Jeff Flaten is Consumer Marketing Strategy Manager at ReSound and has been with the company for 24 years. What many people don’t know about Jeff is his long-standing love affair with art.
“I was the kid that took every art course available and I was encouraged as a child by many of my teachers to pursue a career involving art and the creative process,” he says.
When it came to the ReSound Art Extravaganza, Jeff was reluctant to enter. “I was thinking they wanted something newly created and I just didn’t have the time outside of work to devote to the effort,” he says. What he did have, however, was a drawing he had created years ago at art school. A drawing that had taken him over 50 hours to create.
“The hardest thing to draw or duplicate is the human hand,” he says. “Because of the subject matter, I wanted to draw the hands of a male and female that had a lot of character, which would allow me to show a lot of detail. I wanted my drawing to show years of wisdom, hard work, and experience, which is why I selected these models. Both models were in their sixties at the time and had very mature looking hands that expressed the character I wanted.”
Outside of ReSound, Jeff is married with three children that have become his greatest creative accomplishments. “I must admit there are days that I’d I like to erase a couple of them and start over, like many drawings and paintings that I’ve worked on over the years,” he says, “but like most creations of art, it doesn’t happen overnight and takes time, work and devotion to achieve a positive end result and I’m sure they all feel the same about me as their father.”