In this episode of the Create! Podcast, host Ekaterina Popova sits down with Philadelphia-based artist Jo Gamel for a conversation about building a full creative life, staying committed to your practice through major life changes, and what it really means to dream big and say it out loud.

Jo is a returning guest, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. She has shown at the Louvre during Paris+ Art Basel, completed a fully funded medical billing program while maintaining her studio practice, and just announced an upcoming show at the Stockholm Affordable Art Fair this September, a goal she set years ago during a coaching session with Kat.

In this conversation, Jo and Kat talk about what it means to be pluridisciplinary, how joy of discovery shows up across every creative pursuit, and why sharing your wins is just as important as achieving them.

In this episode:

How Jo maintained a daily painting practice through a demanding six-month program by building a block schedule around 5 a.m. studio hours
The process behind her miniatures series created during the Create! Magazine 100-Day Painting Challenge, including working with a magnifying glass and painting from a curated folder of personal photographs
How each small painting became a portal into memory, history, and ancestral research, including a portrait in progress of her great grandmother from Lithuania
The sensory, Mediterranean cafe-style exhibition she mounted at the Jane Gallery, complete with bossa nova, a lemon candle, and pastry boxes
Why she believes community and mutual aid are not just feel-good ideas but a driving professional force
Her upcoming exhibitions including Collective Futures at the Arts League in Philadelphia this October, themed around Bohemia as a trans-historical state of mind
The big dream she named in coaching that led her first to the Louvre and now to Stockholm

Listen to the episode above and subscribe to the Create! Podcast wherever you stream.

About Jo Gamel

Jo Gamel's pluridisciplinary practice ponders medicine as a cultural system as much as a clinical one. Becoming a medical mystery and entering formal medical study reshaped her understanding of authority, diagnosis, and care. Gamel depicts natural specimens against Enlightenment architecture, situating living forms inside historical frameworks of reason, to create eerie, dramaturgical altars of miracle, perception, and dismissal in whimsically layered mixed-media, polychromatic palettes, academic brushwork, and magical realism.

Jo Gamel lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA with high honors from Moore College of Art and Design, where she received the Emerging Leaders in the Arts scholarship and the Excellence in Painting Award, which fully funded her study abroad of Eastern Baroque architecture in St. Petersburg, Russia. Gamel has also received several honors, including the Women in Art Excellence Award from Artio Gallery in London and First Place and Best in Show at the Art Is Cool contest. Gamel has exhibited her work internationally at institutions such as the Louvre (Paris, during Paris+ Art Basel), Chelsea Old Town Hall (London, during London Art Week), the European Museum of Modern Art (Barcelona), and twice at Philadelphia's Magic Gardens museum. She is an alumna of the Governor's School of the Arts residency program. Her work is held in private collections in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Ankara, Stockholm, and Gothenburg, and has been featured in Create! Magazine, Killer Magazine, and a full-color front page feature in the Salem Sunbeam newspaper.

Follow Jo at jogamel.com and on Instagram at @joegamel.

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