Life & Work with Ron Schafer of Culver City

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ron Schafer.

Ron, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in a small town—small compared to the big town an hour away, but the biggest thing going if you lived in the town next door. We ate great food, fought giant bugs, sweated buckets in summer, and swam just as much. Most of my high-school friends still live there. I wanted more, so I moved to Los Angeles “temporarily.” I was going to move back—LA is too expensive and too far from home—but, as time does, time moved on, and I’ve now lived here almost forty years.

That town was exactly the size it needed to be to tell you who you were supposed to become. You could be a teacher, a contractor, a nurse, maybe open a hardware store if you married the right person. You could not, under any circumstances, be an artist, because “that’s not a job; that’s a hobby that makes your mother cry at parent-teacher night.”

My dad was a contractor who spent his days arguing with architects about why the building he built didn’t cast the shadows the architect wanted and why the color was not the lilac that the architect imagined. He loved engineers because they understood that some shapes are load-bearing walls that don’t care about their shadows and actually don’t really care what color they are.

So my father sat me down—the way small-town fathers do when they love you too much to let you ruin your life—and said, “How about engineering?”

Of course I (who was definitely not going to say, “How about art?”) answered, “Uh… okay,” and agreed to visit an engineering school. But while Dad and I were there, I spotted the architecture building, sneaked in, saw 3D models of crazy buildings and colorful yet technical drawings, and thought, Is this something like art? It was in the Art building. So I told my dad, “I want to study architecture.”

He cried a little (in private, of course), because he really didn’t like architects, but he was happy—his son wasn’t going to end up sleeping under a bridge with nothing but a sketchbook.

I went to the university close enough to come home but far enough to feel like I was in another world. I got Bs, mostly because I spent lectures doodling alien worlds in the margins instead of learning why concrete behaves like a drunk toddler when you pour it wrong. I graduated, got a job, then another, then a better one. I worked on buildings people put on postcards. I flew to countries I couldn’t pronounce, stood in hard hats, and nodded seriously while someone explained curtain walls. I made good money, bought a sensible car, and became the kind of man my father could point to at the gas station and say, “See? That’s my son. He draws buildings for a living. Very stable.”

I’ve also done things outside architecture—things for that world wide theme park company that turned Star Wars into a place you can walk through and things for a fountain design company where we taught volcanoes to erupt on cue with fire and water, perfectly polite, like they’d been to finishing school.

I spent nights telling fountains when to jump and flames when to sit down and behave, a grumpy conductor waving a baton at elements that never learned to read music.

My dad just wanted the roof to stay put. I gave the night sky a little extra sparkle instead.

But when folks back home ask what I do, I still just say “architect.” It’s quieter that way. They nod, happy I turned out respectable.

Life goes on, and one night in that rented garage apartment, a few years back, I woke up from a dream. The dream had a cone-shaped object attached to a wall, small end against the wall. Kind of weird. It was a Sunday, back when newspapers still came to apartments; I was one of those people. I took the cover off the LA Times magazine, rolled it into a cone, grabbed a wire coat hanger, and push-pinned the dream cone onto my wall. All day, all week, I kept looking into it, passing by, forgetting, rediscovering. When you looked toward the wall, it seemed to enlarge whatever was there, so I pinned photos from the newspaper inside, added a tiny tub candle for light (bought in bulk at the 99-cent store), and that was it.

I worked on this in the borrowed hours of evenings and weekends, while my weekdays pressed on with the precise, sensible architecture.

The dream turned into a single-car-garage show with five 4’–0” × 4’–0” collage panels I named “3 Lives.” (Artwork needs a name, or not.) It only makes sense to me: Life one = the person in the news article, Life two = the photographer/journalist, Life three = the viewer of the art. Of course it could go on to eternity; that’s the fun of it.

But you live in LA—of course things happen. You make big pieces, then move somewhere that has no room for art plus family. (Oh, I forgot to mention—I got married and we had a son.) So the five panels, like so much art made by people with no money, are no longer in this world. I still have photos and memories, but the panels are, as they say in the art world, no longer extant.

Yet they inspired a continuing series that has become 3 Lives – Evolution. New pieces keep arriving through whatever mysterious paths only artwork understands.

I need to step back. For some reason I love drawing on paper napkins. Yes, I know—real artists are supposed to use bronze or marble—but napkins are free, and bars have plenty, especially the ones where I liked to sit, drink, snack, and draw with my friend Mark. So I have stacks of “Napkin Sketches” that have made me very happy for years.

Let’s back up a bit more. I never understood why broke artists should pay for expensive materials when the world screams “PLASTIC LASTS FOREVER!” If it truly does, why not use plastic? That thought birthed my FAST series—fast-food art made from quick, ready-made trash. It all weaves together like a rug made by a messy, drunk weaver, but that’s the most honest description I’ve got.

Funny/sad story: hire a new cleaning lady who can’t tell Trash from Art Trash, and the Art Trash quietly disappears into an LA landfill while you’re marveling at how tidy the house suddenly looks. Oops.

More FAST art is coming.

So, I have art called, 3 Lives – Evolution, Napkin Art, FAST art, plus a few others: FACEs, Between Things, Lounge Act.

And now AI art, because apparently I still hadn’t run out of ways to be impossible.
I whisper nonsense into Midjourney and whole universes cough up cathedrals made of smoke and dresses stitched from sunsets. I sit there like a kid who found the last cookie, eyes wide, heart racing.

People sigh the same sigh my father saved for me since kindergarten:
“Can’t you just pick one thing?”

Nope.

My brain is a drunk butterfly with commitment issues.

Maybe one day all these worlds—trash, fire, pixels, napkins and architecture—will crash into each other and become one big beautiful mess.

Or maybe they won’t. Either way, I’m still the same stubborn boy chasing whatever makes the lights come back on inside my chest.

When people ask what I do, I still say “architect,” because it’s simpler and it keeps my father’s ghost from worrying.

But the truth is I studied architecture, built a respectable career in it, and every single step of the way—from the first doodle in the margin to the latest piece waiting to be born—I made art.

Thank goodness for the stubborn kids who grow up and quietly disobey anyway.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
All those brilliant jobs were perfect until the morning they suddenly weren’t. Sometimes the economy sneezed, mostly it was just me not fitting inside the lines anymore.

I’ve been fired by the very best firms in Los Angeles. They always did it kindly, with a cardboard box and a sad little smile that meant “You’re too much for us.”

My father would have called it poor planning. I call it tuition—expensive, painful tuition that left me standing in parking lots with a box of pencils and a bruised ego, wondering why nothing ever fits for long.

It always hurt, of course. Like stepping on a Lego barefoot in the dark, except the Lego was your own heart and the dark lasted months. But pain is just the road’s way of saying turn left, idiot.

So I turned. Again and again, until the bruises taught me the shape of the next door. After every rejection, I still sat in whatever apartment I happened to be renting that year and drew and sculpted the things that made my heart happy.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
As I mentioned earlier I’ve made my “living” as an Architectural Designer—an entirely sensible profession that somehow wandered into theme parks and water features, as if my career took a wrong turn and politely decided to stay there—while my nights and weekends have been spent creating art in whatever medium refuses to leave me alone, and of all the pieces that have insisted on being made, my favorite is “3-Lives,” because it began as a dream that refused to stay a dream and grew, stubbornly and beautifully, into what it is now. 3-Lives eVolution.

Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
People always ask how you end up where you end up. As if life is a straight road with neat little signs saying “Wrong Way” and “Success, Next Exit.” But mostly it’s just fog and potholes and someone yelling from the backseat that they need to pee.

We spend the first years learning the fences. Not the real ones (those are easy to see), but the invisible electric ones society hums around us. Don’t speak too loud. Don’t love the wrong person. Don’t quit the job that makes you want to lie down in traffic.

We learn them the way we learn not to touch a hot stove: someone older grabs our hand at the last second and hisses, “You’ll ruin everything.”

Then one day you touch it anyway. You say the thing, you quit the job, you love the person who makes your mother clutch her pearls so hard they crack. And the burn is spectacular. People stop inviting you to dinner. Your bank account laughs at you. The silence from certain phone numbers feels louder than screaming. That’s when you learn the second lesson: the world doesn’t end when you break the rules. It just changes address.

The trick nobody tells you is that falling is mandatory. Staying down is optional. You rarely know how you’re going to get anywhere worth going. That’s fine. Knowing the destination is already cheating.

I’ve driven to places with nothing but a postcard in my head and a tank half full of stubbornness.

The map lies anyway; roads close, bridges wash out, and sometimes the best café is the one you find because you took a wrong turn during an argument about whose turn it was to choose the music.

Forgive yourself for the wrong turns. Not in a grand cinematic way with swelling strings—just quietly, the way you’d forgive a child who spilled milk. You meant well. You were tired. You were twenty-six and thought feelings were facts.

Say sorry, but I love you, to the person in the mirror, then make coffee and move on. The past is a bad roommate; it never shuts up and it hogs the remote.

Be the house where people can show up in their worst sweater with engine trouble in their chest and still get tea without explanation. Leave the porch light on, metaphorically and, if possible, literally. You never know which night someone will need to see that small stupid glow to remember the planet hasn’t gone completely cold.

And when the next impossible thing barrels toward you (because it will, wearing a name tag that says “Hello My Name Is Challenge”), let it hit. Don’t flinch. Stand there with your ridiculous soft heart and your borrowed courage and take the impact. You might win. More likely you’ll lose in slow motion and everyone will watch. Doesn’t matter. Either way you’ll come out the other side with new calluses and better stories, which is the only real currency we ever get to keep.

Life isn’t about staying inside the fences. It’s about learning which ones are worth the shock, and how to keep walking even when your hands smell like burnt possibilities.

So fall. Get up. Forgive the falling. Leave the light on for the next idiot who’s trying to find their way home in the dark.

You’ll be fine. We all are, eventually. Even when we’re not, we are. That’s the whole trick.

Credit to Fredrik Backman – this is written in his style, I recommend his books.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://schaferron.wixsite.com/art-found-objects
• Instagram: https://schaferron.wixsite.com/schafer-design
• Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/roneschaferai/?next=%2Fronschafer_fashion_%2F&hl=en
• Twitter: https://www.instagram.com/ronschafer_fashion_/?next=%2Froneschaferai%2F&hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.instagram.com/ronschafer_objects/?next=%2Fronschafer_fashion_%2F&hl=en

Image Credits
Elon Schoenholz photographer El Monte Station