The Cotton Company is our local Wake Forest artist incubator and place to buy beautiful things you never knew you needed to purchase.
We think management sits on resident artists till they hatch their first sale.
The Cotton Company has a few resident artists who keep themselves off the streets and holed up in their studios in the place. You can watch the artists do their thing through the glass as they work. Just don’t knock on the glass or throw them peanuts. Popcorn might be okay. Rice cakes are a definite yes.
However, we have witnessed they will behave like this Puffin if you are a cute little girl.
Dr. Jane Steelman is one of those local artists. Jane suffers from a fruitful career as a budding proctologist, not really. Jane has a different kind of shitty job with a very impressive doctorate in education stuff. When asked why she got the PhD. she said, “I thought as a doctor I’d get better parking. Boy was I wrong.”
Jane says her art kept her sane while she was slaving away for low pay in the teaching profession.
As a professor at nationally recognized local universities she often daydreamed of skipping the pretense of being an adult and just playing with her artistic talents.
All joking aside, she is a brilliant artist and very talented with the little known art technique called alcohol ink.
Artists who waste time with this medium are often known to go on binges for days, just painting tiles till they drop or run out of money.
An alcohol ink intervention is being planned soon by her old stained glass friends who miss her terribly. Really, they are terrible at missing people, they just can’t get the lead out.
Some examples of Jane’s work available for sale at The Cotton Company are below.
While the kid and pumpkin drawing is so well done. We secretly suspect she “borrowed” the idea from the picture below.
She is truly amazingly talented at this and can make the most inept student become their own special little Picasso. Wait, he was a womanizer, right? Okay, like a little Vincent van Gough. Oh crap, wasn’t he bat shit crazy and cut off his ear? Okay, like the little artist trapped inside of you. We won’t judge you. Let it out.
It turns out all those years of being a pro in the education field really paid off. Unfortunately some of her students still get sent to the office.
“What are you doing here at The Cotton Company office?”
“Jane sent me here for painting outside the lines.”
“Damnit Jane!”
Dr. Steelmen’s art work is available for sale at The Cotton Company in Wake Forest. Her story of moving from a long professional life to a new life of art and expression is a classic example of why we are a wonderful quirky little town full of talented Wake Forest Nutters.
We are a wonderful Raleigh secret and let’s keep it that way. That is unless you want to buy some art, then tell everyone you know.
If you can’t make the drive to Wake Forest to pickup some of Jane’s work you can visit this website, this one, or this one.
If you do decide to pickup one of her talented pieces of art tell her the Wake Forest News sent you. We negotiated a special relationship with Jane and made one of those modern newfangled referral relationships. She insists we pay her a percentage of every sale that comes from us. We are not sure that’s supposed to be how it works but what do we know.
If you do decide to visit Jane at The Cotton Company be forewarned, the artist in the space next to her is a real Dick.
Dick Larsen specializes in awesome paintings of dogs and here are a couple of his works that are available.
We love Dick and think we are going to ask him to paint a portrait of our little darlings. Hope he can paint barking.
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P.S. If you do buy anything or visit The Cotton Company, be sure to tell them you found out about them from the Wake Forest News, it will really piss them off. Bonus!