classroom where you're going to study art history and you're going to come out the end with a grade and there's your check mark and it's going to go towards your degree. You're utilizing really different ways of educating yourself and getting sort of external or not external rewards. So that must be an interesting shift for you.

Laura Mrazik: It is. It's been refreshing. I did promise my husband, when I completed graduate school, I said, I'm going to pay off my student loans before I go back to school. So going through the more informal training and learning, I've always really enjoyed learning by doing. Actually in my undergrad, I took a drawing class that I didn't finish. I started it, I dropped the class and took another elective very early. In the class I wasn't doing, I was sitting and learning. So this has actually been more helpful in the art profession, that I've been able to do a lot more practice as I'm learning and kind of go at my own pace, which has been nice.

Lisa Belisle: I'm also fascinated by the fact that in your other career, medical career, you actually are in a field, you're working on digital health, which from the beginning of when you started working on this to where you are now is just a completely different space. So much of what you're doing is leading from the emerging edge. I know you've talked to me about learning things from other health systems that are doing things a certain way. I know that nationally and internationally there are groups that are working on things like digital health, but a lot of what you do has experimentation involved, and experimentation on a pretty big scale that impacts people and lives and health and systems. You don't really know what you don't know. So you're actually doing a little bit of both in both of these fields, plus being a parent, which is its own experiment. So just that ability to sit with the uncertainty of it all and keep moving forward and motivating yourself, how do you do that? How do you show up every single day and keep motivating yourself through this uncertainty? How do you create something concrete enough that you keep saying, well, here's this step, here's the next step?

Laura Mrazik: I think the driver behind all of it is learning. Even anything that could be considered a failure, you learn something from it and you apply it to the next thing. So I think I have always enjoyed being a continuous learner and being able to do that in all aspects. We often start some of our services as a pilot, and through that pilot we learn something and we adjust and we evolve, and then we carry that forward to the next iteration. So I think having an appetite for learning is really helpful in being able to carry through each day. In this position that I've been in, telehealth, I've learned the most each day, which has been really energizing.

Lisa Belisle: Talking about learning and being self-taught, I know also you've worked with your brother, so I think that he also can kind of direct you in some ways. What are some of the things since you and I last spoke that you've been learning, that you've been exploring, that you've been thinking about, that you've been applying?

Laura Mrazik: I have been definitely applying more intuition to my paintings and trying to lean in and really trying to solidify my own unique style. Right now I'm reading a book by Amira Rahim, which is called Paint to Prosper. In the beginning, it's so interesting, she has a background in research, and she said, when I first came into the art world, I came at it from a research perspective and a light bulb came on for me, that you're looking at all of the artwork that is around, and it's very similar to doing a lit review. You're looking at the existing artwork and finding the gap in the literature and where can you fit in. That's what you're doing with your style, looking at all the artwork that's currently out there. So I have done some of that work as well, and being able to find my own balance of what feels right and what it feels like others aren't necessarily doing, and being able to have that sort of unique voice.

Lisa Belisle: That's such an interesting parallel. For you, what is the gap that you so far are identifying?

Laura Mrazik: I think being able to have a concrete balance of these large florals that have very defined, detailed work, and then the palette marks around or interwoven into them. Not that they're not being done anywhere, but it's a little bit different from what others that I've seen around have been doing, which has been nice. You have a lot of artists that influence you or that you enjoy, but being able to find something that's a little bit different than what they're doing is really much more satisfying.

Lisa Belisle: I also think about this idea of the proximate lateral, where somebody's got enough brain structure to think about something that exists in a certain way, and that enables you to introduce something that's just a little bit different. So their brain's already structured in a way that they can see what you've put out there, but you're like, okay, you can see what I've put out here, and let me introduce you to a slightly different approach to that. Which I just think from a neuroscience perspective is so fascinating. We assume that this looks like the other thing, but sometimes it's not exactly like the other thing, and it's that small difference that can really make something really unique.

Laura Mrazik: I'd say I'm continuing to learn and evolve, and I think that's really important and rewarding, to continue to experiment with leaning into the intuitive and organic brush strokes or marks, but being able to explore how you can stretch that further.

Lisa Belisle: So far what you've been doing is you've put yourself out there in the world. You're an artist, you do a lot on Instagram. We enjoy your Instagram stories. They're very creative. I really love watching them. But you've recently joined the Portland Art Gallery, and that's like a whole other step. You're joining a larger artist community. It's a slightly different group of people. You're putting your work out there for others to purchase in a different way. I know you were already doing this, so talk to me about that, and talk to me about when did you feel like, okay, this is what I need to do next.

Laura Mrazik: Each year I have set goals, stretch goals, since I started painting, and this year one of my goals was to explore the gallery world, and my goal was to apply to this gallery in particular. So I think it was a goal for the next evolution of this career. I'm incredibly grateful to be represented by the Portland Art Gallery. So it's exciting, and of course nerve-wracking in something new, but that's where the growth happens.

Lisa Belisle: I think that's really interesting for me, because a lot of people, and I'll count myself in this group, you put a stretch goal out there and then you get to the place where you actually reach and stretch for it, and you go, oh, no, no, this is a little bit too scary, I'm not ready yet. In this case, it's great to hear that you said, well, this is the goal, I'm going to do it, I'm going to apply, I'm going to see what happens. And you push through that. It seems more matter of fact, perhaps, I'm just going to do this. Is that in any way reflective of how you approached it, or was there a place where you're like, oh, wait, I'm not quite ready yet?

Laura Mrazik: I think there's always that in the back of your mind. I also think there's power in manifesting where you'd like your next step to be. So I think in both professions, trying to go in as confident, hopeful, and prepared, and manifest your next step is really important, at least for me, mindset-wise.

Lisa Belisle: So I'm going to get a little bit more personal, and I hope you'll forgive me on this one, but let's see how this goes.

Laura Mrazik: Sure.

Lisa Belisle: I think I can do this because I feel like I'm also this person in some ways. On the medical side of things, you come across, you're very accomplished. You've put a lot of time and effort into your career. You're very serious. You do great work, you're very well respected in our organization, and you probably know this stuff, but if you don't, then I'm telling you now. But there's this interesting playfulness and lightness to your personality, and even the fact that you are doing art, which is not something that we see a lot in healthcare. You're almost like two completely separate people. There's the Laura Mrazik of our group and our institution, and then there's Laura Mrazik the artist, and almost sometimes the entertainer it seems on Instagram. Do you ever feel any sort of friction between the two, or do you ever feel like, no, over here I'm going to be this, and over here I'm going to be this, and never the two shall meet?

Laura Mrazik: I don't necessarily feel friction. I have certainly always felt like in the medical field, having the professional boundaries and staying serious helps me stay focused. We'll use an example of one of our medical directors who's making jokes at senior leadership, having those lighthearted moments. I certainly still enjoy doing that kind of thing in meetings and everything. So I think there's certainly in the medical field more focus on being taken seriously. And frankly for me, and you may have felt this in the past too, being female, wanting to be serious and prove myself and stay focused and prove that you can work well with others. I think in the art world there's a little bit more freedom, and often people joining the art world are more used to that freedom and it's more fluid. So I think it's just kind of naturally occurred. But I certainly am both of those things, and just sort of show different sides depending on where I am and the group that I'm around.

Lisa Belisle: I absolutely agree. I think there is something about being female that makes it uniquely, well, I won't say challenging, it has in the past for me been challenging, it's just interesting. But I do sometimes feel like I'll be at the medical center during the day and I'm wearing one outfit and I have my doctor's coat on and I have my black thing that I wear over my dress, but then I'm wearing my yellow shoes, and then I take off my doctor outerwear, and then I go to the Portland Art Gallery opening on Thursday evening, and all of a sudden I'm like a different person. I actually feel a little bit of freedom. All day I've been this, and now in the afternoon I'm going to be this. I often wonder, if I was hanging out with the people that we hang out with at work, most of whom are just lovely individuals and very good at what they do, if they went to the art gallery, would we be seeing an entirely different group of us just all wandering around being different in our own freedom? I don't know. What do you think?

Laura Mrazik: That's a great question. I think there might be a balance, a mixed bag of the two, I've found. It's fun also. Dr. Vic, who is into photography, he's picked up on this, that I'll wear complementary colors in my shirt and my earrings, or just try to wear bright colors, and he always picks up on it. He's got that eye too. So it's interesting, I think there would be a mixed group of who you'd see, who may be dressed or looking the same, or who may be a little more free spirit in that group and setting.

Lisa Belisle: He's a great example, because I will wear my yellow shoes and a blue dress and he'll say, oh, it's the colors of Provence today. So he absolutely has that eye. He and others in our group are musicians. So I often wonder how that translates, as they're hearing conversations or they're seeing how things interact, are they able to shut their brains off entirely and just move into, I'm in medical mode, I'm not in musical mode? I don't think you can.

Laura Mrazik: Yeah, my husband is a musician, and he certainly picks up on things that I don't pick up on. It's interesting, they certainly have a different ear, because when I hear a song or the kids both talking at the same time, I hear it all at the same time. And he can hear one distinct sound or an instrument or a voice much more easily than I can. It's definitely a trained ear. So I wonder if in that professional setting, if they can hear amongst the side conversations, can kind of hear things better. But that's interesting to think about.

Lisa Belisle: And people's sensitivities even is kind of just pondering. We all kind of assume everybody sees and hears everything the way that we do. Most people who have healthy eyes and ears and noses and sensory organs of various sorts, we're all like, oh, well, can you smell that? Yeah, I can smell that. Or no, I can't. But when you walk through the world as a visual artist, let's just say, and you're looking at the world around you, your eyes are stimulated on a completely different level, and you probably can't turn that off even if you're not in an art setting. So being able to maintain that ongoing sensitivity and also just kind of show up and do your job is a really interesting balance, I think. How do you balance that?

Laura Mrazik: The time that I can think of that coming up is when we're mapping out workflows or developing patient-facing materials. I don't think the two things are working against each other necessarily, but there might be, or developing the telehealth vision, that making the visual representation of that as easy to digest as possible and looking at the perspectives of people who might be looking at it in the audience. So I don't necessarily see them working against each other, but I do notice that I'm paying attention to those things when I'm working on those visual components.

Lisa Belisle: Do you sometimes feel like you have to convince other people that perhaps those components could be useful in any given setting?

Laura Mrazik: I haven't yet, but I can see that coming up. There's the marketing materials that we want to make sure are displayed in a visually pleasing way. I think our marketing team is very professional and expert in being able to design those things in the way they do. So I haven't yet run into that, but it'll be interesting to keep an eye on that.

Lisa Belisle: Well, maybe I'm probably projecting a little bit. I'm asking you a question that I ask myself often, which is, I sit in a meeting and we're talking about communication, for example. And obviously communication, for me, it just is across all the things that I do, and probably all the things most of us do, but I just feel like I'm highly attuned to how messaging is put out there. And then when I talk to somebody and they're like, oh, well, that's just semantics. I'm like, but semantics are everything. It's actually really important. But I don't want to come across as, well, I'm going to school you on this thing. So I think that's what I'm getting at a little bit. Do you ever run across like, well, I actually think this is really important, and let me help you understand why?

Laura Mrazik: Yeah, absolutely. I think probably because we both have public health background as well. When I first came to MaineGeneral, I worked under Natalie, an absolutely brilliant mentor. And her first question always was, who's the target audience, or what target audience are we communicating to? I think even when talking to, let's say, a group of medical professionals, and you're going to be communicating with patients, being able to navigate both communication styles and then translate the two so that it's in a way that medical staff may interpret and digest, and then also translate to patients. So sometimes it's developing two different sets of communication, or being able to marry the two together so it can translate to both. But absolutely, I see there are certainly different ways of framing and communicating things depending on the population.

Lisa Belisle: I think the ability to persuade others to understand it in a way that doesn't cause them to feel defensive, so you don't show up and you say, well, actually you're wrong, let me tell you why. You show up and you say, have you thought about this, perhaps? Let's look at it in a way that's slightly off to the center of where you are right now. Even that as a communication strategy, I think can be really important.

Laura Mrazik: And that goes back to when I first started out of undergrad in health coaching, and that also applies to parenting, but motivational interviewing and asking open-ended questions sometimes can pull more out of perceptions, or help you understand barriers, or help adjust communication to better understand and help move the conversation forward, or move the project forward, or help people understand how to take the next step.

Lisa Belisle: So is there in any way an intersection with art, when you show up and you look at the art and you think, what are you trying to tell me right now, tell me a little bit more about why this feels unfinished to me. Do you ever have those kind of creative conversations with yourself and the piece in front of you?

Laura Mrazik: Absolutely. I think that's something I'm definitely working on. As I'm painting florals, I now am focusing on the meaning, whether it's the symbolism or the potential power that these florals might have. For example, peonies are known to provide protection, so having a large floral peony in your home can provide some protection. It's a balance of having that in your mind as you're creating these brush strokes at the end and finishing off the painting. But also it's a work in progress of how do you convey that, so that's felt by the person looking at the painting.

Lisa Belisle: Oh, that's so interesting. You've just described something that I love, the symbolism, especially when it comes to florals and other plants, and really the healing ways that they intersect, not just with when we look at them, but also when we plant them, when we tend to them, when we walk among them. And you're right, if you're thinking, well, peonies are protective, but you don't want to be thrown out there all kinds of armored insects flying around your plants in the piece of art that you're creating. So how do you kind of meld that symbolism with the actual visual impact of what you're doing?

Laura Mrazik: I've been working towards doing that in a more abstract way. So that's definitely the evolution of my work right now, is working through that.

Lisa Belisle: So I think I recently saw that you were working on a sunflower perhaps. Is there anything that I should know about what your process was around that?

Laura Mrazik: Sunflowers can, I actually wrote this one down so I didn't forget. Well, joy, but also hope and strength. At the time I was working on this one, it was working through the process of onboarding with the art gallery. So I was working through that as I was working on this painting, and really putting in the hope and the strength to carry through and make this a positive experience and have the confidence. So I felt very empowered creating this painting. I think that painting flowed through me very quickly, and I knew that I wanted to paint it, and I stayed up way too late quite a few nights because I was just going through the creative process and letting that flow through.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it seems like the spirit of the sunflower really is carrying you into the next phase of your life as an artist. So I'm hoping that we'll be able to see you. I know you have the other job and the other job, I won't say which one is more real than the other because I think they're both pretty real, but parenting certainly is pretty far up there on the list. But I'm really glad that you've joined the Portland Art Gallery, in part because you're just a wonderful human being. I think the community of artists that I've had a chance to work with at the Portland Art Gallery are also wonderful human beings. So to have you come into the collective just seems entirely fitting to me.

Laura Mrazik: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate you coming in and updating me on what's going on in your world these days.

Laura Mrazik: Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you very much for joining the Portland Art Gallery.

Laura Mrazik: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with artist Laura Mrazik. I encourage you to go to the Portland Art Gallery website, or go to the Portland Art Gallery just in person, and experience some of her wonderful work. And if you happen to be up in the Augusta-Waterville area and you're engaged in any sort of telehealth processes, you'll also be experiencing some of her wonderful work. But either way, it is truly a pleasure to be talking with Laura Mrazik today on Radio Maine. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, Laura.

Laura Mrazik: Thank you.