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

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. 💛

Sunday slow-look.Take a minute with this painting — the crooked little house with its too-many roofs, the trees lit up l...
10/04/2026

Sunday slow-look.
Take a minute with this painting — the crooked little house with its too-many roofs, the trees lit up like they're on fire, the fat yellow moon with bats cutting across it. Nothing about it is trying to be realistic. It's trying to be fun.
When's the last time you let yourself look at something and just enjoy it, without needing it to mean anything? Kids do this constantly. They see a weird house and want to live in it. They see bats and want to be one for a night. Somewhere along the way, most of us trade that in for seriousness.
This is your permission slip to get a little silly this week. Put on the costume. Carve the pumpkin too early. Watch the movie you've seen twenty times. Your inner child doesn't need a reason, and neither do you.
Painting by Christopher Kuster — Spooky Evening. Watercolor, mouth-painted.
Your Sunday is allowed to be a little whimsical too. 💛

Dennis Francesconi didn't set out to become a painter. In 1980, at seventeen, a water-skiing accident left him quadriple...
10/02/2026

Dennis Francesconi didn't set out to become a painter. In 1980, at seventeen, a water-skiing accident left him quadriplegic. During rehabilitation he met Kristi, who would later become his wife, and who encouraged him to find some way to put down what he was feeling. Frustrated at being reduced to an "X" scratched out with a pen wedged between his fingers, he grabbed the pen in his teeth instead and wrote his own name for the first time in years. Writing led to doodling, and doodling led to painting.
A chance meeting with a fellow MFPA artist in 1993 brought him in as a Student Member. Five and a half years later he'd advanced to Full Membership — and with it came a moment he still talks about: going into the Social Security office to say he no longer needed government aid. He and Kristi both went on to earn Associate in Arts degrees with honors, and his work has since shown in roughly 70 exhibitions, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Atlanta and on to Europe, Asia, and Australia.
His range as a painter is wide. In Garden Roses, every petal fold is visible, a spike of red salvia rising beside the bloom. Statue of Liberty renders her in cool, sweeping blues, torch catching the only warmth in the sky. Sailing sets a single boat down on pale sand under a deep horizon, its life ring resting in the sand beside it, and Uphill catches a lone rower's orange scull cutting a straight line across flat blue water, oars caught mid-stroke. For winter, Santa's Sleigh silhouettes a sleigh and reindeer crossing a full moon.
And this week, one more of his paintings is doing something new: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer — a reindeer in mirrored sunglasses with a nose bright enough to light the sky — has just launched as MFPA's newest photocard set and e-card, Cool Rudolph. Dennis's own words on what MFPA has meant to him: "MFPA has been the key to unlocking my potential."
Shop Cool Rudolph photocards and e-cards: www.mfpausa.com💛

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: the card in your hand has a 180-year history.In 1843, a man named Henry Cole was too busy to wr...
09/30/2026

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: the card in your hand has a 180-year history.
In 1843, a man named Henry Cole was too busy to write personal holiday letters to everyone he wanted to greet that year. So he did something no one had done commercially before: he commissioned an illustration from artist John Callcott Horsley, had it printed, and sent it out instead. One thousand copies were made. That's the first commercial Christmas card in history.
It caught on slowly at first — printing was expensive, and cards were a luxury. But by the 1870s, cheaper color printing brought the price down, and sending cards became something ordinary families did every December. By the end of the century, over a billion cards were being mailed each year in Britain alone.
What hasn't changed in 180 years is the idea at the center of it: a small painting, made to be held, sent, and kept. A card someone opens with their hands, sets on a mantel, keeps in a drawer for a few years before they can quite let it go. That's a different thing than a notification that disappears in a scroll — and it's exactly what MFPA's cards carry forward, new work from our artists in a tradition almost two centuries old.
💬 What's a card you've kept for years, and who sent it to you?

Some good news to start the week: new cards from MFPA artists, and for the first time, two brand-new ways to send them.P...
09/28/2026

Some good news to start the week: new cards from MFPA artists, and for the first time, two brand-new ways to send them.
Photocards: upload your own photo, pair it with an MFPA artist's design, customize the message. Personal to you, still carrying an artist's work at its center.
E-cards are something we built ourselves, from the ground up: a digital card platform that lets you send to up to 200 people at once, either by uploading a spreadsheet of addresses or typing them in one at a time, with a message you can send to everyone or personalize individually. No stamps, no printing, and a genuinely lighter footprint if that matters to you.
All available at www.mfpausa.com!
Two new ways to send something that still means something. More details coming this week. 💛

Sunday slow-look.Take a minute with this painting.Wherever you are right now, let your shoulders drop. Take one slow bre...
09/27/2026

Sunday slow-look.
Take a minute with this painting.
Wherever you are right now, let your shoulders drop. Take one slow breath in, and out.
Now imagine yourself walking into it. You're on a path under a canopy of trees turning gold and orange, the light coming through in patches. Leaves are falling around you — not all at once, just one at a time, drifting down without any hurry to get there.
Watch one leaf let go of its branch. Follow it down. Let it land.
That's all it has to do. Let go, and trust the ground.
Take one more slow breath. Let something go with it — whatever you've been holding onto this week that doesn't need to come with you into the next one.
When you're ready, open your eyes. Carry the rest of the walk with you.
Painting by Marius Maczka — Jesienna droga (Herbstliche Allee / Autumn Avenue). Oil on canvas, mouth-painted.
Your Sunday is allowed to be slow. 💛

On Wednesday, we talked about art that lives on the things you actually use. Today, here's what that looks like at MFPA....
09/25/2026

On Wednesday, we talked about art that lives on the things you actually use. Today, here's what that looks like at MFPA.

Our coffee mugs, tumblers, and totes all carry original artwork by MFPA mouth and foot painting artists, wrapped edge to edge so the painting is the whole point, not an afterthought. Sunflowers, florals, a red vintage car, avocados, a cat curled up in the corner of a mug. Something for the coffee drinker, the iced-tea-on-the-go person, the one who always needs a bag for the farmers market.
And for the tree this year, we have a new set of ceramic ornaments: Winter Friends, by our own Shane Lynch, and Holiday Wreath, by Brom Wikstrom, who some of you will remember from his Feature Friday back in August.

Every one of these is more than a nice thing to own. It's a small, working piece of one of our artists' careers, out in the world, being used.
Take a look and let us know which one you'd bring home. 💛

Address

Atlanta, GA

Opening Hours

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

Telephone

(770) 986-7764

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