Kevin Macpherson were our latest guests on our BoldBrush Live! program. As a paid subscriber, we are happy to provide not only the video replay but the full transcript of the insightful session with Kevin below. Please keep in mind the transcripts are generated by AI so there may be some typos.
Creatively,
Clint Watson
BoldBrush Founder & Creativity Fanatic
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Transcript:
Olya Konell 00:00
Welcome everybody to BoldBrush LIVE. This is a series where we bring on special featured guests, and we talk about art, creativity and marketing. It is brought to you by Faso, which is an website builder, tool for artists. We have a lot of other free and paid resources for artists that include our, you know, free newsletter where we share marketing tips and information. We have a podcast, just a lot of really cool stuff that artists can use to help learn about how to sell their work and how to start their art business. Because being an artist and having an art business are kind of two different you know, they’re two different worlds, different hats that we have to wear. So if you go to boldbrush.com you can actually learn more about what we do. And right now, Faso is doing a bunch of specials for the holidays. So if you’ve considered getting started with a website, or you want to make an upgrade, if you’re an existing customer, we have a lot of different bundles and specials that you can check out, and we’re going to drop all these links into the chat for you. We’ll also include them when we send out the recording. So keep a lookout for that. And a little bit about our guest today, we have Kevin McPherson, and I hope I’m saying that right. And we have Angela Augusta, who’s our Artist Relations Director, and Clint Watson, who is the founder of Faso and BoldBrush. And we haven’t had Clint on in a while. So this is going to be a fun discussion. Be ready to laugh. Put your questions in the Q and A box. If you put them in the chat, I’m going to try to grab them, but if I miss it, put it in again. You know, squeaky wheel gets the grease. We don’t want to miss your questions. And the way this works is, I’m going to get the discussion started. We’ll be talking with Kevin and Clint, and then you guys get to throw your questions out. So if you have questions about email marketing, if you have questions about getting your art seen, if you have questions about how to become a better artist, all of that. Put all those questions out there, and I do have a couple that were already submitted that we will get to as well. So I’m going to bring everybody else on our screen, or I’m going to bring Kevin on, Kevin, welcome, and then I’m going to bring Clint on. So Clint, Clint Watson and Angela, and just let you guys take a look at their beautiful faces, and we’re going to let Kevin and then Clint do a little introduction. So go ahead, Kevin, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Kevin Macpherson 02:32
Good morning, and thank you, Olya and Angela and Clint. Clint and I go way back when we were both kids, but he still looks like one. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to get together with Clint, especially our history goes way, way back to an exciting time in both our careers as we were starting and and it’s exciting to see what Clint has done with his career. It’s really fun to see what him and his wife accomplished.
Olya Konell 03:05
Yeah?
Clint Watson 03:05
PJ said to tell you hello, by the way.
Kevin Macpherson 03:08
Thank you. Yeah, she’s so fun. Yeah.
Olya Konell 03:11
So Kevin, you travel, you travel, you paint, you teach. One of the things that I like to do early in the discussion is touch base on your offerings. So before we dive into the all the questions, I want to just cover our some ways that artists can connect with you for you know, your workshops, and I have stuff on my screen right now. If you go to Kevinmcpherson.com you can click on workshops, and we’ll share the link. He has two coming up, and the the the magic grid. FYI, I did some digging on his YouTube channel, which he has a YouTube channel. So go, follow and subscribe there, where he teaches for free. But one of the things that you, you have that people can purchase, is the magic the magic grid. And this is a technique that lets helps artists become better artists. Do you want to touch base on that?
Kevin Macpherson 04:03
Like it’s actually a method I’ve been working for myself to improve my own artwork. When I it was around 2010 I was invited as the only non Chinese artist to paint in Xinjiang, along with about 200 really fine artist from China. And so I went with a great trip with Wei Han Liu, and we spent a few weeks in Xinjiang. And then we did a large painting that was traveling around Shanghai and Beijing and Guangzhou, all the art museums, and got auctioned off in China way back and when I was working on that particular large painting, I was concentrating on my compositional concepts, and it just led to how my magic grid got started, and as I’ve been working with it for the last 15 years, for myself. And as my teaching methods, and I’ve done it in many different countries, too, in different languages. It’s, I found it to be the most effective way for artists to learn. It’s, I call it the magic grid, and it truly is magical to see the transformation to an artist so quickly, and especially if someone has never painted before, it’s a great way to start your journey as an artist, because one of the most difficult things I find when I’m working with my students is changing bad habits. So someone who has painted for 40 years has developed a lot of ways to do it. And so changing the way you see, and I call it the magic grid of visual language, it’s all about seeing, seeing two dimensionally. And once we get on the right path, it’s amazing how quickly your growth will be. And so when we change our bad habits, whether we’re skiers or golfers or whatever our activity is, we have a lot of muscle memory and ways that people normally see that is different than the way an artist needs to see. So it helps with drawing, color, composition, all facets of the painting. So it’s been really exciting for me, and it really has transformed my work too, and my working methods. And so when you’re working for 4050, years as an artist, how do we stay enthused? How do we stay curious? How do we get up every day being inspired? And this is another way that has totally transformed my inspiration and working on the written book of it now that I’ve been working on for many, many years, always takes me about 10 years to produce a book, because I find the ways to communicate it the most simply possibly. And so I’m hoping that next year, I will finish that book and have that out for people.
Olya Konell 07:03
Oh, that’s exciting. We will definitely keep a lookout for for that. And for those of you that want the book or want to know when it comes out, I’m sure they can subscribe to your newsletter and they’ll be notified first. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah. Well, we’ll make sure we share all of the links, and you’re, I mean, just looking at your work, and I tried, I tried to scroll back as far as I could to see the different progression. And there definitely has been, like, subtle changes in just the different ways that you are doing things. And it’s absolutely fascinating, just that your use of color, the way you see the world I find is very unique as well, because your vision, you’ve had something to do with you. I think you said your vision wasn’t super great, but that is, you know, the way, and you inspired me to not get LASIK. So I just want to say that, because I’ve recently started dabbling with a little bit of plein air, and I’ve realized I don’t have to squint. If I don’t, it’s a benefit.
Kevin Macpherson 08:05
Yeah, it had its issues when I was young, but when I started painting, just basically almost like Monet you know, the reason he painted the way he did is because of his myopia, and so it softens things. It so it makes me see the world in much bigger fields of color, not in detail. And so that kind of informed the way I started working. So when you do change, and I think you know, all of us as artists evolve, whether sometimes the evolution, it goes backwards or sideways, but it becomes part of for me, my lifestyle, my travels, for instance, going to China. After I did that, after a few times, I got interested in doing portraits. So as a landscape painter, some of my galleries weren’t thrilled that, oh, all of a sudden, I’m doing portraits and then, but you have to kind of believe in yourself, where you’re headed, and how it builds, you know, your life as an artist, you know, it’s not for me. It’s not just painting a certain thing successfully a formulaic way and then selling them. You know, it kind of is ingrained in my lifestyle of travel and doing different things. But it’s interesting, sometimes galleries and or collectors will come to one of your exhibitions and say, Oh, I see your work is changing. That usually means I don’t like it. I know what that means. You know, basically, I like what you used to do. I like the subject you used to do.
Clint Watson 09:44
Yeah, and you’re thinking, I would hope so.
Kevin Macpherson 09:49
Yeah, you would think people would encourage or galleries or collectors encourage you to continue to move forward, whatever that might be, as. I said, sometimes it’s backwards too, but, but well, and you have to believe in yourself to make that choice,
Olya Konell 10:06
and they have to look, I mean, as artists, we have to understand that they’re looking at it from a more purely business perspective, like they need to sell work to pay their bills. And I actually want to highlight something here. So Clint Watson used to, I don’t, was it Clint, did you own the gallery, or you ran the gallery? And remember you were,
Clint Watson 10:25
I was partners with partners with two other people. So two other guys started the gallery, and I bought in at some point as a partner around around the time that they started working with Kevin,
Olya Konell 10:37
okay, so, and then that’s how that, you know, friendship was formed and
Kevin Macpherson 10:43
and so we worked together for 20 years. I think it was, wow. I think so, yeah, great relationship, yeah.
Olya Konell 10:50
And I wanted to highlight this little part of your guys’s relationship as well, because we had a question that came in from an artist, and I think this is going to help answer the question. The question was, I’m wondering if websites are not outdated. Many artists I know are using other forms of getting their images out in front of the public. And Kevin, you have a website, you use your website, Clint. Clint actually started Faso. I You tell the story.
Clint Watson 11:18
Of how I started it? Yes, yeah. So it was when I was in the gallery business, and this was when the internet was really starting to take off, and a lot of artists, so I had developed a website for the gallery, which, for the time, was pretty sophisticated for what most people had at the time. And so a lot of artists would naturally ask me if I would create a website for them, because back then, it wasn’t so there weren’t a lot of website builders. And I would always say no, because I didn’t have time. I didn’t have time to be everybody’s webmaster. And so Kevin asked me, you know, could you help me do a site? And he was probably our biggest artist at the time, and we were having a big, you were having a big, one person show, and all of that. And I thought, well, I can’t say no to Kevin. So I said, I’ll tell you what. I will make a way for you to make your own website. And that that was the beginning of the idea, I was thinking, There’s got to be some way I can create a program that allows the artist to input all the data, upload the images, and automatically create a site for them. And so that was the start of it. I spent a few months working on the idea and showed it to one I think I showed it to Wanda, and I still remember to this day saying, this is absolutely not ready. Like, this is just the first pass of this idea. And, like, a few days later, she said, We uploaded all Kevin’s images, we’re going with that site, and we pointed our domain name at it. And I was thinking, how they even do that? Like, I didn’t even tell them how to do it, and they figured it out. And so without sort of that was it like it’s live now, and kind of scramble to try to, like, keep adding features and stay ahead of them.
Kevin Macpherson 13:13
And it, really, it did revolutionize the whole art marketing, I think making it easy for even to this day, I don’t know how to really turn in on the computer and stuff all that for me. And you know, now, even with the the laptop, you know, I try to touch touch the screen is not moving like my phone and but you know, Wanda has done a great job of doing that end of all the marketing for me in keeping me updated with the Facebook and the Instagram and things like that. So that’s really a helpful thing and but what Clint has done and made it so accessible for all the artists to do that for themselves, I think that really changed the art market around the country.
Olya Konell 13:58
Yeah, well, and something I want to add, and I’m just going to add myself to the to the screen I did a Google search for Kevin’s name. This is to answer that question. So when you search someone’s name, if you are using other social media, which social media is a tool to get people to your website, it’s a tool to get people to look at your artwork, on your home, on something that you actually own to help get people to your newsletter, where you actually have access to them without a middleman. And so if, when you do a name search and you don’t have a website, you’re going to get a bunch of stuff, maybe stuff with people with similar names. You might get lucky if you have a huge following, and one of your platforms might pop up. But if you have a website, and you put in your name, and especially if you’re an artist, you put art or artist after it, the first thing that will pop up is your website. Faso does a really good job with that, but it it allows people, let’s just say, you go into a show for another artist, you meet some random strangers at a barbecue, you give them your. Hard. You meet people, they remember your name. They can Google you without even your having your website domain, and you will pop up instead of a bunch of million other things. So you know, that’s one of the biggest advantages of having a site. And this way, if the other social media platforms go south, and you decide, I’m not going to use this one anymore. You just invested years and years of your life, you know, putting things out there at when you could have owned that, you know, that could have been yours. And in fact, I’m going to say this, this is old advice. Every human should own their name domain. So you should own your name domain. So even if you’re not ready to start a site? Yeah, maybe you’re still in school, you’re in art school, or you’re still in college. You should just purchase it and just have it so no one else can take it like I did this years ago, before I even knew what I wanted to do.
Clint Watson 15:50
So I just want to add that question is an interesting one, because back when we created Faso, really having a website was pretty much the only way you could be online. That’s obviously not true today. There’s, there’s all kinds of platforms you can be on. So to some extent, the person asking that question has a point like, I think websites are visited less probably, than they were in the early days of the internet, but at the same time, so you absolutely could probably get by to some extent, without your own website, as far as if you just want to have your art online. The problem there’s a couple problems with these other platforms, though, and I think the problems are actually getting worse over time. One of them is, is, if the platform isn’t really designed to properly show your art portfolio, it’s very difficult to for as a collector, it’s very difficult to find art. For example, I’ve often asked artists that I’ll be attracted to a certain artist. I’ll say, Well, what paintings? You know, I want to get a painting. Where do I go to see your work? And they say, oh, go check my Instagram. Well, have you ever tried to look at someone’s Instagram feed to find the available pieces? There was one particular piece the guy told me about, and he said, Oh, it’s on my Instagram. I had to search for an hour to find it because it was buried like the 20th post down in the feed, and it was in a carousel, and it was like the fifth thing in the carousel, yeah. And of course, it had no price information, no title information, no. So there may be platforms that are designed that solve some of those problems, but the other, the other thing that I feel like is becoming a big threat is these platforms, especially the big tech ones, are really not in it for you. And I mean, I know this probably sounds like I’m marketing us, but we are in it for artists. We’re not in it. We’re not in it to suck the value out of the value chain and accumulate it all for ourself. But if you watch the history of all these platforms, Google, Facebook, Instagram, every single one of them, they they promise you something, and there’s all these great things that happen early on. Someone’s very early to the platform. They get a ton of followers, they sell a lot of work, and then everybody joins that bandwagon and like, Oh, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. But slowly, over the years, they start changing the algorithm. They start suppressing your posts and showing what they want to show and showing their ads, which we all know this happens. What they’re doing is they’re sucking the value out of that chain all accumulating up to themselves. There’s a reason that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon and now Nvidia are worth most of the stock market because they have sucked that value out of all the other companies, yeah, and so that, combined with the fact what they’re now doing is training AI on your on your artwork, and they they’re actively developing AI users. So you go to they don’t care. They don’t care to send traffic to you. They care to keep people in that feed and selling ads. And if they can do that with AI, they’re happy to do that, because that’s way less expensive to them than trying to get people than trying to attract people to post. I’m really, really down on big tech, right? And I’m really down on what they’re doing to artists and other other types of creatives. I mean, they’re basically training the replacements for these people, of these people, and I’m not down with that, yeah, so I’m so so to some extent, maybe you don’t need a website as much as you used to, but in another sense, you need it even more than you used to.
Olya Konell 19:56
Yeah, because it’s, it’s, it’s a safe place for you to complete a transaction. Production. I wanted to add that Faso also protects your images from Ai scrapers. There’s that you can put better more images. You know, you could put certain things on social and another thing. And I was going to ask Kevin to share his insights as well. I’m going to say this every artist we’ve had on and this is something that you guys in the audience may or may not want to hear, but do not forget about the value of in person interactions, those are going to be one of your greatest referral sources. Is like people want to feel your energy. So when you meet people in public, when you go to public events, participate in things you know, travel, you meet people that’s going to be, you know, that’s the real relationship. That’s you can build a relationship a lot faster with a handshake than you can with a social media like so do not forget about those. And Kevin, I wanted to ask, do you, do you have recommendations, things that artists can do, not just online, but offline. You know, what are some of the things that that have helped you connect with collectors and stuff like that?
Kevin Macpherson 21:09
Probably that the best was, you know, for years, Clint and I, we would do one man shows at the gallery. I had the Red Fern Gallery and the greenhouse gallery were my two main galleries. So having that, that focus and the direct connection with collectors definitely is important, you know, I get now on all those platforms too, you get someone, Oh, I love your work. And, you know, it’s, you know, I want to buy. It’s all, mostly all fake, you know, I don’t trust any of them. Very rarely. You know, if someone wants to buy a piece on there, do I really trust it? And it’s usually because you had a personal relationship with that person. You know that it’s a real person. So my teaching definitely is a way to spread your name and personal interaction, definitely when I’m painting on location, you know that that’s when I really enjoy meeting people, you know from all over the world. You know that there’s a connection when people see somebody out on site painting, and I’m usually open to letting people watch me and interact with it me when I’m doing that. So I think that’s important for me, writing my books and sharing my video presentations and doing keynote speaking for the portrait society or the plein air convention or wherever that may be. All those type of things I think are important because the audience will forget you very fast, you know. So, you know, even if you’re present and there’s no personal relationship, you know, I don’t think there’s a real connection. So finding ways to interact with the real person, I think, is important, yeah, the gallery, the galleries now, you know, since covid especially, I think, you know, a lot of the galleries lost their businesses, and, you know, a lot of the artists lost their momentum. So I think, you know, it’s a very interesting and challenging time, I think for artists,
Olya Konell 23:20
yeah, is there anything in particular that you’ve noticed? I would say, Okay, since 2020, you know, obviously a lot has changed. But is there anything new that you’ve kind of noticed is helping you, you know, is there anything new that you and Wanda have been experimenting with or, you know, you teach so maybe you hear from other artists as well
Kevin Macpherson 23:41
Off hand, I don’t think of something, you know, I always just try to pursue and always do different things, as I said, evolve. And you know, my creativity comes in form of writing my books and sharing my lessons, experimenting on my own, you know. So I always have inspiration and curiosity that moves me forward. So some, some of those projects might take many years to fulfill, but it gives my sense, me a sense of purpose. So I think that’s the main thing you know, so many artists want to follow other artists Success Path. You know, instead of finding the one that really is tailor made for themselves, and when you do that, you take a lot of risk, and a lot of people don’t want to take that risk. But I think as an artist, we always have to be passionate about what we’re doing. We have to be willing to take the risk, to take the fear of failure. You know, that has to be a part of what we do on our career. And I’m fortunate, along with Wanda and I, we had a great career. And. Continue to have that, and continue to have, you know, I’m, I’m going to be 70 soon. So, you know, I don’t think about retiring necessarily. You know, what? What would I do? Would I paint when I travel? Would I, you know,
Angela Agosto 25:15
That is the right time for artists?
Clint Watson 25:17
Yeah, you could finally travel,
Kevin Macpherson 25:19
You know. So I think having for myself, if I focused solely on painting and stayed in my studio or painted outside, and, you know, did it for myself and kind of held all that information I gathered and to help my painting and kept it to myself, perhaps I’d be a very famous, well paid artist, you know, like with focus, you know, making paintings, but I enjoy doing a variety of things that keep it kind of fun and exciting for myself. So maybe that makes a lot of diversions, you know, and takes me away from, you know, teaching is very exhausting, and you know, if you do a good job of it, let’s say doing a work one week workshop. You know, I prepared to get everything ready for a few weeks. I do the workshop, and then I’m exhausted for a few weeks. So, you know, it takes a lot of effort to do something like that, and so that takes away from your painting time. But I think if you’re an artist, total artist yourself, you know, I think you could burn yourself out. You have to find ways to refresh yourself, to inspire yourself. So doing, for me, doing a lot of things, like doing a book. It’s a creative Avenue, doing things, you know, sculpture or something that kind of diverted my attention during the covid days, something just kind of evolved, you know, it took me away from painting, but I got so excited every day. I was so excited to do something so doing something different. Yeah, we gotta find that inspiration to keep, keep a our motivation to be an artist for 50, 60, 70, years.
Olya Konell 27:13
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And you said something I want to highlight, and then I want to highlight some of the comments from from folks that are chiming in. You said, without the great you have to take the bigger risk, because the bigger risk is the one that will yield great reward. If you don’t take any risks, you will never have an opportunity to have those big, you know, big rewards. And I’m going to be bold enough to say that if you literally just take the risk and you follow through and execute consistently, you’re almost it’s by design. You’re not going to fail. You’re going to get noticed, because everybody else is not doing that. You know, 90% are not taking those risks. So, you know, I hope, I hope you all that are listening, catch that and definitely apply that,
Clint Watson 28:02
Yeah, the way I think about it, and I’m certainly not the first one to say this, but when you have that fear, to me, that fear is the compass, like when there’s an area that I start thinking about and my mind shrinks away from it, instinctively, I keep thinking like That’s the area I need to go explore, which is not easy. It’s certainly not easy, but it’s, it’s where not necessarily financial reward, but sometimes it can be financial reward, but that’s the area where you go to reward your soul, like you’re maybe you’re afraid to write, you know, to step out there and write a book, but you also, once you face that and start doing it, it’s the place you find the greatest reward for yourself, which may or may not lead to, you know, success in the in the marketplace later,
Kevin Macpherson 28:54
yeah, yeah. But it does, yeah, it like for public speaking for myself, you know, I’ve talked about this many times. It’s always been the biggest fear in my life. You know, I think I became an illustrator in school. In third grade, my teacher let me do book reports illustrating instead of speaking in class. So my whole life, I avoided it, avoided it. And then, you know, now I still hate to do it, but I force myself to do it. So it’s you know that puts you in in a level, or an audience above, say, you know, 90% of the artists that are out there, it’s putting you on a platform to share what you do and get to know a lot of people. So every time I do it, I still, um, my water glass is full with martinis, you know,
Olya Konell 29:46
I like your strategy, and I wanted to, yeah, and I wanted to highlight. Didn’t you do hypnotism before you started public speaking?
Kevin Macpherson 29:55
I did. I did the only thing I remember it now, every time Wanda snaps her finger, i. Do something that she wants, you know, but literally, the very first time I did a public speaking demonstration for Sun City, Arizona, they saw me out painting up in Flagstaff and asked me to do a demonstration down in Phoenix. And so I went to hypnotist for eight weeks to get the courage to do it.
Olya Konell 30:24
I love that, and I’m just going to grab some of the comments that we said. Some of you just to read out to Kevin. George says I’m 78 and I agree with Kevin. You need to have that energy and direction that makes getting up in the morning and exciting adventure. And Colleen says that fear is a compass. We had some questions and, well, questions about the magic grid, which we I want Kevin to kind of explain a little bit more if he can. But before we do that, we just talked about websites and technology and and somebody was saying, that’s a great discussion from Clint, Olya, you mentioned stopping scrapers. Is there a way to protect an image that appears on a website, even like a Faso site, like embedding something in the image, or question mark and Colleen to answer that, Faso? Faso does that for you. Clint, right? That’s how it works. Like you, you monitor, you’re more techie, so please explain that.
Clint Watson 31:20
Okay, so there the article. So in the absolute sense, there’s no way, if something is on the internet, it’s available. So in the most absolute sense, there is no way to absolutely protect an image. I mean, if someone really wants to get it, they’re going to find a way to get it. But what we’ve done is so all of our sites are protected by, for lack of a better term, what you might call a web firewall. And this firewall is smart. In fact, this firewall uses AI and it’s it’s through a company we work with that has 250 data centers around the world, so they monitor all kinds of traffic, not just us, but they are able to identify scrapers that come from these, these bots that scrape for AI companies. Some of these bots are legitimate, like from open AI or Google or anthropic, whatever the you know, whatever the AI is, those bots are not we block all those by default. So those are what we might call well behaved bots, because they tell you what they’re doing. But there’s all kinds of smaller AI companies that try to trick you into thinking they’re legitimate people, because they don’t want you to block them. So even though they’re scraping to take your images for AI, they’re not telling us that. So what this company has developed, and we’ve applied to all the Faso sites, is it’s able to look at all this traffic over the whole world in real time and identify these bots, even if they don’t identify themselves. And so when we say we protect your images, we’re protecting them from these kind of automated scrapers that are doing this at scale to try to train an AI. And it’s not only for AI. There’s other reasons people may be scraping your site as well. So I guess. So I guess. What I’m saying is we can’t necessarily protect the image against one determined individual, you know, with a web browser, but we can protect it pretty thoroughly against these automated scrapers that are training all these different systems.
Olya Konell 33:30
And then Kevin, you were asking, what is scraping?
Kevin Macpherson 33:33
What is that?
Clint Watson 33:35
Actually, it means that there’s a bot, which is just a program that’s running that’s going to millions and millions of sites and loading those pages. And they call it a scraper, but it means it’s making copies of everything on that site, images, everything so, so if an AI company wants to make an image generation, you know AI thing, they need to go get millions or billions of images to train this thing. And so, you know, it’s they need to, they need to create a program that can go out in real time. And like, you know, get 1000s and 1000s of images, you know, per minute. It’s actually a real problem for web hosts like us, because if we had no protection. By far, most of the traffic that we deal with is automated. It’s and it’s not even just the bad guys. There’s their Pinterest has a bot. Facebook has a bot. These are all they use. All these bots for various reasons, and they’re not even nefarious reasons. But I mean, a few years ago, we were having problems with our sites, you know, responding very slowly or going down, and we thought someone was attacking us. Well, it turns out it was Google. You know, Google bot was sending us so much traffic that we couldn’t keep our servers up reliably. So, so we’ve put all these systems in place where we can. Block the bad guys, and we can tell the good guys, like Google, if they start, if they start spiking a lot of traffic to us, we can say, hey, you know, back off. You’re, you’re attacking us.
Olya Konell 35:12
No, that’s, that’s a really good explanation, and thank you. I know it’s one of those real risks that, as Kevin you were saying, like you have to take the risk of putting your art out there, but you have to understand, you have to do your best to mitigate that risk. You know, we get in the car, it’s a risk. We put our seat belt on, we hope that everything goes smoothly, and most of the time it does. And I feel like it’s the same way with kind of putting your art out there. So I have seen artists get really have high anxiety over, oh my goodness. You know, there’s some weird person commenting or what if people copy it, and it’s a real risk, and you just have to put your seat belt on. Do, do? Do your best. Use a reputable, you know, place to upload your images. You know, you can watermark them. There’s all these different things that artists can can do, but if you can’t be fearful of it either. I have one question. This kind of came in from Donna, different subject, but for Kevin, I’m struggling with trying to do it all. Do you have an assistant to help in some of the technical stuff in marketing? And you kind of answer that, but I want you to highlight that you do? You have Wanda
Kevin Macpherson 36:19
And we have Clint, you know that that’s such a big part of it. And definitely, I have Wanda to do all this. Like to set this up this morning. I wouldn’t be able to do it if she goes, if I’m at home skiing, and she’s down here, and I hit the remote on the TV and it doesn’t go on. I don’t watch TV for the month, you know? And then sometimes, like, she’ll Google me, or whatever you call it, and on the phone, and I’ll say, Okay, what do I button do I push? So, you know, to have it’s really a difficult job, in a way, because people will ask me, Do I paint every day? Well, let’s say you paint it every day, and then you want to get your paintings into the gallery. Do you get in the car and put your seat belt on, as Olya said, and go down there, and who frames them? Who orders the frames? You know, there’s so many parts to be an artist, and getting it out in front of your audience, it’s very difficult. So having somebody like Wanda started working for me a year out of school, you know, I worked as an illustrator first, and then after a year of her being out of school, she started working for me and worked the financial side of the business and things like that, and doing photographs of all the artwork. So theoretically, if you can hire out people to do all those things, you could accomplish a lot more, you know, and focus on the things that you’re best at. But, you know, sometimes I get up on a ladder and try to do some handyman stuff around the house, and you could just see in the newspaper, 70 year old man was up on a 17 foot ladder changing a light bulb and fell. Everybody would just say, what an idiot. You know, he deserves to die or something, right? So, you know, there are things that if you did have the opportunity to find someone who’s really good on the computer to find someone who can help you with the financial organization of what you earn, and you know, do and spend all those things you could accomplish a lot more on what you’re good at, the craft of making paintings, perhaps. But as an artist, we seem to kind of have to do a little bit of everything, you know, and so that’s just part of it.
Olya Konell 38:46
And something that I have seen other artists share that are that don’t have a Clint or a Wanda in their in their life, is they have to get very disciplined. And that’s hard for us artists, because we’re creatives, but whatever method and system works for you, whether it be picking one day out of the week that that’s what you do, you get everything ready. We actually so all of our Faso customers do get access to a marketing calendar that gives you a framework, you know, on this day prepare your newsletter for the following week. On this day, do this. You can change it, you can modify it to fit your schedule, but it gives you kind of a basic routine. And I think that will help if you’re somebody that has to wear all the hats, but you have to understand that if you don’t wear the hat, you don’t put the hat on, and you don’t have somebody that you can outsource it to, it’s not going to get done, and you’re not able to grow if you don’t put your art out there. So you have to, kind of, you just have to accept that that’s the way it is. And you know
Angela Agosto 39:55
We had a couple of artists, I think Tina Garrett was one. There was a couple. She suggested. And a lot of artists do it, you can source it to somebody else. Maybe there’s an artist who’s really good at social media, and maybe you’re really good at taking pictures, and you kind of swap those chores or those little jobs, and there’s no payment, because you’re doing something for them and they’re doing something for you. I believe his name, we had another artist on. He said that his mentor knew nothing about computers. He was a little older. He said, “he gave me free art workshop classes so I could improve my art, and I did all his social media for him.” Wow. He did that for many years. It was just an even exchange, and that worked out so you don’t have to have, like, you know, a partner who does it for you, or like a, you know, Wander or a Clint. But you can also hire young people, they’re always looking for, you know, to doing these little, small jobs, small pay. I think we had Dan Gerhartz say that, in his case, his daughters did it. But he said sometimes even, like hiring models and stuff that requires money, he said sometimes giving a little study of a picture that you did, that could be a payment, you know, if they don’t want, or you maybe can’t financially afford that. He said, there’s other ways you can do it to kind of have somebody do these things for you, so that you can spend more time in the studio. Or maybe you’re just not tech savvy and you don’t want to learn to do that.
Clint Watson 41:20
Yeah, it sounds to me like the moral of the story is you should hire someone to do this, and if they’re really, really good, you marry them so they can’t quit.
Kevin Macpherson 41:30
That’s what Wanda did.
Clint Watson 41:33
There’s someone else I remember from in our gallery days there was a gallery owner and their top selling artist. And he said it as a joke, but I still remember it. This gallery sold like tons of this lady’s work. And so he said, and then, so then I married her, and now she could never leave the galleries.
Angela Agosto 41:53
I won’t say who, just in case I mistaken, but where I think he was the teacher and she was the student, and then she’s like, I married him, so I got free art classes after that.
Clint Watson 42:03
And then, if you can be like, Dan Gerhartz and have kids, free labor.
Angela Agosto 42:07
It’s actually like, your Wanda, and then his kids, you know, yeah, they help him with social media and YouTube. And now he’s gotten really big on that, because he had,
Clint Watson 42:15
there’s a reason, there’s a reason. There’s the whole proverbial artist spouse,
Olya Konell 42:20
yeah, and one more thing that artists have been doing lately, that I’ve seen is, if you have a group of, like, four or five artists that you get together, if you pool your funds, you can hire one person to be full time, to do all of your social medias or to do all of your things. And so if you’re local, you find somebody that you all feel comfortable with hiring you can kind of crowd, crowdfund an assistant, because it’s, it doesn’t have to be a full time gig, one person for one artist. That’s why it’s so hard to find somebody. Because, you know, it’s hard to find somebody unless they’re already doing that for a bunch of other people, where they can do it cheaper for you.
Clint Watson 42:59
So yeah, we’ve toyed with the idea for years of building some kind of service to do this, like an artist assistant that would be shared among them, but it’s just not our core competency. Yeah, because to scale it up, we’d have to, we’d have to keep we, we’d have to hire these people and manage them, which at any level of scale, would be a lot of people to deal with, and then if they quit, like that, leaves the artist in a lurch.
Angela Agosto 43:25
Yeah, there was one artist who said a group of artists shared an assistant. She shared her and well, lost her to that other person because they were needed more. Now she to train somebody new.
Olya Konell 43:35
A couple comments, I married a patent, copyright and trademark attorney. That’s awesome to say. I have worked with students Monica, I’ve worked with students at the University next to my house to help in the studio with a variety of things. That’s awesome. Yeah, students are a great resource. That’s kind of how artists have a long tradition of learning from those that came before us. And I know I say this all the time, but it’s true. So any opera, that’s why we do these talks is it’s our opportunity to connect artists with each other. Because maybe you’ve never met Kevin before, you’ve never seen his work, and now you know that he’s a great resource, for example, to get the magic grid lesson or whatever. And I know you have it in a video, right? And you do it in person. Is that how it works? Kevin? Somebody was asking about that, yeah.
Angela Agosto 44:21
We do have a couple questions wanting to know more about the Magic Grid.
Kevin Macpherson 44:22
yeah, yeah. There’s those videos called the magic grid, the magic grid landscape, then a portrait, and then a still life. And I think I videoed one in acrylic too, that might be coming up too. These are a couple acrylics that are right behind me right now. And then, yeah, and then I do in person workshops. I’ll be doing two in Taos in in August of next year, the last two weeks, August and 26 and I think I have one in Japan and one in China also.
Olya Konell 44:58
And the magic grid. For those trying to get wrap their mind around it, because we’re visual people, it literally is you, you, you have a special grid that you’ve designed that you use, that helps artists become better painters, in a way, you know. So there’s, there is a type of grid, and there’s a way of using it that you teach. And so that’s essentially what the magic grid is it just, and you call it magic, because you said it’s so magical to see the transformation that people go through, right? So I think that’s awesome.
Kevin Macpherson 45:28
Yeah, that’s magical. But also it’s, it’s not one grid. It’s a it’s a method of dividing your two dimensional space. It’s a method of thinking two dimensionally. Because basically, you know, the painting is flat, you know, it’s just this, just flat. And, you know, mentally, we we want to paint things, but it’s a way of changing the way you see. And it’s so simple, it’s illegal in 17 states. Now for me to teach it, because the universities don’t want you to do this. They want to get $100,000 you know, every quarter you know, while they don’t really teach you how to paint. But so it’s really, it helps you with drawing, composition, color, every aspect of the language of painting. So it’s really a fun way to to change the way you think and change the way you see, and, very quickly, change the way you’ve been painting incorrectly.
Olya Konell 46:29
Perhaps I need to check that out. Maybe I’ve been doing things incorrectly because I’m a hobby artist, so not but somebody asks, What are your feelings on working from the focal point out
Kevin Macpherson 46:42
that’s a good way to do it. And so any way to I call it like in the magic grid, I call the star. You know, if we are setting a stage or playing a symphony, you know, every part in that orchestra has a role to play, and it works towards, you know, the soloist, or whatever it might be, let’s call it the star, the focal point. So every mark that you put on the canvas has to be in relationship to, how does it support that star? And so if we start with the focal point first, that way we know this is going to be the area that we want the person to move through the canvas and settle on. And so if we start with the focal point and work out, we can control that, perhaps in a in a very good way, because it’s easy for things to get distracted in the painting, you know, contrast, for instance, for instance, attracts attention. So if there’s something down in the corner that’s attracting attention beyond the focal point, you know, we have to adjust that, you know. So there’s many things that are grabbing us when we’re painting from life or from our photograph, saying, Oh, this is important. No, this is important, but we have to control the hierarchy of everything in our painting. So starting with a focal point, that’s one easy way to help that happen. Yeah.
Olya Konell 48:13
Really good question. Thank you for asking. And then I want to pull out one of my anchor question. So kind of, is
Kevin Macpherson 48:24
that like to tie around my foot so I sink down?
Olya Konell 48:28
No, we don’t want to tie you down at all. But, you know, I kind of because you have such a long career to reflect on, and you’ve done so many different things, and, you know, you’ve, you’ve done it all. So reflecting on your career, was there one piece of business advice you received early on that shifted how you approached being an artist,
Kevin Macpherson 48:54
business way, you know, I just kind of interesting. You know, I am.
Kevin Macpherson 49:02
I started as an illustrator, so I think maybe that was a good piece of business advice. You know, I went and I studied at Northern Arizona University to become an illustrator, and I didn’t have any business classes, and Wanda actually was in the business school, so that was kind of a good that could have been the good business advice get someone from that department. So that was a wise decision, but not very thoughtful. I don’t think, you know, I didn’t plan it. Just happened in a good way. So working, though, as an in advertising was a really a good lesson, you know, because artists, we just don’t have that talent, and we just don’t do it, and everything falls into place. You really have to work hard for it. And advertising was a work ethic that I would work 14 hours a day, 100 miles an hour. And. Pressure for performance and expertise was really important. You wouldn’t get a job the next day if you didn’t perform the one you had the task to do. And I remember I would do freelance. I got a job in a little art studio. So after four years of college, I got job offerings at every studio I went to. So I didn’t take the most, highest pay. I took the second which was $625 a month. You know, after four years of college, it wasn’t maybe the wisest career to take. However, I also did freelancing right from the start. So in addition to working as the illustrator in the studio, I’d go looking for other jobs. So I really had a desire to be the best illustrator I could be. And I bought one of those little carbon copy little books to write receipts on. You know that in the gas station way back in the 60s or so. And I remember my first I still have that little pad somewhere, and my first freelance job was $35 and, you know, way, but having to be in that position of knowing that art is a business. And at that time, as I said, I wanted to be the best illustrator. So I wanted to be the best at my craft and what I was doing, but you had to make a living at it, and the advertising was a way to make a living at it. So I think that teaches a lot of us to wear the many hats you had to be, perhaps the person to go up and find the job until you had enough, and then you would get a representative to do that for you, building understanding, you know, the expenses and the profits and, you know, all those things I think are, that was probably the best business advice
Olya Konell 51:53
for me. Yeah, no, that’s really, really, really good, yeah.
Kevin Macpherson 51:57
And then you mentioned something Olya earlier, about the the risk taking, you know, getting in your car, all the things we have to do, and, you know, the nerve to go into a gallery for the first time and show your work, the possibility of getting rejected, which I still get rejected on, lots of things that I try to approach, and stuff. All those things are important. And there were many very talented artists I knew that didn’t like working with the gallery because they thought the gallery, you know, wasn’t fair to them in some ways, you know. So you know, the gallery has their business model, that artist has theirs, and you have to find a way that you have a good relationship with both of those sides of it. And if you get too angry because the gallery doesn’t do this or doesn’t, you know, want to do this and you want to, you know, a lot of times that bites you back from moving forward and getting some of those relationships. And as I said, Clint and I worked together for 20 years, and it was a terrific relationship with that gallery.
Olya Konell 53:04
Yeah, and actually, we have a gallery question from Carol, how often is it appropriate to contact galleries that represent your work? So I think
Kevin Macpherson 53:15
especially in the beginning, if you have galleries that are nearby you, so you can have a personal relationship where you can go in, you can change your paintings out without the expense of shipping. That can really do us in on a big way, and going in there, so that they know that you are viable, and you can see what they’re doing, see that your painting is hung correctly. Is it hung at all? You know, lot of those things. And did it sell? There’s many galleries that you you call them six months later and they say, Oh, we just sold something yesterday, you know. But they said they sold it maybe four and a half months ago. But they, you know, there were a lot of galleries that were not, he’s on to us, yeah, how do you think he built that great website? You know, so the relationship is really important. It’s easy to get in galleries, but I find it difficult to get out of galleries. You know, like building the relationship is important. And, you know, sometimes things don’t work. And then, you know, if you have a good relationship and or a bad getting out of some of those things is more stressful than the opportunity get in. So pick, you know where you go and go into a gallery, find a nice conversation with them before they even know you’re an artist. You know, how do they treat you as a respectful patron coming in. You know, I, I’m I always, nobody ever robs me when I’m out painting on site. You know, often people give me a little money in my hat down there because I look homeless or something. So then after that, we walk in a gallery and, you know, sometimes they look. At you and think, Oh, this guy’s not going to buy a painting. And, you know, I, I have quite a collection of you know that I bought is such a big mistake, yeah? So, you know, you have, they have to, you have to be treated like with respect. And know that when someone comes into the gallery looking for your work, that gallery person is going to treat them with respect. And I think that’s important,
Angela Agosto 55:21
yeah, because they’re, they’re actually representing you. They’re the face for you, since you’re not there for your Exactly,
Clint Watson 55:27
yeah, and Monica, I would, I would add another thing, which is not always possible, but if it is possible, it helps a lot. If you know any artists in a gallery you’re going to approach, you can, you can hopefully get some feedback from them about how their experience has been working with those people.
Olya Konell 55:46
Yeah, definitely. And probably even if you have a good relationship with that artist friend, and they have a good relationship, you can get recommended, because I know Clint, you’ve shared that, or other artists have, you know?
Clint Watson 55:58
And well, sure, like, back then, if Kevin had said, Hey, this guy was in my workshop, you guys should really look at them. Like, instantly, top of the list. We’re going to look at that person, yeah,
Kevin Macpherson 56:10
and then he gets in, and then they kick me out.
Clint Watson 56:16
But all those things are important. Yeah, you taught someone to paint like you, and now, now he’s undercutting you, right,
Kevin Macpherson 56:22
right? And he doing a better job. So, yeah,
Olya Konell 56:26
I love, I love the humor about all that
Angela Agosto 56:29
I have a question for when you sit you’re out there, like, you know, painting en plein air, do you have business cards? Or, how do you show them more of your work or if they want to see more of your work. Like, or do you tell them, Oh, I’m at this gallery? Like, how do you kind of keep in touch with those people or send them to your site?
Kevin Macpherson 56:44
You know earlier, how we talked about having that website, you know, I think nowadays, you know, I had business cards, and I rarely have them with me. But you know now that we have the phones and, you know, you can say, Oh, you they could instantly look you up, you know. So if they Google me and they see, you know, pages and pages of stuff, all of a sudden you get credibility that you’re, you know, somebody, and then having that website, you know, gives that. I think that’s a really good way to do it. So it would be good to have that in your in your backpack or so, but I usually forget to do that.
Angela Agosto 57:25
You can now pull it up. I think somebody else said they have business cards with a QR code that goes to their Faso website. So, yeah, yeah.
Kevin Macpherson 57:33
One day, actually, I was in Poland, or it was Budapest this spring, and I was painting, and this nice couple came up to me and was watching me paint, and they asked that question. So I I said, Oh, she was trying to type my name, and I said, Oh, let me get your phone in. So I typed it, and my hands were so covered with paint. Her phone was just covered with paint, and, oh, I said, Let me fix it so I was clean off, but my other hand had paid.
Clint Watson 58:09
So then you just sign the back of her phone. Yeah, one,
Kevin Macpherson 58:16
it did make me a business card. And yeah, she did do that QR code on there. So that’s a good thing to do that too.
Olya Konell 58:23
I’ve seen some artists online where they are painting plein air. And you know, maybe they don’t have time to grab business cards or whatever, but in their plein air painting kit, they just have a little card that sticks up somewhere on in their setup that has their website, their Instagram, handle, their name, whatever, email, whatever they you know. So people walking by can just take a picture of it, or they can pull it up on their phone. So I
Kevin Macpherson 58:50
with all that information on there,
Olya Konell 58:52
perfect. And then it’s a business expense.
Kevin Macpherson 58:55
And then you could also say yes, I seen that guy Bob on TV painting, you know, you can answer all,
Olya Konell 59:01
yes, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, those actually is, that’s a creative idea, and then you can get jackets and sweatshirts, and it is legit business expense because it has your marketing information. No, that’s, that’s actually really, really good. There was a gosh, there was another question I wanted to pull, but I might have lost it there. Oh, okay, so why is it so difficult to get out of the galleries if they haven’t sold your work? That’s the one I want. So if
Kevin Macpherson 59:36
Yeah, it’s just a relationship. You develop friendships, and you know with your people that you’re working with in most cases, and you know after so long, it’s theoretically not working for them, not working for you, but you know that’s breaking up. It’s hard to do, I guess, right?
Olya Konell 59:55
Yeah, I get it’s like a relationship.
Kevin Macpherson 59:57
And then if, then, if you did, you. To have someone who was not doing things in a scrupulous manner, you know, again, then that’s confrontational. And, you know, so, yeah,
Clint Watson 1:00:08
well, yeah. And then I’ve heard, I’ve heard stories from artists that where it was not a good situation, where they then try to get their paintings out, and like the gallery, people don’t give them the paintings. And in the worst cases, like, there have been a few cases where I heard where, like, the gallery shuts down and absconds with all the artwork.
Angela Agosto 1:00:30
Somebody who said that during the pandemic, like you were saying, Kevin, the gallery is closed, and they said the paintings were gone because it was all locked up in foreclosure, bankruptcy, whatever it happened. He’s like, I can get my paintings.
Clint Watson 1:00:42
So there’s a level of difficulty in the best case and the worst case, there’s a level of difficulty getting out of it, right? Yeah.
Angela Agosto 1:00:50
I think the only thing that he advised to us at that time, he said, make sure in the contract you put that that those are yours, and if anything happens. You get those facts in the contract, that it can’t be included in any kind of, foreclosure or bankruptcy.
Kevin Macpherson 1:01:03
And most galleries, also, they’ll have on their contract. And in, in my best years working with galleries like Clint’s, I never had a signed contract. It was, you know, just we respected each other and and did the right things. But you know, now they’ll say, like, Okay, you ship to us and and they try to get away with, okay, and I pay for shipping back. But you know, you, if I ship to them, their job is to ship back to me. And very often, they’ll never want to ship them back, because that’s a cost to them. So and so if you did, you know, quit the gallery. You know, all those issues come up, so that’s why, you know, choosing the right gallery is important. So take a little bit of time to get one that you feel good about.
Olya Konell 1:01:55
And even, like you said, starting local, and I’ve heard artists say the same thing about show starting local and then going out as you go. And it’s obviously hard for artists that live in the middle of nowhere. You know, we understand that. Another thing that I have seen younger artists do like, because I live in a small community, and we have a little town just 15 minutes away, and I’ve seen like the local cafes there and in the other little town. So, and I love this, artists will connect with the local business and be like, hey on this evening, on a Friday, you know, can I put my art up and be here and have a table and paint live and whatever, and you can pretty much do your own art show. You know, with a non art business, it doesn’t have to be a gallery, but, and the reason why I wanted to highlight those opportunities is if you have artwork that is more expensive or bigger, people will look at it on your website. But most people don’t buy very expensive things, sight unseen in person. They want to see it in person most of the time, not always, but most of the time. So if you can create opportunities to sell online and offline. You’re, I feel like you’re going to have a good you’re depending on the type of work that you have. There’s always an opportunity for that work to be seen and purchased in the best way possible. So, so this is why galleries are great for that. If you have those bigger pieces, if you have more, you know, pricier pieces, that gives you that opportunity. You could say, go there, go there. You can look at it, but
Kevin Macpherson 1:03:24
yeah, definitely. And I think making opportunities for yourself, you know, to grow and show your work, you know, it’s you definitely have to find opportunity.
Olya Konell 1:03:37
Yeah, I know we’re closing in on the hour, but I I have one question, and then I want to help us land the plane. My My question is, do you participate, or have you participated in art shows? Do you still do it? Did you do it in the past?
Kevin Macpherson 1:03:56
Oh, definitely. I remember one of the very first art shows I got. Do you remember Bob Eubanks from the newlywed game? Yes, I do. His wife, Irma, had a very popular Western show called The pepper tree show, and it was mostly western type of painting, which I lived in Arizona. But I allergic to horses I know nothing about anything Western, really, but I got invited to participate there, and that was one of my first shows, and had to ship the painting. And I was on a budget, and I found chunks of plywood. I made this big, heavy crate. Found 17 different styles of screws. So one was a nail, one was a Phillips head, one was the other type. And so
Clint Watson 1:04:46
Sounds like my builder, yeah. So I guess I got,
Kevin Macpherson 1:04:50
I, you know, I just did the best I could do back at the time. So I won an award for the most irritating crate scent. And so it was called the gold. In golden apple. So it was a road apple, a horse turd. It was gold flaked or something. They gave me that as a war because I had the most annoying crate to uncreate. Oh, and actually use pampers to cushion, cushion we didn’t have the bubble wrap at that time, so
Angela Agosto 1:05:29
you will not be able to get
Olya Konell 1:05:33
that. The word is like, so perfect.
Kevin Macpherson 1:05:35
You know, some people have Oscars on their shelf. I still have the road apple. You still have, oh my gosh, oh, gosh, no. So, yeah, so participating in art shows and competitions, you know, all those things help get your work out there. And you could be rejected with a painting, which I have. I’ve been rejected on some shows, and then when the best is show with the same painting that was rejected. So, you know, a lot of it is subjective. A lot of it is you have different groups of people that kind of pre screen things that not, you know, I judge a lot of shows, a lot of the national shows, and someone says, Oh, I didn’t get in, you know, sometimes I don’t even get to see the work that was submitted. They go through the 1000 pictures and maybe call out 500 of them. But you know, I get disappointed sometimes, because I would view it very differently than, say, the pre screeners that might not have the same judgment esthetics that I would so don’t get too just drag do too disturbed. If you don’t get in or don’t win, don’t tell people. But when you do win, tell everybody. You know,
Clint Watson 1:06:53
it’s interesting you say that because when, when we were in the gallery business around the time that we were working with you, there was a, I’m not going to name the show, but we were hosting this national show. It was in association with another, like nonprofit association, and when they approached us to host it, one of the things we said was, we want, basically, we want, we want to see the ones, because they did the pre jurying. We said, We want to see the ones that you rejected, and have basically have a number like we want a certain number of vetoes, right? So we found some paintings that we that they had rejected, we put back in, and I clearly recall that of two of those paintings were by the same artist, and one of those two paintings won the Best of Show. Yeah? I think, I think you might have been the judge.
Kevin Macpherson 1:07:49
I think I remember that. Yeah, yeah, I gave myself the award.
Clint Watson 1:07:56
Yeah, exactly it was. It was an inside job, yeah?
Kevin Macpherson 1:08:00
But yeah. So do think that, you know, again, find opportunities to get your work out there, find find opportunities to to win an award and let people, you know, sometimes people need other people’s judgment. You know, they’re afraid to make that decision to buy something, but you’ve won award that’s, oh, it must be good or something. And doing, you know, I did a lot of our outdoor shows, and especially the plein air painters of America started in 1986 and I was a part of it since 1987 and those were the very first plane air events in the country and kind of in in the world, really, that was the start of it. And so I did that for many, many years, and then participated in many of the other ones around there, and a lot of invitational shows around the country. Again, we want to get exposure. You know that we you know you can paint all this great work, but if nobody sees it, you won’t sell it. So you, yeah, put it on your refrigerator, but you only have space for so many refrigerators.
Olya Konell 1:09:14
Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. And I love what you said that sometimes people need to be told that, you know, like that clout, the I won an award. It’s really good peer pressure to say, Hey, this is fantastic. You should buy. I mean, unfortunately, that’s, you know, human psychology. People work that that way we want, what other people like, or what other people want, sometimes, not always, but sometimes and all the the other cool thing about going back to the website is, like, if you go to artists websites, you can see their CV or their awards, and you know they’re linking to those things. And so it’s an opportunity that somebody else has said this in the Q A box, and I responded, but I wanted to highlight the comments they said. So another benefit of having a site is when you go to apply for these things, you go to apply to get in a gallery, or you go to apply for a show that helps influence people’s decisions when they can kind of see what you’ve already accomplished. And so your resume is a part of your professional reputation, and having it on your site versus a Facebook page and an Instagram page, you know that will never be found. Having your CV or your list of accomplishments and all the things that you’ve done, having it someplace easy to find does help an artist in their career. So I mean, that’s another
Kevin Macpherson 1:10:38
definitely, and that helps you validate the price structure you have, you know, like you could be in a show, and there’s so many fine painters and today, you know, the opportunity to learn from so many great artists through personal and videos and books, you know, is Much greater than when I started. You know, back in the 80s, fortunately, I had great teachers and mentors that were sharing at that time, but now it really is at your fingertips to become a great artist. So sometimes, let’s say I’m in a show with someone who’s been out there for three years, but is doing great paintings, they may not have a reputation so, but their painting may be terrific and I may be side by side. Maybe my paintings $15,000 and theirs is $1,500 so why would somebody buy spend that much money on my painting when the one next to it is better, you know, or equally as attractive like, they’ll question, why is this 115 100? Why is that 115 1000? But then they can look at your CV and say, Oh, he’s have his whole career behind him. He he’s earned this level of respect and reputation and price structure again. But if you don’t trust yourself to looking at paintings. You know, I would go in there and, you know, I I buy lots of paintings of, you know, very expensive debt artists and up and coming artists too. You know, I can tell this person is going to be a real force in the world. And this is an opportunity to spend $1,500 and get a real value at this stage.
Olya Konell 1:12:25
Yeah, no, those are really good points, and that’s real life. That’s just how it is. Yeah, that’s how things happen. So I know we have had a lot of questions and a lot of comments as I’m going to ask this last one as we land the plane, we’re a little bit over, so I apologize, but anybody that wants to pass a thank you or a comment to Kevin, I will be sending those over to him after the session. So if you want to throw it in the chat, you can just respond to hosts and panelists. If you want any kind of a you know message to him or Clint, or any one of us, go ahead and do that now, but I want to ask you, Kevin, so last words of advice. I think this last bit that you shared could technically be the, you know, just the last bit. But if there was only one thing someone could take away from this conversation, what would that piece of wisdom be?
Kevin Macpherson 1:13:21
I’d say, try to follow your own path, you know, make, make a life’s journey if you’re going to be an artist, you know, Wanda and I really had a great life, you know, looking back at it, you know, we we did things, and it feels right sometimes when you’re following the right path, you know, just trust yourself. Make some choices and take some chances. And I think Wanda needs to get in over here. Come here.
Olya Konell 1:13:59
Yeah, get in there.
Clint Watson 1:14:01
That’s great advice.
Angela Agosto 1:14:03
It is, it really is.
Olya Konell 1:14:06
And I have heard so many artists echo similar versions of that. Hi Wanda, the wonderful lady that we’ve heard so much about
Angela Agosto 1:14:16
Hi Wanda!
Kevin Macpherson 1:14:16
have every once a while, did you see my arm go? She was pulling the string,
Olya Konell 1:14:22
just snapping her fingers. We
Angela Agosto 1:14:24
I do have a little message for you, Kevin and Wanda, from Susan Lyon and Scott Burdick. They were on here last month, or about two months ago, and they were so excited you were going to be on. And they said to tell you, “Tony Bennett, Lake, Tahoe” they wanted to see if you remember.
Kevin Macpherson 1:14:40
Oh we, oh yeah, yeah, okay. We had a great time.
Angela Agosto 1:14:45
We were actually talking because next year is FASO’s, 25 years. Wow, really, Yes, Kevin and Clint, kind of like I always say, Walt, Disney and Mickey Mouse
Clint Watson 1:14:55
I finally have to print business cards,
Angela Agosto 1:14:58
So they were excited. And then they said that they would love to just and come back on, and if you’re on, let’s just have a party already, kind of come back on and just, you know, chat and, but I did want to leave you with that.
Kevin Macpherson 1:15:09
that would be a fun, a fun thing getting, you know, all our buddies that we’ve painted with over the years, you know, and have like, 10 or 15 artists. That would be a fun, yeah?
Angela Agosto 1:15:20
Susan’s like, I don’t want to be bossy, but I’m gonna tell you, because they’re gonna be Africa. She’s like, we’ll tune in from Africa, you know, next year. And then yeah, guys get
Clint Watson 1:15:28
Yeah, that’d be great.
Kevin Macpherson 1:15:29
We’re often like, we’re in Mexico right now. So
Olya Konell 1:15:31
Mexico, so blessed, so lucky.
Kevin Macpherson 1:15:34
That would be fun. Yeah? I was with Scott not too long ago at the portrait society, so it’s fun to often we don’t get to see each other unless we’re out of the country or doing something like that.
Olya Konell 1:15:46
Yeah, well, we’re gonna, we’re gonna keep that in mind, and I want to all probably reach out to you and we can figure out it’d be great to have a group, and that’s kind of what we’re going to focus on, is topics and groups, because I want, we want to hear the discussions amongst the artists, amongst the legends and the Masters, yeah,
Kevin Macpherson 1:16:07
yeah, yeah, because there’s a lot we agree upon and a lot we can debate, you know. And yeah, kind of fun,
Olya Konell 1:16:15
yeah? Cocktails allowed everybody bring their own
Angela Agosto 1:16:19
so you can relax later in the afternoon. Yeah, it’ll be five o’clock somewhere!
Clint Watson 1:16:29
Yeah, in Africa it will five o’clock.
Kevin Macpherson 1:16:31
Yeah, we’re really, we’re very proud of Clint and PJ and what he’s accomplished and done for artists. It’s been a real blessing.
Clint Watson 1:16:38
So, yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the corollary to what Kevin said, to find your own path. Because, man, it goes fast.
Kevin Macpherson 1:16:50
It really does go fast. It’s you. You are up and coming artists for a long time, until you are going down fast.
Clint Watson 1:17:03
Well, it’s the same in tech. I joke with people that for the longest time, I was the youngest person in the room, and you would think, then you’d be like, the second youngest, and then for a while you’re in the middle. But no, I went, like, overnight from being the youngest person to the oldest person. Yeah. Like, I’m like, Why are you all looking at me? They’re like, because you’re the one with the experience. I’m like, no way
Angela Agosto 1:17:28
We can have you on again when you have your book, Kevin, and Clint is also doing a book.
Clint Watson 1:17:36
Yeah, it’s funny. I you don’t recall I told you about it last December. What you said is totally true. I feel like I’ve been writing this thing for a decade. I mean, it takes a long time, and you can, you can tell me if this is true for your process. But I thought I was finished almost a year ago, but I wasn’t. Yeah, so I think I’m finished now, so, oh, good. Hopefully it gets released next year.
Kevin Macpherson 1:18:05
Yeah, it evolves. And, you know, the longer you let it nurture, you find a unique way to present it.
Clint Watson 1:18:12
And, well, the problem is, you think it’s done, but then you kind of let it sit, and you’re, you know, maybe making minor edits, and then an idea comes up, and then you’re like, wait a minute, this other idea is a bigger idea, and this is really what that book is about. Exactly,
Kevin Macpherson 1:18:29
yeah, no, it’s a it’s a tough one, and that’s just like what we talked about. Also, it’s finding something that may take years and years to pursue on a path that will separate you from the other people too, you know?
Clint Watson 1:18:45
And so, like, what I found, what I’m finding is it’s very satisfying from a soul perspective, because it’s something I always wanted to do, and now, even if it doesn’t sell, even if it doesn’t, isn’t received, well, nobody can take that from me. Yeah? Like, I wanted to write a book. I wrote the book, you know, even if it sits on a shelf and nobody ever buys it, it’s an accomplishment.
Kevin Macpherson 1:19:11
But maybe, maybe you were saying, maybe they can take it from what are the bots and the scrapers? Maybe they’ll take it from you.
Clint Watson 1:19:19
Yeah, exactly so, so it’ll work its way out into the world somehow, through the bots.
Angela Agosto 1:19:25
Exactly. Thank you. That’s what she said.
Kevin Macpherson 1:19:30
Just you girls, Angela and Olya, you’ve really done a great job.
Olya Konell 1:19:35
Appreciate it. Really appreciate. Happy to have you.
Kevin Macpherson 1:19:39
It’s and, yeah, it’s good to hear you giggle throughout too. And then, fortunately, the Wi Fi stuck, which doesn’t happen all the time.
Angela Agosto 1:19:48
Yes, we got lucky.
Olya Konell 1:19:51
for your book, stars aligned, and thank you for making us laugh
Kevin Macpherson 1:19:55
Let me see if you can see my view.
Angela Agosto 1:20:00
Wow that view. That’s a painting right there.
Olya Konell 1:20:02
That is a painting right there. Yeah. Oh, that is beautiful. That is beautiful, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have, we have friends that do that. They’re going back to Mexico now. They bought a house there. His wife, it got her citizenship. So they bought a house, and they’re here for part of the year. They’re down there for part of the year, and then, and then, and then they do what you do, they travel. It’s, I’m like, yeah, they’re on the Kevin, we just
Angela Agosto 1:20:26
Two of our team members there last week. Yeah, Puerto Vallarta and somewhere else.
Olya Konell 1:20:31
Oh, nice. Yeah. Very beautiful. And Kevin, I’ll shoot you guys an email later today. I’ll pass on. There’s been so many amazing comments and little stories people have shared and things that you might enjoy reading. And, yeah, and
Kevin Macpherson 1:20:44
if people have more questions, they can send to and, you know, I can on the website, Faso website, I can answer, like I do get many from there, and I try to answer them when I can,
Olya Konell 1:20:58
yeah, so shoot him an email. He can go to contact, contact me on Kevin’s website, which we’ve shared all the links. Yeah, we’ll drop that in the but thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you Clint for joining us. Been a pleasure, and we last little bit, Kevin, we’re taking a break. We will resume next year. I’ll send an email about all of this to everyone that’s registered, so
Kevin Macpherson 1:21:21
thank you guys. What a pleasure.
Angela Agosto 1:21:24
Bye, bye, see you guys next year.
