[dropcap]“[/dropcap][dropcap]Do[/dropcap] you feel big and strong when you make me feel small. Does it give you joy to see me when my back’s against the wall. Your tongue cuts like a razor with every word you say. Just know before you judge me, that God makes no mistakes. I am beautiful.” These opening lyrics of 18-year-old, Tulsa native Anastasia Richardson’s “I Am Beautiful” is her call to end bullying and a message of hope for all those who’ve felt the devastating effect of its grip and aren’t sure where to turn.

In April, “I Am Beautiful” arrived on three national digital music charts – the Independent Artist chart, the Hip-Hop/R&B chart and the Rock chart – an indication that her message is being heard, an anthem for many in helping to overcome hurt.

An avid singer-songwriter, Richardson hopes her music will encourage others to learn to use their voice instead of hiding it inside, she says, something she did before being inspired to stand up for herself and others going through a similar situation.

During Richardson’s Freshman year at Edison High School, she suffered the crippling control that bullies many times obtain over their target. Richardson often spoke with her mother, Susan Dale, about her experiences at school, but Dale didn’t know how bad it was until her daughter wrote, “When can I stop being bullied on” on a social media site. With the help of the school dean, the problem was resolved, but that wasn’t enough for Richardson. Her dreams were on a much larger scale: sharing her story in hopes it would inspire others. And, it was remembering back to a Justin Bieber concert the year before that drove her momentum.

“[He said to the crowd], ‘If you didn’t believe in me, I wouldn’t be performing in front of you guys,’” Richardson recalls. “That really engaged me.”

That fall, Richardson, in the 8th grade, joined the school chorus. She wrote in her journal, where eventually all her creations would find birth, that she loved singing, and she wanted her songs to mean something. “Note to self,” she wrote. “Write feelings and what happens around me. Maybe I will find something that inspires me.”[pullquote]Earth is raw, and we’re going to make gems out of raw stones.[/pullquote]

Richardson’s first encounter with bullying at Edison began shortly after. And, like she always did, she journaled her experience, saying, “Music is my only friend … hate school.”

A few months later, Richardson told her mom, “I’m going to be a country/pop singer. I’m going to write songs that inspire others and have my first album out in five years.”

“She took it by the horns and ran with it,” Dale says of what happened next.

After one of Richardson’s Youtube videos was retweeted by N’Sync’s Lance Bass in 2013, Curt Ryle, a Nashville producer (originally from Oklahoma) happened upon it as well. Ryle would become another influential force behind Richardson’s success, and while collaborating on “I Am Beautiful” with Ryle, Richardson began molding her talent into other powerful compilations.

Richardson’s first album, I Am Beautiful was self-released in September 2014, three years short of her five year goal, and sharing her story online leading up to its release, she already had 40,000 followers on Twitter by the time she debuted.

“Where Would We Be,” another of Richardson’s pieces on the album that reached the charts, shares her appreciation and gratitude for the military, saying, “Where would we be … without American soldiers who die for you and me. … They sacrificed, ‘cause freedom isn’t free.”

“We’ve had some people point out, ‘That’s my son … that’s my husband,’ Richardson says of her music video made for the record.

Powerful words from such a young soul, Richardson’s music always seeks to connect with its listener, to dissect important and relevant issues and lend a supportive message. Other songs off Richardson’s album include “Big Bad Wolf,” a rebel song about teenagers’ relationships with their parents; “Motions,” about all the things you go through in middle and high school, “boys just don’t get it sometimes,” Richardson says; and “I’ll Do Anything,” a song she wrote for a friend who was struggling with a relationship.

“I pick them up from things I’ve been through,” she says of her lyrics. “Things I hear going on. … I’ll be at a restaurant or laying in bed, and something will pop in my head.”

Her mother recalls Ryle once asking her daughter what inspired her with some notes they were working on, and she replied, “I was watching this movie, and it needed a better theme song.”

Wherever it is that her inspirations come from, Richardson is making a difference, and she’s excited she can encourage others through her passion.

“Music is just my everything,” she says.

Currently working on a new album set to release next year, her ambition offers other exciting goals to work toward.

“Two years, perform in Madison Square Garden and [London’s] Wembly Stadium,” she says. “Five years, go anywhere in the world to perform. To be able to sell those shows out and tell my story.”

In September 2014, along with the release of I Am Beautiful, and with the help of Ryle, Richardson created Earth Made Records, her own record label.

“She said, ‘Earth is raw, and we’re going to make gems out of raw stones,’” her mother recalls of naming the label.

For now, Richardson is focusing her efforts on October: anti-bullying month. She hopes all the TV and radio stations will help her on a campaign to combat bullying by playing “I Am Beautiful” each day throughout October. She and her mother are tackling that goal one email at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YUSJj_l3Ts

[dropcap]Joe[/dropcap] Andoe no longer lives in Tulsa, but a little piece of Tulsa resides in everything he paints.

Take one of his more recent exhibits, Super Highway, for example: Andoe used images from Google Street View as a direct inspiration for characteristically stark landscape paintings of places he remembered from his past, growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s in an east Tulsa neighborhood that never seemed far from undeveloped fields full of horses.

This particular approach to the Internet – using it “like a periscope to look at these old places that haven’t changed much,” he says, save perhaps for the broadband cables that convey the images themselves – is merely the latest iteration of an artistic process that seems to be perpetually gazing back into a specific time and an even more specific geographical location.

“Tulsa is still my home, even though I have lived in New York for 32 years,” he says.

But the path from the lonesome roads of east Tulsa to the fashionable art galleries of the Lower East Side was never an easy one, nor was it always paved with the most sober of intentions. Andoe’s 2007 memoir, Jubilee City, details a life of drug- and alcohol-related experiences, relationships with beautiful but emotionally unstable women and a tendency toward self-destruction which, more than once, came close to costing him his career, but which he has since succeeded in conquering.

Born in 1955, Andoe began drawing extensively early on – a habit shared by most kids, but with Andoe, it gradually took the shape of something greater, persisting as childhood gave way to the teens against a backdrop of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

[pullquote]My story was just so much more interesting than some kid whose parents drove him down the Merritt Parkway and set him up in a loft in Tribeca,” he says. “I was blown away to meet guys who had never held a shovel or even knew how to drive.[/pullquote]Andoe’s book recalls a pre-digital era when young adults seemed to live more in the present moment, determined to find whatever forms of physical pleasure life had to offer them. He writes of driving to the outskirts of town with an older friend to get drunk on cheap wine at age 14, concluding, “At last I had mastered the low art of coming unmoored.”

A later experience, hitchhiking from Tulsa to the Mexican border near the end of his high school days, feels like something out of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

“I remember that I was lucid and in the moment, and how flat and warm I-35 was against my back, and how big, wide, and deep the south Texas sky was and how I had never seen so many stars, and how I had never been so free,” he writes.

Meanwhile, Andoe’s family and friends and classmates continued to respond favorably to his drawings – all the way up to his time at Tulsa Junior College, where he initially majored in agricultural business with the intent of opening a feed store. Faring poorly in those classes, but wanting to stay in school because he had a new girlfriend there, Andoe changed his major to art.

A significant moment occurred when his art teacher hung up students’ still lifes in the classroom, and Andoe did not see his among them. He knew something was going on, he says.

“I asked why he didn’t hang my still life up, and he said it stood out too much,” Andoe recalls.

From there it was on to the University of Oklahoma’s art school. In Norman he met the woman with whom he would share a troubled marriage and relocate to New York City, where further misadventures lay in store, including tragicomically abortive attempts to establish a home in nearby Jersey City.

The thought of being ashamed of his origins never occurred to him, he says; in fact, his roots played to his advantage. There are even points in his literary self-portrait where he refers to himself in the third person as a “cowboy.”

“My story was just so much more interesting than some kid whose parents drove him down the Merritt Parkway and set him up in a loft in Tribeca,” he says. “I was blown away to meet guys who had never held a shovel or even knew how to drive.”

His reception was, at least for a time, less favorable in his own state. Back in Tulsa, years after he had accumulated a body of work and made a name for himself, the Philbrook Museum of Art refused a gift of one of his paintings. He attributes this to a lack of willingness to accept artists from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

[pullquote]I know what it’s like to own things. I know what it’s like to spend money. I know what it’s like to buy cars by impulse. And that’s all overrated.[/pullquote]“I guess it would have seemed weird to me, too, once upon a time to see a guy from east Tulsa calling himself an artist,” he says.

But he thinks that Oklahoma is changing for the better as far as those attitudes are concerned. His work eventually appeared at Philbrook as part of a traveling show comprised of still lifes from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So goes the upward trajectory of Andoe’s life story – and if the cinematic potential of that story has yet to be realized, it is not necessarily for lack of effort. A condensed version of the book nearly saw life as a movie – not so much A Memoir at Full Speed as A Memoir on Crack, Andoe says – but, after various fits and starts, the project failed to reach fruition.

Fellow Tulsa native Larry Clark was slated to direct, he says.

“He got me to write the screenplay so we didn’t lose control of the story,” he says. “Just like a couple of Okies, we got the same lawyer, a Hollywood lawyer that we were sharing, so we were on the same team, you know? But it just didn’t happen.”

Andoe is a man of the 20th century who made it, against improbable odds, to the 21st with body intact and mind expanded. He is also an artist who gained international recognition through sheer force of creative will – a testament to the idea that, even in a crowded field like professional painting, success may be achieved on merit alone, and not just as a result of knowing the right people or being born into the right milieu. Viewed from a certain angle, his life assumes Horatio Alger-esque dimensions.

“Nobody really gave anything to me,” he says. “I never expected it. Nobody ever gave me a thing besides my folks.”

Now approaching age 60, he is in a position to look back as one of the lucky ones. A question naturally arises as to what advice he might dispense to young, aspiring artists.

“Don’t do it,” he says, tongue at least partly in cheek, and knowing full well that people will ultimately do what they want, that any valid art inside of a person will find its way to expression.

What makes him happy now, he says, are the simpler things – seeing his children, talking to his friends, working.

“I know what it’s like to own things. I know what it’s like to spend money. I know what it’s like to buy cars by impulse. And that’s all overrated,” he says.

“Maybe that’s a piece of advice in itself,” I suggest.

“I guess so,” he replies, toward the end of a conversation in which no attempt had been made to hide his Oklahoma accent.