Heart of the Wild Sanctuary

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Heart of the Wild Sanctuary
Studio on the Pond

A Living Sanctuary of Art, Spirit, & American Mustangs Established in 2006

Heart of the Wild, at its Heart, A Memorial Sanctuary

Betty-Jean Lexow Miller

The sanctuary was co-founded in 2015 by my mother, my husband, and me, and although their physical presence is no longer part of the daily life here, their influence remains woven through the land, the horses, and the work I create.

My mother, Betty-Jean, had a deep love of nature and a particular affection for horses. She was also a professionally trained artist, educated in design, fashion illustration, advertising, and traditional folk painting. In her twenties, she studied and created folk art for the American Swedish Institute in Minnesota, and that Scandinavian artistic tradition became part of the creative atmosphere in which I was raised.

She was also a writer. Words, colour, design, and imagination were simply part of the language of our home. Much of what I became creatively began there.

I grew up watching a woman who knew how to make things beautiful with her own hands. She understood composition, line, colour, pattern, story, and the quiet importance of craftsmanship. Long before I had words for artistic lineage or inherited creativity, I was absorbing it simply by being near her.

As I have grown older, I have found myself recognizing her influence more and more clearly in my own work. Sometimes it appears in the way I use colour. Sometimes in the decorative movement of a design. Sometimes in the folk-art traditions I instinctively return to. Sometimes it is simply the desire to take an ordinary thing and make it meaningful.

Years later, when I revisited and restored one of her old pieces of artwork from 1963, I was struck by how familiar her hand still felt to me. There were choices in her work that echoed choices I make myself, little visual instincts passed quietly from one generation to the next. That realization meant more to me than I can easily explain. My creative life did not begin with me. There is a thread running backward through my mother's hands, through the artistic traditions she learned and loved, and into my own hands today. Heart of the Wild carries that thread forward in another form.

Her love of nature, animals, creativity, and beauty lives here in the sanctuary itself, in the horses who are given safety and dignity, and in the artwork that continues to grow from this place.

I think memorials are sometimes misunderstood. They do not have to be made only of stone or engraved names. Sometimes a memorial is a living thing. A horse grazing peacefully beneath the trees. A piece of art created at a kitchen table or beside a pond. A tradition remembered. A skill passed from mother to daughter. A life continuing to influence another life long after it has ended. For me, that is what Heart of the Wild has become. Not simply a place created in memory of those I loved, but a place where the things they gave me are still being used, still being shared, and still becoming something beautiful.

~photo is of mom, on the far left ~

My Artistry ... A Resume of Sorts

Creative Design & Artistic Interpretation

Though I am capable of creating artwork and portraiture in a realistic or hyperrealistic style, that is not where my heart naturally settles.

I have always been drawn more strongly to creative interpretation, to taking what I see and allowing it to pass through imagination, memory, color, intuition, and design before it becomes something on the page.

This is especially true in my horse artwork. I do not necessarily want to reproduce a horse exactly as a camera might capture it. I want to interpret what I feel within that horse: its movement, spirit, wildness, softness, strength, age, history, and presence. In my mind's eye, horses are often more colorful, more flowing, more symbolic, and more expressive than literal realism allows.

I love color, all color, and I enjoy allowing shape, line, pattern, and movement to become part of the story. The result is often less about creating a photographic likeness and more about creating the essence of the subject as I experience it.

Over time, I began to recognize that this instinctive approach to design carries echoes of my mother’s work as well. My mother studied and created folk painting for the American Swedish Institute in Minnesota when she was in her twenties. Like her, I became a trained folk artisan, specifically in the traditional decorative painting style known as Bauernmalerei.

Bauernmalerei translates from German as “peasant painting,” or more literally, “farmer painting.” It is a traditional European folk-art form known for expressive floral motifs, decorative brushwork, rhythmic pattern, and strong use of line and color.

One characteristic I have always loved is its use of lighter outlining, often white or another pale color, instead of the heavy black outlining seen in many other decorative styles. It gives the work a softer, illuminated quality and allows color to remain at the center of the design.

Although my work today is not traditional Bauernmalerei, I can see its influence in the way I instinctively approach design: the flowing line, the layering of color, the decorative movement, the stylization of natural forms, and the preference for interpretation over strict realism. In that sense, my artwork feels both deeply personal and strangely familiar. It is my own visual language, but it also carries something older within it, a thread connecting my mother's hands to mine, and both of us to the folk-art traditions of our Scandinavian and Northern European heritage.

Materials, Mediums & Methods

Creative Design & Artistic Interpretation

Over more than forty four years of creating art, I have learned, explored, and worked in a wide range of traditional mediums and methods. I have always been happiest when my hands are involved in the process, drawing, painting, carving, stitching, shaping, burning, wiring, layering, embellishing, and building something from the beginning.

I am fluent with brush, quill, pencil, and pastel, as well as calligraphy and traditional gold-leafing techniques.

My experience also includes kiln-fired painted glass, china and porcelain painting, stained glass, and kiln-fired decorative glasswork. For many years, under the name BhryiahrWood Creations, I designed and crafted wooden carousels from my own original patterns. Wood carving remains one of my favorite creative outlets, along with porcelain clay work.

Beadwork, wirework, pyrography, and sewing are mediums I especially love and return to often. I have also worked extensively with carved and painted gourds, dreamcatchers, leatherwork, and resin-pour design.

And then there are feathers.

Other than painting, feather art and quill making have become one of the strongest threads running through my work. There is something about the delicacy and strength of a feather that has always appealed to me, the structure, movement, colour, symbolism, and the sense that no two are ever quite the same. Much of my work today brings feathers together with beads, stones, leather, wire, handwork, and other natural or traditional materials.

At this stage of my career, my goal is no longer to keep each medium in its own little box. I want them to speak to one another.

I want a painting to inspire a quill, a horse to inspire a piece of beadwork, a feather to become part of a larger story, and skills learned decades apart to find their way into the same finished piece.

More and more, my work has become about bringing everything I have learned together, forty-four plus years of materials, methods, mistakes, discoveries, and craftsmanship, and using them to interpret the spirit of the horse. Not simply the way a horse looks, but the way a horse feels. Their movement. Their individuality. Their colour. Their beauty. Their wildness. Their history. Their energy.

Each piece is created as its own thing, guided by the materials in my hands and by the horse, story, or idea that inspired it.

That freedom to move between mediums, nd sometimes combine several of them in a single work has become one of the things I value most about being an artist.

Chaeyahne

Creative Design & Artistic Interpretation

Chaeyahne

My work has travelled into homes and collections around the world under the artisan name Chaeyahne, most notably through ChaeyAhne SilverFox Designs.

The name began very practically. Early in my career, while my children were still young, I wanted to keep my public creative life separate from my private family life. So I created a nom de plume, an artistic identity that could belong to the work while allowing the rest of my life to remain my own.

Over time, however, Chaeyahne became much more than a name I worked under.

She became a creative extension of me. A place where all the different things I know how to do could coexist without needing to fit neatly into one category.

I am neurodivergent, and that is very much a part of the way I create.

My mind is curious, fast-moving, associative, and rarely content to stay in one place for very long. I can become intensely interested in a material, a technique, or an idea and want to know everything about it, how it works, how it is made, where it came from, and what I might be able to do with it differently.

I get bored easily, but I have come to understand that boredom has also been one of the great engines of my creativity. It has pushed me to learn. To experiment. To pick up a new tool simply because I wondered whether I could master it. And over a lifetime, all of those curiosities have accumulated into a rather unusual collection of skills.

I have never believed much in idle hands.

I am also a shepherd, and that part of my life has given me another connection to traditional handcraft. I can take wool shorn from my own Romney sheep, or fibre from my German Angora rabbits, clean and process it by hand, prepare it for spinning, and sit at my spinning wheel to turn that raw fiber into beautiful yarn. And yes, I can knit and crochet with it too.

There is something especially meaningful to me about that kind of making. To begin with an animal I have cared for, hold the raw fibre in my own hands, work it through each stage of its transformation, and eventually create something useful or beautiful from it feels almost elemental. It connects animal husbandry, traditional craft, patience, and artistry in one continuous process.

That idea runs through much of what I do. I like knowing where something came from.

I like understanding how it was made. And whenever possible, I like being able to make it myself. Perhaps that is why my creative life has wandered through so many mediums over the years. Painting led to carving. Fibre led to spinning. Beads led to wire. Feathers led to quills. Horses led to Spirit Horse art. One skill has almost always opened the door to another.

I have never considered that wandering a lack of focus. Quite the opposite. It is the natural architecture of the way my mind works, one idea connecting to the next, one material suggesting another, one question opening a new door. There are too many beautiful things in this world to learn how to make, and I have never been particularly good at leaving my hands, or my mind, idle.

Chaeyahne is the name that has travelled with me through all of it.

The Thread That Was Never Broken

My creative life did not begin with me. And yet, I have never really thought of this creative lineage as something belonging to the past. In our family, it never did. These people, their artwork, their stories, the things they made, and the ways they made them were woven into ordinary family life. They were spoken about, remembered, displayed, used, and passed from hand to hand.

Their work did not feel like family history to me. It simply felt like family.

The strongest artistic lineage runs through my mother’s family, the Sundeen and Lexow lines, and it is rich with painters, illustrators, carvers, designers, writers, craftsmen, and people whose creativity was deeply tied to nature and the world around them.

One of the earliest artists whose work remains physically in our family is my mother’s grandfather, Robert Sundeen, who immigrated to America from Stockholm, Sweden. We do not know the complete history of Robert’s life or artistic career, but we do know that he worked for a newspaper and, during the era of the Spanish-American War, travelled as an artist documenting what he witnessed in watercolour. The sketchbook he brought home remains in our family today. Its pages contain remarkably detailed paintings of naval vessels, military activity, recognizable figures, and scenes associated with the conflict. Ships are identified by name, rigging and movement are carefully observed, and events are rendered through the practiced hand of an artist working in an era when illustration played an important role in bringing distant news before the public. Robert returned those images to the newspaper, where they were used in reporting on the war.

To hold that sketchbook now is to hold a small piece of both family history and American history.

Yet Robert’s work was not confined to serious documentary subjects. Other surviving pieces reveal a much more whimsical side, postcards, decorative illustrations, and smaller imaginative works. I find that combination especially meaningful. There was room in his work for observation and imagination, seriousness and whimsy, documentation and decoration. That freedom to move between artistic worlds feels very familiar to me.

Another branch of my mother’s family carried its own strong painting tradition. Her grandmother was an accomplished oil painter whose subjects reflected the sporting and wilderness culture of her generation, dogs, hunting scenes, wildlife, fishing, game birds, and the natural world.

Her paintings were sold to northern lodges, where that kind of sporting art was very much at home. Our family still has a large floor-to-ceiling mural she painted depicting a hunter with his rifle and dogs amid a sporting landscape. It is not a small decorative keepsake, but a substantial work, evidence of a woman with both confidence and considerable artistic ability at a time when women's creative work was not always formally preserved or celebrated.

Then came Fred Lexow, another remarkable artist within the family. Fred was also a watercolourist, often working in a pointillist technique, building landscapes and other scenes through countless small touches of colour. His work reflected the northern lake and lodge country that surrounded much of our family history. But he became particularly known for something else entirely: wood carving. His hand-carved and painted fishing lures became highly collectible pieces of folk art in their own right. They combined craftsmanship, observation of the natural world, functionality, and artistry—the very qualities that appear again and again throughout our family.

And to me, Fred was not simply an artist from an earlier generation. He was Uncle Fred.

When I exchanged letters to him up at the lake as a little girl, I would draw little animals and wildlife on the envelopes. That was simply what I did, and in my fathers words "Uncle Fred cherished them".

No one had to tell me that art belonged in correspondence, or that a little fox or bird or woodland creature could become part of the message. It was already part of the way I communicated.

That is what I mean when I say this legacy was never separate from the present. It was present. It was ordinary. It was alive. And the creative line continued.

Fred’s daughter went on to work as an artist for Walt Disney, including work connected with Snow White. From newspaper illustration and watercolour journals, to sporting art, folk carving, animation, design, and decorative painting, each generation seems to have found its own vocabulary while continuing the same fundamental impulse: to make.

My mother, Betty-Jean, carried that inheritance directly into my own life. She was a professionally trained artist and writer whose studies and work included art design, fashion illustration, advertising, traditional folk painting, and decorative arts. In her twenties she studied and created folk art for the American Swedish Institute in Minnesota.

Words, colour, drawing, pattern, storytelling, and craftsmanship were simply part of the environment in which I grew up. I learned very early that things could be made by hand. That an idea could become an object. That a blank piece of paper could become a world. That ordinary materials could be transformed through imagination and skill.

My father, Harlan Francis Miller, was artistic as well. I do not have the same documented history of generations of professional or practicing artists through the Strauch and Miller side of my family, and I do not want to invent a lineage simply for the sake of making the story symmetrical.

But creativity was present in my father, and so I grew up with artistic ability coming to me from both sides of my immediate family. I still have a small portrait of myself my father sketched while I was sitting next to him on the couch watching TV, and a hand carved doll cradle from my Uncle Alfred.

What strikes me now is that I never really had to go looking for this history. I did not uncover a forgotten artistic lineage later in life. I grew up inside it. Robert’s sketchbook was not some distant artifact I discovered in an archive. Fred was not a name on a genealogy chart. My mother’s paintings were not museum pieces.

The carvings, murals, illustrations, stories, tools, and creative accomplishments of the generations before me were simply part of the atmosphere of family. They were referenced. Remembered. Handled. Talked about. Kept. Loved. They were not merely part of our history. They were part of our everything.

When I look at my own life now, the pattern is impossible for me to miss. Painting. Illustration. Wood carving. Folk art. Wildlife. Horses. Feathers. Fibre. Beadwork. Leather. Quills. Writing. Working with animals and land. Creating useful things and beautiful things, and quite often things that are both. For much of my life I thought of these simply as the many things I happened to love doing. Now I see them somewhat differently. They are part of a much older creative language.

I do not create as Robert Sundeen created, or as Fred Lexow created, or as my mother created. I would not want to. Each artist deserves their own voice.

But I recognize something of them in the way my own mind works—the curiosity, the willingness to move between mediums, the attraction to nature and animals, the combination of fine detail and whimsy, and the desire to understand how something is made well enough to make it with my own hands.

A family legacy does not mean repeating what came before. It means receiving something, carrying it for a while, and allowing it to become something new in your own hands.

Today, through Heart of the Wild Sanctuary, Studio on the Pond, Enchanted Quills, and the work I create as Chaeyahne, those threads have come together in a way that is entirely my own. The tools have changed. The subjects have changed. The world has certainly changed. But the impulse remains. To observe. To imagine. To preserve. To tend. To make. And, whenever possible, to leave something beautiful behind.

I am not reaching backward to retrieve a lost tradition. I never put it down. I am not the beginning of this story. I am simply the current pair of hands carrying it forward.

With the Brightest of Blessings

I have come to understand that a life is not made from one calling, one talent, one loss, or one beginning. It is made from all of it.

From the hands that came before us. From the things we choose to carry. From the lives we tend. From what we create. From what we release. And from what we leave behind for someone else to carry forward.

My life has been shaped by art, animals, family, loss, resilience, imagination, and an enduring need to make something meaningful from whatever has been placed in my hands.

Heart of the Wild, Studio on the Pond, the horses, the quills, the paintings, the stories, and all the small handmade things that leave here are not separate pieces of my life. They are one life. Mine. And for as long as I am able, I will continue to tend it, create from it, and add my own small piece to the long story that began well before me.

Perhaps that is all any of us are meant to do, are for what has been entrusted to us, make something beautiful while it is ours, and leave a little goodness behind.

~ Holly