The Milwaukee Post

By TOM JOZWIK Special to the Post OAK CREEK — You fall ill, and your illness is diagnosed as Stage 4 colon cancer. The diagnosis requires removal of a 2-inch tumor, plus 8 inches of the colon. It also requires a chemothera- py session every other week, a six-hour session that will typically deliver a knockout punch lasting several days. That means your job as a child welfare agency social worker is history after 15 years. You're still a wife and mother, however, and, as has often been said, the mother is the heart of the family. And that's a role from which one never really retires (and probably never would want to). So, given all of the above — at least if your name is Jennifer Apfel and you are an artist — you adopt a phi- losophy encapsulated in a slogan: "Creativity helps keep you sane." Apfel, 53, whose maiden name of Kadlec is the source of her appellation "Bohemian Artist" (even though Bohemia was long ago incorporated into the Czech Republic and even though she doesn't speak the Czechs' language and even though she's Polish and Croatian on her mother's side), literally displayed cre- ativity during a recent inter- view. She pointed out, hang- ing on a wall of her Oak Creek ranch house, a paint- ing of bold-colored flowers she'd done in her days as an art student. Moreover, she exhibited many additional canvases, or equivalents of canvases — plates and drink- ing glasses, candy dishes, coasters, even furniture. Primarily, the Bohemian Artist works with plates. She buys 10.5-inch plain ones at the Dollar Store and deco- rates them with designs and words of various sorts: Biblical passages, recipes, definitions of terms, and upbeat messages such as, "We love our Granny and Paw Paw." An Oak Creek res- ident since the 1990s, Apfel has sold her handiwork through an online store for several years. These days, some of her proceeds are applied to medical bills. She has sample plates online but is more than happy to cus- tomize for her customers (mostly women), who live throughout the United States. Some will place an order to mark an occasion ("I did one for celebrating a birth," the artist recalled). Apfel sends out her products by priority mail, encased in "Bubble Wrap and lots of plastic bags" and boxed. How long does it take the lady from Oak Creek to turn a Dollar Store plate into a work of art? Perhaps 45 min- utes. "These I have down pat," she explained. "Sometimes I can sit down in an evening and crank out six." (Apfel applies Pebeo Porcelaine 150 paint in creat- ing her designer dishes. Users can feel free to put the plates in microwave ovens and to clean them in dish- washers.) Conversely, it "took weeks" for Apfel to turn a wooden table and chair into captivat- ing tributes to Marvel Comics. She literally "took apart" a graphic novel, inserted Batman and other images into a decoupage-like process, added graffiti, and subsequently applied a rosin covering to the furniture, which yielded bubbles "just like soda — that's what gives it that glass look." The artist was born in Milwaukee, grew up in Greenfield and graduated from Greenfield High School before obtaining an associ- ate's degree in commercial art from the Milwaukee Area Technical College and later a bachelor's degree in studio art and clinical psychology from Alverno College. Desire for marketable employment explains the clinical psych emphasis, Apfel said. Apfel is the youngest of four sisters. She and hus- band Kevin, a security offi- cer at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, have four chil- dren (Kurtis, Derek, Crystal and Eli) ranging in age from 35 down to 17. The three youngest live at the Oak Creek home. "All of them have some artistic skills," their mother noted. Rounding out the family are Buddy and Betsy, two of the friendliest Labrador mixes anybody is likely to encounter. "Sometimes I just don't have the energy" for her craft, Apfel conceded. But those non-energetic days are offset by good ones, enabling the Bohemian Artist, whose cancer was diagnosed in January 2016, to declare with confidence, "This is not gonna get me." After all, she and Kevin have plans to give the ginor- mous RV they acquired last year a thorough workout come summertime. Readers can visit Apfel's online store at https://www.etsy.com/shop/ jenniferapfel and can receive updated medical reports regarding the artist at https://www.mylifeline.org/ Teamapfel. Tom Jozwik/Special to the Post At home in Oak Creek, Jennifer Apfel poses with one of the plates she's decorated. 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