SACRAMENTO, CA (MPG) - Mike and Laurie Blanchard have grown older and wiser, yet they still think like art kids looking to put on a show.

Their current projects are both in print: hers a healthy-lifestyle magazine and his a vintage skateboarding photo retrospective.

Married 30 years, the Blanchards also take side roads into digital publishing, painting, photography, music, tarot reading, gardening, home improvement, travel, rat rods and old motorcycles. For them, the more interests, the better. And they are blessed to have each other as in-house muses and constructive critics.

During a two-hour visit at their Rosemont home, the couple shared with the newspaper how they indulge their individual and collective interests.

Their collaboration began when each played in Sacramento-area bands in the 1990s. Their acts supported each other in local gigs and road shows. Later, she added a June Carter-meets-Grace Slick kind of harmony to his Americana quintet, Mike Blanchard & The Californios.

Visual art also came later to Laurie Blanchard, just prior to the pandemic. She said that her husband’s ease at creating sketches or watercolors eventually led her to take paint to canvas. “He was always artistic and I wasn’t,” she said. “Watching him create, I was always, ‘What a beautiful creative outlet’ but I didn’t think I could do it. And I had this huge block on visual art and I had to work through that in order to get to the point where I could even try.”

“Once I could get past that self-judgment, I began to recognize that I had my own unique way, and he definitely supported that and encouraged that,” Laurie Blanchard said. “Generally, he stays in his lane unless I ask his opinion.”

“Her interests are different than mine and her inner psychology is different than mine, so what she’s going to paint is a lot different than what I do,” Mike Blanchard said.

He has studied and practiced photography, painting and general design since junior college in Santa Barbara; he also earned a journalism degree from California State University, Sacramento. 

Mike Blanchard was a photographer for Thrasher magazine and covered the 1980s skateboard scene with a keen eye and a fast lens. His earlier band, the alt-country/punk Tattooed Love Dogs, started in the 1980s, is in the Sacramento Area Music Awards (SAMMIES) Hall of Fame.

Later, while the couple were bringing up three sons, Mike Blanchard’s day job was as the hands-on manager of a repair shop. It fed his passion for vintage import cars and unusual two-wheeled vehicles. Today, his love for vintage film cameras feeds his day job as the e-commerce manager for a camera shop. 

Laurie Blanchard worked in sales and marketing during the family-raising days. Previously, she was a Nashville songwriter and musician, both solo and in a group called Her Six Daughters. 

Her eventual dive into visual art landed in a distinctive mode of finger-painting. Commissions for original art to decorate clients’ homes keep Laurie Blanchard busy at a Midtown Sacramento studio and she does tarot readings for individuals and at area events. Recently, she added other spiritual studies and credits to her role as a seeker and teacher.

The Blanchards keep it together by exploring apart. She has gone overseas on charity missions and often treks out of the area for spiritual retreats and workshops. 

He has been known to take working tours to the East Coast, ride a vintage motorcycle to Monterey or pilot his hot rod solo to the Bonneville Salt Flats.

All this is to say that the Blanchards are not your joined-at-the-hip artsy couple. They both say that their approach to art couldn’t have happened with another partner. And they also say others should tune into their own partners’ creative and spiritual sides.

During the newspaper visit, Laurie Blanchard was more meditative and cerebral while Mike Blanchard was more declarative, although he also noted that turning an idea into art requires creative immersion.

They agree that art comes from curiosity. And they advocate turning off the TV to open channels to creativity.  Other modern screens and social influences also detract from the creative potential, they say.

“When you spend time creating, you’re unplugging from the machine,” Laurie Blanchard said of the marketing and political message streams. “There is something almost subversive in creating art.”

In their unfussy yet put-together great room are some of their recent paintings. Hers include florals, aspens and faces. His latest are still-life renderings of vintage spark plugs. Laurie Blanchard said the florals and trees have large appeal to women. But Laurie Blanchard said her own muse goes wild for her face portraits, which she paints for herself. 

“Those are the easiest,” Laurie Blanchard said, “when I’m just doing it for me. I’m in flow state. I’m just doing. And sometimes, it goes horribly awry and goes in the dumpster. But sometimes, there’s a breakthrough and you find some new thing.”

Mike Blanchard has shown and sold his art and photography at local shows and to individual clients. He described doing extensive research into vintage Vespa motor scooters to paint a piece for a collector of Vespas and art. 

“What the client got was something that is individual, meaningful to them in the commission,” he said.

The Blanchards’ onetime print magazine, Rust, profiled other artists, motor-heads, tattooists and models. After going out of print, it later became a digital showcase for features by Mike Blanchard and others on niche interests ranging from weird bicycles to vintage motorcycles, to craftspeople, racing legends and rarely seen cars. 

Both Blanchards have extensive collaborative and promotional networks due to their decades in the local culture, and they use social media and word of mouth to sell their work.

“She has a better clientele than I have,” Mike Blanchard joked. “She sells way more paintings than I do.”

Laurie Blanchard replied to her husband, “You have so many projects going on. I just hustle a little bit more. It doesn’t always work but I get it into cafes. I do a lot of florals and I try to keep it reasonably priced.” 

She also posts images of new paintings on social media and her website and hangs her work at shows. 

Laurie Blanchard has completed a solo album, which the couple is planning to self-release and promote. 

And her Spirited Soul quarterly has potential for community-building and digital reach, she said

But for now, show and tell is over. The Blanchards, elders of the Sacramento creative scene, are heading out to pick up the grandkids for the day.