Four women trade boardrooms for brushes

CARROLLWOOD — A vibrant new art exhibit exploring themes of courage, resilience, and transformation began with a dinner conversation last year.

Following a 2024 art reception, four award-winning women artists shared personal stories about how their lifelong love of art was rekindled after years in the corporate world and raising families.

The women discovered a shared ability to move past comfort zones to find new power by expressing feelings, beliefs, and hopes through their art.

“We talked about how art helps us heal, process our lives, and just express ourselves in the best way that we possibly can,” Michele Renee Stone said. “Art helps us push our personal boundaries and tests us in ways that we didn’t realize could happen.”

The conversation evolved into a commitment to create a group show demonstrating their unique expressions through sculptures, oils, watercolors and mixed media pieces.

“Her Story: Pushing Boundaries,” runs Sept. 4 through Nov. 1 at the Carrollwood Cultural Center, 4537 Lowell Road, Tampa.

A public reception featuring artists Babette Arnold, Jennifer Thomas Houdeshell, Cindy Stevens, and Michele Renee Stone will be held 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept 12 at the center.

Arnold returns to art after retirement

Arnold, 76, graduated with a fine art degree from Miami University in Ohio. But corporate advertising work and family took precedence.

“My art was on and off for years,” she said. “I got involved with the Cultural Center about five years ago and met Michele, who was then the center’s curator. She encouraged me to return to my art and now I have a whole new future to look forward to.”

Arnold retires this month to a “whole new future” that she hopes pushes her artistic “boundaries” as she transitions from oil to blending pastels over a watercolor base to express her love for “the vibrancy of all the colors and contrast of darks and lights.”

A shift to abstract works helped her process recent health issues.

“It’s been a lot of fun and was a distraction for me. I was able to express when I was feeling good and when I was feeling anxious or chaotic. It kept me sane.”

She describes her “dramatic” and “emotionally charged scenes of life’s journeys” are “interpretive pieces” inviting viewers to explore their own lives through creative challenges and healing.

Houdeshell blends her art with a social conscience

Houdeshell is a lifelong advocate, painter, art educator, and freelance illustrator who specializes in children’s books combining storytelling with social justice issues including human trafficking, homelessness, and environmental damage.

She helped found an anti-human trafficking group at her church and a foundation building shelters for victims. That led to a series featuring black-and-white images and brightly colored sunflowers called “Hope” now exhibited throughout Central Florida in galleries, government offices, health departments, and churches.

“Art has been a part of my life since I was little. I am now 79 years young and intending to be a centenarian,” she said. “Teaching art has been a joy — in schools, in museums and galleries, and even with homeless folks. It has been a wonderful experience.”

Whether raising a family, teaching middle and high school art, or helping care for family members with Alzheimer’s disease, Houdeshell never abandoned her creative instincts. She developed an artistic style speaking to both innocence and urgency, hoping viewers will look deeper, ask questions and “open their hearts to compassionate action.”

Winning a United Way competition to illustrate a children’s picture book was a “gift from God,” leading to a multi-book illustration contract with a publisher, freelance illustration work and television appearances.

Stevens focuses on evocative sculptures

Stevens, 57, jokes she is the “new kid on the block” and is just beginning to fulfill long-delayed artistic instincts.

“I’ve been an artist in my heart since I can remember, but I didn’t feel I had the skills,” she said. In her 20s, an artist aunt taught her “to carve my way to find my voice in art.”

She started with painting, then shifted to sculpture.

“This thing I do is important. It gives meaning to each piece you create. Every one of the five pieces I have for this show was born from meditation and all have a story,” she said.

Her largest piece in the Carrollwood show stands more than 2 feet high and features a hand with a colorful mosaic wasp sitting on one finger. “Letting Go of Fear” recalls sculpting in a backyard tent shared with paper wasp nests.

“I had to learn to cohabitate with them. I would go in every day and say, it’s just me. And I would do my thing and they would do their thing and everything was magical,” she said. “We fear what we don’t understand. When you’re able to let go of that fear, you get to the other side and it’s a good place.”

Stone leaves corporate world to live her art

Stone, 56, has been creating art since age 5, inspired by artistic relatives — a great-grandfather who painted and taught her brushstrokes, two artist aunts, a creative mother and a grandmother who knitted and crocheted.

Raised with the idea that “artists don’t make any money,” she pursued retail management while taking art classes on the side.

“One day, a friend reminded me that ordinarily people don’t wake up at 2 a.m. to draw out their dreams and told me just to admit that I was an artist,” Stone said.

She enrolled at Columbus College of Art & Design. After moving to Tampa, she taught children’s art, won awards and realized she had found her “calling”.

Stone worked at the Straz Center, taught art at a YMCA, then served as art curator at the Carrollwood Cultural Center.

She describes herself as a multidisciplinary artist, art educator, therapeutic art facilitator, art curator and president of Michele Stone Masterpieces. She founded Global Art Therapeutics and Artist Bridge to Abundance, mentoring creatives and holding art-based healing workshops locally and internationally in Tanzania.

“My work is rooted in deep spiritual connection, emotional expression and transformative storytelling that often draws on personal experiences, global collaborations and intuitive imagery,” Stone said.

Her art features mixed-media mandalas and large-scale paintings she describes as using layered symbolism and sacred geometry.