Mike Sivak and Julie Renfro say their journeys as artists have had a lot to do with the right timing.

The husband-and-wife Ann Arbor-based multimedia artists have both led creative lives, but they agree that their artistic sensibilities needed to build up over time before either of them could find a comfortable level of confidence in their artistic process. They started exhibiting their art in the second half of this decade; however, the road to their current adventures started long before.

Both artists’ mixed-media works incorporate found objects and things they collect from places like thrift stores. The couple shares certain artistic sensibilities. At the same time, each of them has tread a unique path in order to find their personal artistic styles and sources of inspiration.

After moving to Ann Arbor, the couple “fell into art,” by deciding to create pieces for their new house. One of the pieces they created “just for us,” according to the couple, is a dining room table and set of chairs. Friends responded well to the dining room set, and encouraged Sivak and Renfro to share their art.

Sivak and Renfro have had successful collaborations, such as “The Feminine Mystique,” a six-foot “Barbie cake” which was featured in The Humor Show at Gallery Project in 2006. Yet they also know how to keep a healthy distance for each individual’s artistic process.

While collaborating on the piece, “we split the work,” explains Sivak. He designed the outside of the cake and focused on the idea of womanhood and female beauty in a social context, while Renfro designed a more natural, inner world of womanhood inside the cake.

Sivak’s background is a bit of a cornucopia. As a college student studying biology and chemistry at Eastern Michigan University, he played in a bluegrass band that toured the area. After that, Sivak worked as a courier in the gold industry in California, getting his MFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and working for a 3-D design firm.

“Musically, I was always trying to see what other people liked, instead of expressing myself,” he says. When he discovered the key to his artistic process, “I hit a chord in myself that other people can relate to ... I've always been creative. I don’t know what age I was, but it was an awakening and filtering out of what I assumed other people want or expect. It was coming into my own identity and expressing my creative interest in a way that pleased me.”

Renfro has found that age and experience has made her “more confident,” she says. “The idea of doing my own work had become more of an option, as I was coming into my own,” she explains. As the current Director of Design for Ann Arbor-based music nonprofit the Sphinx Organization, she feels fortunate to have a creative job that brings home income. In the past, she performed ballet, got her BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and worked at a 3-D design firm, however “all of the experience I have had in my life had to happen before I could do my art,” she says.

For Renfro, one of the experiences that had to happen before she could come into her own as a visual artist was the life and death of her parents. She explains that her “mother the quilter” and her “father the architect” have inspired the aesthetic qualities of her mixed media collages and 3D assemblages. She describes some of her artworks as “my own versions of a quilt,” which include “patterns and marks that are very similar to sewing and imagery like you would see in a quilt,” and incorporate materials from sewing to glitter to beads.

In certain elements of Renfro’s artworks that are inspired by blueprints and architectural drafting, her father’s influence comes through. “I’ve always been attracted to the blueprints he used to do. It was very exacting — that really tight graphic quality of architectural drawings and plans,” she explains. “My work is much more jumbled and layered”; however, she notes a connection between the way her father built toys and playhouses for her as a child and her sculptural works. She has also used her father’s drawings in some of her pieces.

Sivak uses objects and imagery from various religious traditions to create many of his works, as evidenced by his mixed-media sculpture Viaticum, which was recently featured in the Grand Rapids-based international art competition ArtPrize, as well as a number of objects resembling shrines, reliquaries and ceremonial vessels. He has found that although he does not have a personal history with each world religion, the artworks invite other people to find their own personal stories in his art.

When Sivak is in the process of creating one of his mixed media assemblage sculptures, he “tries not to overthink it,” and he finds that “if I have a set goal in mind, I’m dead in the water right out of the gate. But if I have a direction and I allow the piece to develop on its own and have faith that the spirit of the piece is going to be coming in, the piece generally goes in a good direction,” he says.

Both Sivak and Renfro agree that they collect more objects than they use, creating a stockpile of inspiration they can draw from whenever the time is right. Occasionally, they come across that one perfect object that fits brilliantly into a piece that they are already working on. More often, the artists are attracted to certain objects and later decide how to use them. According to Sivak, “I think there’s a spirit in the piece that I connect to. You have to have faith that when the time is right, you will know how to use it,” he says.

Jennifer Eberbach is a free-lance writer who covers art for AnnArbor.com.

Find out more about Julie Renfro and Mike Sivak on their web site.