Welcome to the Sabby Painter Podcast, the Podcast for Artists who Mean Business. Here's your

host, Antrice Wood.

Hello, it's Antries and welcome to another episode of the Sabby Painter Podcast.

You may remember a few episodes back, I interviewed the artist Carol Marine, and Carol

mentioned that Karen Jurek helped her out and had been an

inspiration to Carol and many other daily painters. Well this week I am

pleased to share with you an interview with Karen.

Karen has kind of an unusual story.

She starts out as many artists do.

As a child, Karen drew obsessively and was always drawn to expressing herself creatively.

At the age of 18, she took over her parents' framing business and made a living, not making art art but still surrounded by it. But here's

where I think it's a little different. After 9-11 her framing business took a

dive in a desperate attempt to save the shop and to keep

from having to lay off her employees, Karen began to paint. She was able to keep the

framing business going and her employees kept their jobs for another seven years

by subsidizing the shop with the sales of her art. Eventually painting became more lucrative

than her framing business and she took a leap of faith and

begin to paint full time. Karen is now working on a series called Busted, almost 200 portraits

inspired by police mug shots.

Karen sells the majority of her work online using eBay.

And in this episode, Karen and I talk about building a fan base, trust, getting payments, and how she navigates a

sometimes choppy waters of selling art online. Karen, thank you so much for

...