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MFPA USA Bringing about awareness to the USA about the wonderfully talented Mouth and Foot Painting Artists.

Good news to kick off your week! 🎉 Meet Callum Smith — Britain's first armless racing driver, who just signed his first ...
10/19/2026

Good news to kick off your week! 🎉 Meet Callum Smith — Britain's first armless racing driver, who just signed his first driver contract with Team BRIT, the world's only all-disabled competitive racing team!
Born without arms, Callum steers with his left foot and works the pedals, horn, and lights with his right — and he's already hit speeds of over 110 mph on track. Next stop: a seat at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. "I'm going to be the first person to be racing without any arms, the first one ever," he says. Go get it, Callum! We love seeing disabled athletes and artists alike show the world what the body you have is capable of. 🏁
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Sunday slow-look.A whale gliding through open blue water — all that size and power, moving like it weighs nothing at all...
10/18/2026

Sunday slow-look.
A whale gliding through open blue water — all that size and power, moving like it weighs nothing at all.
"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength." St. Francis de Sales
We're taught that getting through something hard means pushing harder. But brute force usually just wears you out — it rarely gets you there any faster. This week, notice where you're forcing instead of flowing- can you loosen your grip, let go of your need to control and let the next right thing come to you.
Painting by Dennis A. Francesconi — Whale # 2 Majestic. Mouth-painted.
Your Sunday is allowed to be slow . 💛

Meet Jung Eon Hwang — one of MFPA's longest-serving Korean members.In 1993, at 29, a car accident left Jung Eon paralyze...
10/16/2026

Meet Jung Eon Hwang — one of MFPA's longest-serving Korean members.
In 1993, at 29, a car accident left Jung Eon paralyzed from the neck down. About a year into rehabilitation, his family suggested mouth painting — partly as art, partly to help him train to sit upright in a wheelchair again. He started with a brush between his teeth, practicing lines and circles, and held his first exhibition in 1996.
Thirty years on, he still paints three to four hours a day, completing about one piece a month — often flowers and other quiet, everyday subjects — a basket of cherries, a cluster of hydrangeas, a single vase of peonies. He paints in oil rather than watercolor because, in his words, oil "lets you layer colors on the canvas." His brush is rigged with two wooden chopsticks so he can reach every corner of a canvas, and a sensor-equipped easel lets him move his own work without help.
He credits his sister, actor Hwang Shin-hye, with getting him started — she researched mouth painting and bought his first equipment while caring for him in the hospital.
After the accident, Jung Eon has said he struggled with feeling worthless. Painting changed that — not just the mood at home, but his own sense of purpose, beyond whatever it earned him.
Every three months, he sends his latest work to the Association of Mouth and Foot Painting Artists of the World, based in Liechtenstein, which turns it into calendars and greeting cards and pays him for it. That same resourcefulness shows up in his tools — he built his own brush by extending a standard one with two wooden chopsticks, engineered to move in every direction. "I can move the chopsticks in all directions, even roll them," he says.
He's one of 18 artists currently registered with MFPA's Korean branch, founded in 1992 — a small community where painters sometimes ask each other what their lives would look like without the easel.
"It feels good to earn my own living," he says of his work with MFPA.
Thank you for thirty years of this, Jung Eon. 💛
Paintings by Jung Eon Hwang: Yellow Peony Flowers, Irises, Spring Flowers, Peony, Cherries, Hydrangea. Shop the Hydrangea card (US): https://mfpausa.com/products/blooming-hydrangeas

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: a genre it took the art world a long time to take seriously.In the 17th century, the French Aca...
10/14/2026

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: a genre it took the art world a long time to take seriously.
In the 17th century, the French Academy — the state-run institution that controlled art training and exhibitions in France, and effectively set the standards for serious painting across Europe — built a hierarchy of painting. History painting sat at the top, prized for telling grand stories drawn from mythology, scripture, and the past. Below that came portraits, then everyday scenes, then landscapes. Still life was placed at the bottom of that list, seen as asking less of the artist since there was no story to tell and no scene to invent, only objects arranged on a table.
Regardless of the prejudice, those who continued in the tradition produced some of the most technically demanding paintings in the Western canon. Rendering a glass goblet convincingly means solving light, transparency, and reflection all at once. Rendering a piece of fruit means capturing the exact moment its skin starts to give. There's no narrative to lean on — the object itself has to carry the whole painting.
Jean-Siméon Chardin dedicated a career to showing just how much skill the genre actually demanded, painting copper pots and loaves of bread with a precision that even his harshest critics respected. A century and a half later, Cézanne's apples laid the groundwork for the Post-Impressionist movement and earned him the moniker of the “Father of Modern Art.” The category's place in that old hierarchy never really changed. What changed was how clearly the work spoke for itself.
Still life remains a theme a lot of our own artists return to, and the same lesson applies: a painting shouldn't need the right pedigree to be taken seriously — it should be judged on the merit of the work. Swipe through to see Chardin's own basket of strawberries, the Cézanne apples that helped build modern art, and five from our own collection carrying that tradition forward:
Jean-Siméon Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries, c. 1761. Paul Cézanne, The Basket of Apples, c. 1893.
Ronaldo Pio dos Santos, Vaso de prata com girassol. Foot-painted. Shely Cohen, Flower & Pot. Mouth-painted. Nancy Hall, Strawberry delight. Mouth-painted. Jung Eon Hwang, Afternoon at the window. Mouth-painted. Jin Hyun Song, A love song of spring II. Mouth-painted.

Good news to start the week: this year’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month theme is “Celebrating Value and ...
10/12/2026

Good news to start the week: this year’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month theme is “Celebrating Value and Talent.”
There’s a reason that phrasing matters. For most of history, disabled people have had to fight for the chance to simply be judged on what they can do, rather than written off for what they can’t, or treated as remarkable for doing ordinary things. Being valued for your work, on the same terms as anyone else, shouldn’t be unusual. But for a long time, it was.
That’s the gap MFPA was built to close. Our artists are paid for the work itself, not for the story behind it, and they have a say in how the organization is run. New members come in through a scholarship that invests in their growth, the same way any serious business invests in developing talent, and none of that is charity — it’s what happens when someone’s work is taken seriously.
That’s worth celebrating, this month and every month.
More from us this week. 💛

Sunday slow-look.Take a moment with this painting — the river catching every color of the trees around it, stones worn s...
10/11/2026

Sunday slow-look.
Take a moment with this painting — the river catching every color of the trees around it, stones worn smooth underfoot, the whole scene lit up like the woods decided to put on one last show before letting go for winter.
"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." John Muir
Whatever this week handed you, let it drop off like that. Find a window, a trail, a porch — anywhere the air moves — and give yourself five quiet minutes in it.
Painting by Jin Hyun Song — Get Stained I. Mouth painted.
Your Sunday is allowed to slow all the way down. 💛

Meet Jayden Tranby — one of MFPA's newest and youngest members.Jayden was born a bilateral congenital amputee in China a...
10/09/2026

Meet Jayden Tranby — one of MFPA's newest and youngest members.
Jayden was born a bilateral congenital amputee in China and adopted by an American family at age two. He grew up in Oregon, in the Cascade Mountains, where the landscape around him has become one of his biggest sources of inspiration — seen clearly in pieces like The Beauty of Summer, a view of exactly the kind of peaks and alpine lake he grew up alongside. He paints with his feet, something he's done his whole life alongside everything else he does that way.
Last fall, Jayden's work was displayed at Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon, for the September and October show. During the First Friday Art Walk, he gave a live painting demonstration, brush held in his foot, while a steady stream of people stopped to watch this young and talented artist work.
For Jayden, painting isn't just a skill — it's a way of saying things that are hard to put into words. In his own words, he finds painting "a way of communicating his thoughts and feelings more easily."
Outside the easel, Jayden is a para-nordic skier, a camper, and a serious builder of Lego sets — proof that one person's life holds a lot more than any single thing they're known for.
Jayden was accepted as a Student Member in 2024, which means he now receives an MFPA scholarship: a grant that covers tuition, art materials, and the costs of developing as a working artist. It's not a handout. It's an investment in his growth, the same one every one of our Student Members receives, built to carry them toward Associate and Full Membership and the independence that comes with it. It's how the path our founders built in 1957 still works today, one artist at a time.
Welcome, Jayden. We're glad you're here. 💛

10/07/2026

Wisdom Wednesday. October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. So today we would like to tell you about our business model, and what it means when you purchase the packages arriving in your mailbox.
MFPA is a for-profit business. We don't ask for donations. Our packages are landing in mailboxes across the US this week, showcasing the incredible work of our artists, with the option to purchase if it's right for you.
We're a for-profit democratic co-operative, controlled by and for disabled artists. The artists themselves elect a management board from their own membership to run the organization. When a card or calendar sells, the proceeds don't go to one artist alone — they support the whole membership: Student Members earning a stipend as they develop, Associate and Full Members paid on an ongoing basis for the work they produce.
Plenty of organizations send mail like this and ask for a donation. We don't. What we're selling is the work itself — card stock and print quality we hold to a high standard, and paintings that stand on their own merit, not just their story. And like any business that wants to stay relevant, we pay attention to what customers actually want. When they wanted a way to personalize what they send, we built our photocard and e-card line. When print-on-demand made sense for how people shop now, we added it. We're not producing the same handful of designs year after year.
That structure exists because in 1957, eight painters set out to build something different: a business that let them live with dignity, and be known as artists first. Not pitied for what they couldn't do, and not treated as extraordinary for doing something any able-bodied working artist does every day. They simply wanted to be judged on the merit of their work.
Nearly seventy years later, and in a month built around exactly this question, it still works, one mailing at a time. Self-Help, Not Charity.
On Friday, we will introduce a working artist from our organization who benefits from this model, built on the vision of the original founders.

Our mailings are on their way. 📬Next week, packages from MFPA artists start arriving in homes across the US. Inside: sam...
10/05/2026

Our mailings are on their way. 📬
Next week, packages from MFPA artists start arriving in homes across the US. Inside: samples of our new holiday greeting cards and our 2027 calendar, all produced from original paintings by MFPA artists, along with an order form if you'd like more.
There's no obligation to purchase anything you receive. But when you do, that purchase goes toward what our artists are actually working for: artistic excellence and financial independence. It's the backbone of our motto, Self-Help, Not Charity — MFPA is a for-profit business, not a charity, and this is how our artists get paid for their work.
Want this year's collection to find you? Sign up here: https://mfpausa.com/pages/join-our-mailings
More from us this week. 💛

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Atlanta, GA

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Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

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