A very incomplete history of the artist.
Ken McElrath (Photo credit: Annie McElrath)
David Brooks wrote in How to Know a Person, that those born with the creative gift do not feel fully alive unless they are making something. His observation describes me well.
I grew up in several small towns in central Pennsylvania where my artistic journey began. As a youngster I was constantly making things. I drew, sculpted with Legos and (when I could get it) clay, built furniture, and even sewed stuffed animals. I also created money-making schemes to support my habit, including everything from collecting S&H green stamps and Coke bottles to buy tools to creating my own amusement rides where I charged a quarter to race kids through an obstacle course in a Radio Flyer wagon. One year my parents gave me an inexpensive camera for Christmas and I fell in love with making pictures. Unfortunately that camera eventually melted down when I left it in the car at Disneyworld. Though crestfallen, I didn’t give up.
In the late-1970s, I purchased a Minolta XG1 35mm with money I earned from painting graphics on a neighbor's living room wall and designing another neighbor's patio arbor. After high school, I studied architecture, graphic design and fine art at Penn State University. But my graphic design professors informed me that there was no place for an ardent apprentice of Jesus in graphic design. Because my church (at the time) agreed with them, and because some Christian friends had left the arts to join “the ministry,” I left Penn State in a state of confusion and focused on putting my new bride, Donna, through school.
Thankfully, an early mentor of mine, Steve Estes, encouraged me to attend Covenant College, where I could learn how to integrate my faith with my vocational calling. So after Donna graduated from Penn State, we headed to Lookout Mountain, Georgia.
Covenant College rocked my world, radically altering my perspective in so many positive ways as I learned to consider how the authentic way of Jesus could influence every sphere of life for good—without isolating oneself into the equivalent of a Christian “ghetto.” As Covenant did not have an art major at the time, my professors encouraged me to finish elsewhere, so we moved to Phoenix where I earned two art degrees from Grand Canyon University.
After college, I spent more than 20 years in graphic design, marketing and senior leadership roles in large corporations, startups, and agencies before starting my own marketing and technology company in 2002, called Cazabba, while living in the San Francisco Bay area. Owning my own company gave me the freedom to pursue passions that had laid dormant for more than two decades, and I decided to earn a master of fine arts degree from Academy of Art University in San Francisco with the dual goals of studying fine art photography and possibly teaching at the college level.
After graduating from Academy of Art University (and after another six years in Phoenix) I came full circle, moving my business to Lookout Mountain and starting to teach as an adjunct professor at Covenant College. There I launched a graphic design program and digital photography classes while also teaching art history classes. After a couple of years I became a full-time professor, but this did not last long, as I had launched another business, called Skuid, to bring dramatically improved user experiences to enterprise software. The growth of Skuid forced me to leave my professorship and focus on business once again. Ten years later, Skuid was sold to Nintex, and Skuid became Nintex Apps, I’m now back at it, making things like this web site, remodeling, building furniture, and a lot more.
In this Studio blog, I will be sharing about different works I’ve made. I may go off on tangents, but that is how my creativity flows. Some days I paint walls and woodwork (like during the majority of 2023). Other days I prefer canvas or my camera or my computer. Consider this an opportunity to get into the mind of an artist: to understand a bit more about how we creatives operate, without melting down.
