Artful Living

Two Springfield sisters share a passion for art and creation. Now they let us inside their homes to see how inspired minds build their nests.

While Julie Blackmon and Sharon Taylor prepare for their photo shoot, they are warned that the pictures are about to begin. Almost at the same time they look at each other and both say “I need to put on lipstick.” Julie and Sharon share a bond. They are sisters. They are both artistic. But their story is a little unusual. As two of nine children, Julie and Sharon grew up expecting the unexpected. “Our family was chaotic and magical,” Sharon explains. “Mom was always painting murals on the walls with all of the kids running around,” Julie adds.

Julie and Sharon grew up with their parents and siblings in the house next door to Sharon’s current home in Springfield’s Rountree neighborhood. In fact, their mother began renovating Sharon’s home long before Sharon ever knew it would become the place where she would one day create and design.

Sharon, mother of three children (with a fourth on the way) and Julie, also a mother of three, point to their mother as the source of their artistic inspiration. “There’s this need to find something in what others might overlook, which mom always did,” Sharon says. Now, Sharon is an interior designer, and Julie is a photographer; both sisters have a passion for creating. The idea of finding antlers in the trash and then hanging them on the wall is not unusual. “That seems so normal to us,” Julie says. “One of the best things [Mom] showed me at an early age was how to think outside the box by reusing, rethinking and recreating.” 

Sharon believes her mother taught her to make every moment as special as possible. “She made every get-together a special occasion. Dinners were not just about the food, but about creating a mood and setting the scene to share with friends and family,” she says.

While the sisters share an artistic passion, their mediums are quite different. But the two look at their work as having at least one thing in common: a desire for a completed look. “You have to consider the whole canvas. Whether it’s the look of a whole room or when I do a photo… all the details have to add up to making sense on the canvas,” Julie says. “[Sharon] can come up with 20 different uses for one object… I sort of apply that to Photoshop where I can take 20 different details and put them together.”

Click here to read about Julie's brilliantly "dysfunctional" home

Click here to read about Sharon's ever-changing sense of style