Oh goodness, no one can truly prepare you for Military life! We’ve been stationed on both coasts, seen things we would’ve normally never gotten a chance to see and shared these experiences with our daughters. The Navy has sent us to Portsmouth, Va, 29 Palms, Ca (this was a greenside stint.), to San Antonio, Tx and now Maryland. To say it’s been a wild ride would be an understatement. In my experience as a military wife, we all know, mental strength is necessary, schedules are constantly changing; everything is the same and yet different, like an odd episode of the Twilight Zone. 

Each time we move, my practice takes a backseat and my work shifts in various ways. This move was especially jarring to my practice. I have had to go through the mourning process of losing my Hawaiian inspiration and I am still working to figure out what my work will look like here. Location changes and motherhood cause my creative practice and business growth to be less linear than I would like.

In military family life, it's been a lifetime with lots of life changes. Summer of 2022 we moved back to the states. Among family and friends, it was no secret how much I was dreading leaving Europe. It was my personal playground for artistic inspiration.

Jennifer Geletzke talks layers with us- layers of life, landscape, faith, and artistic media - blending, diverging, calling. If you've felt the call to create, even after a pause, Jennifer has inspiring work and words of wisdom to share.

German poet Christian Morgenstern’s poem “The Seagulls” begins “seagulls look as though their name were Emma.” It makes our world sound so simple, everything in nature is as it is, in place and together. The artist, however, dissects her world, sees patterns, colors, sometimes multiple colors in a single moss-covered rock in the forest. Which leads to the question, are all forests the same? And is nature really that simple?

Mil-spouse photographer/artist Narissa Alford has turned her frequent PCSes into opportunities. She meets change by embracing new cultures and translating them into visual works of art.

Being a military spouse and a mother certainly have their challenges but we were thrown some extra curve balls. During my last interview, my husband was serving as an Air Force squadron commander in Japan.

When I was first conceptualizing MilspoFAN, I spent some time randomly Googling the arts and military spouses. I remember coming across Carrie’s work and being blown away by the vivid beauty in her watercolor paintings of everyday objects. I put her name in a file, intending to write a cold email asking her if she was interested in participating in MilspoFAN.