Michael Shelby Suberlak

Making sense of art & life, one Piece at a time

This is the personal website of Michael Shelby Suberlak, artist, instructor, wife, mother and pilgrim on the road to God.

Study After Bernardino (Mary Listening to her Son), detail, oil on wood, 5x7in, 2022.

This site is an experiment. It is an attempt to pull together the fragments of my passions and experiences, and find out for myself what is essential for my art-life today. I’ve learned a thing or two after years of making and teaching art, living in sobriety by the grace of God, and encouraging others in their own journeys. Yet things are different now. Moving into the vocation of marriage and motherhood has been the greatest change and challenge of my life.

Where does art fit in?

It has to, somewhere, because art is a part of me. I can’t neglect it, minimize or ignore it for long. This season of life is hard, yet I want to embrace the new opportunities for growth that keep on coming. My goal is to document the artwork that comes out of me—no matter how homely or humble—without holding back. That means I want to document my real art-life, its sentiments, its moods and its means.

I am a Catholic, American mother living during a time of incessant flux and crisis. The ground is constantly shifting on nearly every front. I lean into the day to day work of faith and family life as never before—and art is still something I have to do. I don’t make art to make a living right now—yet I have to make art, somehow, to feel fully alive. All these things are intertwined for me. At one time in my life, I strove for a standard of professionalism that seemed to preclude me from sharing things about my personal life, especially my faith, in the same venues where I talked about art. But today, there’s no need to separate art from religion, from motherhood, from birth, from marriage; love, pain, health and sickness; loss, fear and hope of the hereafter. My goals have changed. The private sphere of family life is my primary domain, and this is not separate from my art life. If I pretended it were, I would be pretending to be something that I’m not. Religion can be an uncomfortable thing to discuss. So can beauty. So can the pain of living and losing and growing as a mother and wife. But these are the things drive me. They drive me when I sleep, when I wake up; when I make food for my family, when I make babies and when I make art. So I have to try.