WARREN, Mich. – Over the past four months, 23 artists from the General Motors Design Center have spent their off hours creating artwork for a cause.
“I spent the whole summer kind of just navigating these pieces and my process and what you know they were really going to be and talking to my inspirations and connecting with my inspiration,” Kara Thomas said. “I like to say that this has kind of become a lifestyle for me.”
Thomas and Jeffrey Froggett were both matched up with individuals to create meaningful pieces of art for Friday night’s virtual Brushes With Cancer program.
“It’s a part of the Twist Out Cancer organization, where they use career, creative arts as a means to provide healing to inspiration and artists,” Froggett said.
Froggett worked with a man who lost his wife to cancer.
“My piece of artwork is a digital illustration,” he said. “It is the purpose of that piece of art to illustrate the woman that died. Her name was Beth. In our time together, Steve and I had learned that he did not get a chance to read the eulogy, so my illustration is a picture of Beth, then over top of it has the eulogy.”
Working on a piece that represented the death of a wife to cancer was familiar to Froggett because he was an inspiration for another artist who created a piece to represent his wife, who he lost last year to stomach cancer.
“My two daughters, side by side, next to me,” Froggett said. “We’re holding hands. Taurus wanted to illustrate the strength that I had for my children.”
Tickets for the virtual event, where you can learn more about the artists and the inspiration behind their work, are still available online. It begins at 7 p.m.
The work will remain on display until Oct. 30 and will be auctioned online.