The Fearless Art of Living:
Alyce Voit and Paul Hudacek
By Karen Koski
It can be argued that the greatest art of all is the art of creating your life. Alyce Voit and Paul Hudacek are partners in creating a life that is focused on living fully and responsibly, using art and passion as their guidelines.
Alyce and Paul are Detroit natives – they grew up not far from each other, spent years living around the globe, and never met until they each came back to their hometown. Paul’s background as an industrial designer with 2 fine arts degrees meshes well with Alyce’s self-guided immersion into art and design through her experiences in creating clothing and furniture lines. Together, they have an interior design business, they collect mid-twentieth century furniture for resale, create fine art, and pursue ways to combine their passion for art with their passion for environmentalism.
“I just have this need to create what I consider the ideal beauty – in everything, in my sculptures, in my painting…” Paul reflects. “It’s the esthetic, our definition of what we think of as beautiful – and it makes you feel good. I love it when someone picks up one of my sculptures – and you can see the emotion in their face – that’s the emotion I felt when I created it. And to transfer that energy into an inanimate object, and to have someone view it, and touch it, and feel the same thing I did when I created it… and for that to surpass my limited existence, so that even beyond me, it will evoke that same emotion. That’s so amazing to me.”
Living and working in their restored warehouse, they exemplify conscious living, using their space to create art, test new ideas, and showcase the results, which can be both artistic and environmentally friendly. “We have a large roof, which collects a lot of rainwater,” Paul says. “We’re working on a way to collect that rainwater and use it for laundry and flushing toilets instead of using drinking water. Why let that all go to waste?” They constantly look at ways to re-use items creatively, and see every innovation as an adventure in creative living. “Recently, we were working on a house and trying to find a way to make this closet work,” Alyce recounts the story. “I had noticed a house that was throwing out a lot of perfectly good wood, and all this cabinetry. The cabinet doors made perfect closet shelves, and the clients were really happy with the results!”
Paul’s artistic explorations cover many types of media – bronze and metal sculptures, painting, sleek, stylish furniture, glass. “I like to express myself in whatever medium I can. I’ve been doing a lot of glasswork recently, because I have the opportunity to work with glass.” Recently, he installed a hanging glass installation in a private home.
“I’m the one who looks at the space and because I know what Paul can do, I think in those terms,” notes Alyce. “We do a lot of co-design work and really feed off each other’s strengths.
“We want to thrill ourselves when we do collaborative pieces. We want to do things that we haven’t done, haven’t seen, we want to see IF we can do it –“
Paul laughingly interjects. “We’re just entertaining ourselves, basically. We have to keep it interesting.”
Alyce is the one who initiates the interior design projects. “I’m the eye for the space, and I shop for my client. I look for unusual pieces - I try not to order things from books or catalogs – I really want to find something very special, one-of-a-kind – I don’t want anything to be repeated. I don’t want to see these things in another person’s house, mainly because I get bored. And I assume my clients get bored, too, if they see things being repeated. When I think of an interior, I think of a space that constantly has to inspire me. When my client goes home, I want them to come into their space and feel a sense that they can’t feel anywhere else. I want them to say, ‘Oh, my gosh – look at that. Look at that piece. I’m looking at it differently than I did yesterday; I’m getting something different from it. It’s arousing a different passion because I’m seeing it from a different angle.” Alyce continues. “I want to push buttons. I want to make people just a little bit uncomfortable at first, so that afterwards, that discomfort has turned into an extreme form of passion.” That ‘discomfort’ is really a recognition of the new, of a creative juxtaposition of elements that highlights a different facet of the piece or composition.
This is a creative partnership firmly founded on mutual ideals and respect for each other’s gifts and strengths. They literally spark off each other, words tumbling over one another, with ideas and the willingness to literally try anything sending them into uncharted territory at any given moment. It’s a partnership and an attitude towards life that keeps them in a state of joyful, purpose-filled serenity.
As Alyce says, “This life is nothing that I’ve dreamed. But if I were to dream a life, this would be it.”