A couple of artists

A police car raced down a country road at night, quickly gaining on the vehicle it pursued.

Andy Fletcher had just left the place where he had been painting a rural scene and in the dark didn’t recognize that it was a police officer behind him. He turned down a side street before being pulled over.

The officer approached to inquire about why Fletcher’s vehicle had been parked near an abandoned house in the area when he saw a painting of the house inside the truck.

“You’re really good at this,” he told Fletcher.

He is so good at painting farms and landscapes that he paints for living. His wife Katie Musolff does too.

“You gotta be good otherwise you have to have a job,” Fletcher said.

Making a living from art has been their passion for more than 20 years, and the pair has found the perfect place to pursue it on a farm on Pioneer  Road in the Town of Fredonia.

“I’m probably one of the few people who bought a farm by painting farms,” Fletcher said.

The couple opened the gallery named Painting isn’t Dead last year in an 1890s granary on their 21-acre property.

Preparing the building for art was about as taxing as creating original pieces for it.

“It hadn’t been touched in 40 years,” Fletcher said.

Musolff said it still had furniture, debris, chemicals and mice.

“It took all winter to clean out,” Fletcher said.

Now, it houses their artworks on the first and second floors what now looks like a wood cabin. They painted it and the adjacent barn yellow in homage to Fletcher’s grandmother, who worked in the yellow barns at Ruby Farms in Brookfield during the Great Depression.

Fletcher often spends time on the road seeking his next subject. When he finds it, he stops, draws and paints.

“People see me on the side of the road in my Dodge Caravan,” he said.

Fletcher will set up an easel if it’s nice outside and stay in the truck when it’s cold. This summer, the heat and mosquitoes created distractions.

He tries to remain as unnoticed as he can. “Generally, people are pretty cool. It seems like they always stop me right when I start painting when it looks like crap,” he said.

His oil-on-canvas work includes farms in the distance surrounded by colorful skies and land. Fletcher said he paints live scenes and rarely from photographs, but customers tell him his paintings look like they were captured with a camera.

His most famous painting can be found in grocery and liquor stores. Fletcher did the background scene for Hamm’s beer packaging. A representative of the company asked him to submit a painting of a landscape scene with water.

Fletcher’s image, which included three old beer signs, was chosen from six submitted by artists. 

“I was born to do this,” he said. 

“Can you just pay me in beer?” he asked, but Hamm’s ended up giving him  money.

Musolff finds her unique subjects closer to home. She walks around the property finding dead animals, flowers and plants, and sometimes people bring her items. They are easy subjects to bring to life in art. “They don’t move,” she said with a laugh.

The concept isn’t new. Rembrandt did a couple of paintings of dead animals, she said.

Musolff’s favorite subjects to paint are birds, moths and mushrooms. She also does fish — the couple used to live in Stoddard on the Mississippi River before moving here six years ago — and all of her subjects came off a hook.

But she has a rule for the models for her watercolor, acrylic or oil creations.

“If it’s smelly, it’s not allowed in the house,” she said.

Musolff will arrange her once-living items into a variety of designs. Each piece carries an intimate moment about something that was once alive but now is dead, creating a connection with customers.

“Pieces remind people of their experiences,” she said.

Avoiding the experience of being starving artists isn’t easy, but the pair has carved out a niche in the art world, attending top-tiered juried shows across the country throughout the year.

“We’re accessible,” Fletcher said. “We talk to people. We’ve met everyone from a senator to homeless people.” 

Their artworks are priced from $400 to $6,000.

“We make luxury items,” Musolff said.

Both grew up loving art, Fletcher in Waukesha and Musolff in West Allis.

He earned an art degree from Carroll College and she from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. They met while painting naked models at MIAD and have been married for 12 years.

Creating art is as much of an escape as it is exasperating for both.

For Fletcher, he has to paint or he feels lost.

“It’s like exercise,” he said.

“The other side of it is it can take everything from you. It always wants more.”

“You can always do better,” Musolff said.

Fletcher said he prefers to paint sunsets when he’s “warmed up” after working for a while.

Their schedules are determined by the art shows and season. Musolff hustles during spring since the Chicago show is in June, “so there’s this pressure.”

For Fletcher, Thanksgiving to April is a little slower. Once the corn grows too tall, he can’t see the farms to paint.

Outside of painting, Musolff enjoys the garden on their farm and Fletcher has a huge record collection and autographed baseballs.

The two are working to preserve the farm — they are the first people not named Wiskirchen to own it — and are turning the land into a prairie.

For more information, visit https://www.instagram.com/paintingisdeadgallery.