What happens when you open the door to your studio and integrate your practice into all of your life?
Our Story
Demeter is the minds and imaginations of Michael and Chuva, two working artists. Coming here means being welcomed into a studio, encountering the people and the curiosity that live inside it, and finding out what that encounter opens up in you.
Everything that happens here — the classes, the workshops, the dinners, the runs, the coaching, the gallery, the window — grows from the decision to be transparent in how art is made.
Who we are
Chuva Featherstone
FounderChuva’s work moves through several dimensions — visual artist, transformational coach, designer, educator — and at Demeter, all of it is fully present. Each dimension informs and deepens the others, and she has chosen to value them all equally.
The coaching and the art are the same investigation, expressed in different forms. The questions she works with in a coaching session — what are the patterns you have ingrained? What version of yourself are you still performing, and for whom? What becomes possible when you put that down? — are the same questions that move through her work on paper and canvas. Art and coaching are, for Chuva, two languages for the same conversation: the exploration of who you actually are, beneath the version you were trained to present.
She spent years allowing different parts of herself to be visible only in certain contexts — the artist mostly private, the educator underestimated. The version of herself she was becoming required all of it to be present simultaneously, without apology. Demeter is what that decision looks like in practice.
On weekends, Chuva teaches art to children across two age groups — from the very young, who are given total freedom to explore and make, to teenagers who are developing a genuine studio practice. She brings to this work the same foundational conviction: that children already know how to play creatively. The job is to protect that knowing and give it room. She also works one-on-one with adults in the private room at Demeter — those who are ready to look curiously at their own patterns, and to try expressing something different.
She arrived in Copenhagen carrying a vision she had held for a long time. This is it.
Chuva was born and raised in Los Angeles and has lived in Scandinavia for the past 15 years. She studied Fine Art and Business at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
FounderMichael Sherman
Michael is an artist/illustrator and teacher. For years, that meant the studio, the exhibitions—the full shape of what a working artist is supposed to want. Over time, it gave him a growing certainty that something essential was still waiting to be found.
He wanted to make art that was about more than the object. He wanted more than the lonely studio. He wanted to find out what his studio would become when it was about encounter, exploration, and chance. What he found himself wanting was the specific aliveness of a room where humans are all following their own curiosity at once, where his studio was more closely connected to others, and sharing the practices of making art through teaching and illustrating provided that.
His teaching approach reflects this: exploratory, focus on understanding material and media, community-centered, built on the understanding that you will learn as much from the people beside you as from the teaching. He draws on 15 years of teaching at universities and cultural centers in New York City and London, and on the creative aging model—the conviction that the capacity to play, make, and be surprised endures across a lifetime, growing richer with the range of experience in the room.
At Demeter, Michael teaches drawing, painting, Procreate, and the tools workshop to adults during the day and in the evenings, and contributes to classes for children and older teenagers.
He also makes his own paintings, drawings, and children’s books in the studio, alongside where the classes happen.
Michael is from Ohio and has lived in New York, London, Rome, and now Copenhagen. He has a degree in Fine Art and Illustration from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design).