Meet John Knudsen of Fully Awake Arts in Clayton

Today we’d like to introduce you to John Knudsen.

John, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Creating art has been a therapeutic expression for me my entire life. It has been a realm in which I feel I can adequately express what I’m going through and what I’m learning in this life, and share that with others in the hopes that we can find space to relate. Finding your authentic voice within art can be difficult, and inspiration for my voice (and the name Fully Awake Arts) came after living in Kauai for six months studying Ayurveda and Yoga. I wanted to be able to share what I was learning with the world and found a little niche my works could occupy in the land of weird illustrations meets spirituality and wellness. From that place, Fully Awake Arts have expanded to correspond to all of my spiritual learnings in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Yoga, and other new age witchy syncretist practices, and has moved into many mediums, from performance art to car murals to children’s books.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The road on this journey has been undulating. The thing I’ve struggled with the most is how do I turn this thing that I love into a life that can support me. By day I am a wildland firefighter and a trail builder on CO14ers, and by night I am Fully Awake Arts. Gaining momentum as an artist can be pretty difficult and slow: attracting followers/fans, finding places to show your work, getting people to visit your online stores, knowing what avenues of putting your art out there are worth the investment of your time and energy, staying authentic to your values and your reasons for making art in the first place without making sacrifices for the money monster lurking in your bank account. On the other end of the torment of perpetually trying to “make it” is the complete and utter joy of creating that makes the whole journey worth it. I have safety in knowing that fame or not, I created and my life is more full because of it.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Fully Awake Arts story. Tell us more about your art.
Fully Awake Arts is known for spiritual illustrations, and illustrations of monsters, outrageous face painting, and inspiration for living outside the box and in authenticity. It’s broad, I know. And that’s what sets it apart. It’s untamable, it’s wild, you never know what comes next. It’s not for everyone, some people want a business to be predictable, it’s easier that way for us to know if we like it or not, but the artists I have loved the most have allowed their creative genius to be unimpeded by their audiences and to expand in many directions (Marina Abromavich, Sufjan Stevens, John Cage, Wayne White, Mark Mothersbaugh, to name a few). Fully Awake Arts will never settle to become something it wasn’t meant to be, which is manufactured for others to reflect their path to freedom, vs. speaking from my own authentic path to freedom and accumulated and acquired wisdom of the days and years.

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in the law of attraction which can appear to manifest as luck. I believe that when you live in accordance with capital T Truth, the universe conspires with you to bring like energy and interactions to you. This is all to say, the closer the messages in my work are to Truth, the more people can relate and are drawn in which leads to increased buy-in, which can sometimes feel pretty lucky, but I take it as an indication that I’m tapping into a Truth and will often lean into whatever that discovery is.

Contact Info:

• Phone: 7195109846
• Email: fullyawakearts@gmail.com
• Instagram: @fully_awake_arts
• Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/FullyAwakeArtsShop?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=813468281

Image Credit:
Personal photo: @overly_apologetic

Suggest a story: VoyageDenver is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.