Everything looks ugly for a while, then it becomes the vision

Maria Gehrke sat in front of our community with a blank sheet of watercolor paper and about half an hour on the clock. She had just walked everyone through a meditation, asking each person what they saw for their future, and taking notes. Now she had to turn all of it into one painting while we watched.

I looked at the blank page and couldn't see where it was going. Everyone's vision for the year was riding on it, each person's and the group's together, and she was making it in real time with no eraser and no second try.

What she wanted was simple. She wanted to bring all of herself to it, the analytical side and the creative side, in the same room.

That used to be two separate lives. After high school Maria went into the analytical, left-brain career and stayed there. She still works the corporate job. The art got set aside for years, and it only came back after her daughter was born. Once it did, she started asking a harder question. Could the art be the main thing, the thing that pays for itself, without her splitting in two to make it work. Painting live in front of a room is the opposite of hiding, and most artists, the way she tells it, spend their time trying to hide behind the art.

Everything's going to look ugly for a while. And then in the end, there's going to be a beautiful outcome.

She was describing the middle of a painting, the stretch artists call the ugly phase, where the thing has no real form yet and every instinct says it is not going to work. But she wasn't only talking about painting.

Maria is a watercolor artist, German by birth, based in Milwaukee. She came back to her art a few years ago and started a mindfulness podcast called Becoming Mindful with a friend. Last November she joined our world to work out how to make the art a real business. What came out of it is the offering she runs now, the Embodied Vision Portal: live painting and mindfulness together, used to anchor a person's or a group's vision in something they can hang on a wall and keep coming back to.

She came and ran the full process for the Sacred Business Network in March, so we had her on Sacred Business Stories to trace how it came together. The part worth hearing is what happens before the painting is any good.

The idea sitting under her work is that art is not decoration.

Art is kind of like a feeling in form.

That is why sad music can both match your sadness and pull you back out of it, she said, and why a handmade original carries something a print does not. When you hang a piece, you aren't only connecting to the image. You're connecting to the person who made it. She has been noticing this more lately, with all the talk about AI, because she thinks you can feel the difference.

And she doesn't only mean the pretty feelings.

It's important that we work with art that doesn't uplift us. Because realistically, we need to feel all the feelings, not just happy feelings.

She talked about haunting paintings, a mother sheep beside a dead lamb with crows all around, and how the grief in a piece like that is really love for what is no longer there. Art can help you feel that through instead of around it.

Two moments stood out to us after we recorded.

The first was about finishing. Maria and her podcast partner made a deal after she read one line in a book.

Publish your shitty draft.

They settled on seventy percent is enough, and it got them to actually put things out instead of polishing forever. The half hour she gives herself to paint live does the same job. The clock makes her commit to the vision and let the rest go.

The second was about selling, and why the fear of it never quite added up for her.

If you're true to yourself, then you're automatically going to do it in the way that aligns with your values.

She had spent a long time waiting for people to come to her. The work now is reaching out directly, finding the communities that could use what she makes, and she still feels the worry about coming off as too salesy. Her answer was that the worry itself is the proof she won't be. The person who is scared of being the snake oil salesman is not the one who becomes him.

On protecting the work, she was plain about it. She blocks studio time in her calendar and treats it like a meeting she has to show up for, then tells herself she can't do anything else in that hour.

What Maria's story reframes is the idea that you have to pick. The analytical career or the creative life. The strategy or the soul. She kept those in separate rooms for years, and the work only started to feel like hers when she stopped choosing between them and put them together. The mindfulness went into the art. The art became how she brings mindfulness to other people. As she put it, it goes full circle. The same painting that helps a client remember why they started is the thing she uses to remember why she started.

Which is most of what we mean by sacred business. You take the skills, the gifts, the values, the odd mix of things that are already yours, and you build the offer out of those instead of going to look for a new set. Maria didn't need different talents. She needed to stop keeping the ones she had apart.

You can find Maria at livelovemaria.com and on Substack.

She works mostly with visionaries and changemakers, the coaches and leaders who want a vision they can actually see and return to, on their own or as a group.

Check out the full replay. Watching her build the thing live is the best argument for what she does.