The Mundane Is the Muse: Yahel Yan on Chairs, Hot Sauce, and 100 Days of Painting + Q&A

We are officially at the beginning of summer, and this episode is a little different. Kat opens with a personal check-in, some honest reflections on the art world right now, and answers to questions submitted by the Create! community through the broadcast channel on Instagram. Then she sits down with San Diego-based Mexican painter Yahel Yan, a Create! Magazine featured artist and community member, for one of the warmest, most joyful conversations we have had on the show in a while.

Read on for the highlights, or tune in to hear the full thing.

What Kat Is Thinking About This Summer

The past few weeks in the art world have been a lot. News of gallery closures, economic uncertainty, the ongoing noise around AI, and the very human grief of losing people in our community. Kat wanted to pop in and acknowledge all of it while also being honest about where she is choosing to put her energy.

One of the biggest shifts she is making: reclaiming privacy.

There has been enormous pressure, especially in online creative and business spaces, to share everything. Every process, every technique, every behind-the-scenes glimpse. And while generosity is a genuine value, Kat has started to notice the cost of radical transparency, including times when oversharing has led to boundaries being crossed and hard-won work being taken without credit or reciprocity.

She is not advocating for gatekeeping. She is advocating for discretion. For remembering that your years of research, your relationships, your creative instincts, and your particular way of seeing the world are yours. You do not owe the internet a complete accounting of how you got here.

She wrote about this in a Substack essay called "Privacy Please," linked in the show notes, and it is worth reading if any of this resonates with you.

Your Questions, Answered

Kat also answered questions submitted by listeners through the Create! broadcast channel on Instagram. Here is a quick summary of what was covered:

On building a mailing list at a show: You do not need a complicated setup. A simple sign-up sheet or a QR code that links to your newsletter is enough. The goal is to give people who already love your work a way to stay in touch. A thank-you card or postcard after the fact goes a long way too.

On approaching interior designers: Let your work do the talking first. Post images that show your paintings in context, on walls, in rooms, somewhere a designer can actually visualize placement. Beyond that, a warm, personalized introduction without a hard pitch is almost always the right move. Compliment a project they have done. Share a link to your work. No pressure, just presence.

On finding your ideal collector: In the beginning, your collectors are almost always people who already know you, or people who know people who know you. Do not overthink the mythical mysterious buyer. Think about who you are, what you are drawn to, and who tends to move in similar circles. Kat analyzed her own collectors and found they share a lot of her interests. Your people are closer than you think.

On where collectors discover new artists: Everywhere you show up. Local openings, juried exhibitions, Instagram, Substack, blogs, magazine features. The key is making sure that when someone finds you, there is a clear and easy path to connect with you further. A website, a newsletter link, an email in your bio. Practice for success, as Kat puts it.

The Mundane Is the Muse: A Conversation with Yahel Yan

There is something quietly radical about deciding that the objects everyone else walks past without a second glance are worth painting. Worth studying. Worth giving a personality, a backstory, a soul.

That is exactly what Yahel Yan has been doing for over a decade. And once you see her work, you cannot unsee it.

Yahel first appeared in the pages of Create! Magazine, and the moment her chair paintings landed in our inbox, something clicked. Bold color, unmistakable confidence, and this warm, strange feeling that you were looking at someone who had a lot to say and had found exactly the right language to say it.

Art Was Always There, Even When Life Got Complicated

Yahel grew up in Mexico City, surrounded by color, movement, and the particular vibrancy of one of the world's great cities. She was always drawing, always making things. When it came time to choose a path, she went into graphic design, a practical pivot that still kept creativity at the center.

Then came marriage, children, and a move to San Diego in 2000, pregnant with her third child. New country, new language, new school system, new everything. Art did not disappear during those years. It just changed shape. She channeled it into school costumes, stage backdrops, and class projects, staying connected to making even when the studio felt out of reach.

When her youngest started preschool, she finally walked into an art class and has not stopped painting since.

It is a story a lot of us know in some form: the creative self that gets set aside, not abandoned, just waiting. And then the moment when the door opens again and you walk back through it.

The Chair Series That Started by Accident

Yahel had always collected chairs. Small ones, decorative ones, ones she found interesting. Somewhere along the way she had accumulated so many that she started joking there was nowhere left to sit in her own house.

When she returned to painting, she gravitated toward what she knew. The chairs were right there. So she started painting them. That was 2012.

And somewhere between then and now, the chairs stopped being furniture and started being people.

"I started looking at chairs like a living person," she told us. "I want to give them personalities, stories, feelings. There is a lot of romanticism in my paintings."

Many of the chairs in her work are ones she found abandoned on the street, already carrying a kind of mystery. Who sat here? Why did they leave? What happened? Yahel does not answer those questions directly. She lets the painting do it.

Other chairs she takes on what she calls field trips, bringing her own pieces to new locations, photographing them in different environments, and painting from those images. Her kids have gotten involved too, sending her photos that have made their way into finished work.

It is a simple idea made extraordinary by commitment and curiosity. And it is a reminder that a strong body of work does not always begin with a grand concept. Sometimes it begins with what is already in the room.

100 Days, 100 Paintings, and a Show She Never Planned

Earlier this year, Yahel joined the Create! 100 Day Challenge and dove in with the same spirit she brings to everything: intuition first, outcome second.

Alongside her signature chairs, she painted food, hot sauce, and everyday objects she had always wanted to paint but never quite had the permission to. The challenge gave her that permission.

"It gave me complete freedom to paint whatever I wanted," she said. "And I grabbed it by the horns."

At the end of 100 days, she had 100 paintings. And she decided, somewhat unexpectedly, to show them.

"It was never my intention to have a show," she told us. "But after so many days of labor, I wanted to show the people what I achieved. It is fourteen weeks plus two days. Three months of work. I feel really proud of myself."

The installation came together on her son's advice: rather than hang 100 individual paintings in a line, she grouped them into blocks of nine, creating a grid that visitors could spend hours with, noticing something new with every pass. People reportedly stayed for up to three hours, discovering objects they had missed on the first loop.

That is what great work does. It rewards attention.

What Is Next

After the show came down, Yahel took a breath, visited her kids in New York, and started looking forward. The chair series continues. It is, she says, her constant, the anchor she returns to even as she experiments with other subjects and mediums.

This summer she is heading to Maine for a two-week ceramics workshop with her daughter, going with no particular plan for what she will make.

"I like the clay to talk to me and tell me what to do," she said. "I am not a director. I am just a follower."

We cannot wait to see what it says.

Follow Yahel on Instagram at @yahel.yan.art and explore her full collection at yahelyan.com.

Want more conversations like this one? Subscribe to the Create! Substack at createmagazine.substack.com, where Kat publishes weekly essays on art, creative business, and life in the studio.