Shownotes
Kevin Murphy, a virtuoso in the world of illustration and portrait artistry, graces us with his presence today! With over 30 years of mad skills under his belt, Kevin has painted for superstars like National Geographic and even the Rolling Stones. He’s not just your average artist; he’s also an educator who founded the Art Academy and launched Evolve Artist, an online program that’s helping aspiring artists in over 70 countries. Talk about taking art global! In this chat, we dive into Kevin's 'fundamentals first' method, which is like a secret sauce for teaching realistic painting. He’s all about breaking down the art-making process into bite-sized pieces, making it easier for anyone and everyone to pick up a paintbrush and create masterpieces. It’s like he’s handing out the keys to the art kingdom! Plus, we explore the emotional journey of art and its transformative power. Kevin shares his own story of rising from humble beginnings to creating a thriving art school where his daughter is set to take the reins. It’s a heartwarming tale of legacy and the belief that art can change lives, and trust me, you won’t want to miss it!
A gift from our guest: On this page there's a 7 minute video that shows how simple fundamentals can be used on your own work to make your art realistic.
Kevin Murphy is a master illustrator, portrait artist, and educator with over 30 years of experience. Since 1993, he’s completed nearly 600 commissions for clients like National Geographic, LucasArts, and the Rolling Stones. In 2001, he shifted to portraiture and later founded the Art Academy, which led to the creation of Evolve Artist, an online program studied in 70+ countries. Kevin’s fundamentals-first method teaches realistic painting like a science, helping students of all ages consistently outperform art school grads.
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Transcripts
Today I have the pleasure of introducing Kevin Murphy. Kevin is a master illustrator, portrait artist, and educator with over 30 years of experience.
Since: In:Welcome, Kevin. It is an absolute pleasure to have you here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. Thank you for joining us.
Kevin Murphy:Well, thank you for having me.
Kristina:Yeah. And then when we had our pre chat because I always, you know, bet our vet our audience or our fo vet our guests. There we go. Oh, my gosh.
I'm tongue tied today. And make sure that, you know, this is going to be a great fit.
It was really amazing how we talked about education and art and, you know, the way that we really want to help our children understand art better. So tell us a little bit about that passion. Why share this passion of art with kids and families?
Kevin Murphy:Well, I don't like, we don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to try to do this very quickly. I'm going to abbreviate it. But basically, I grew up very poor with very limited access to things like art.
And art has allowed me to change my position in the world to the point where my girls are growing up. We're eight minutes north of Princeton University, live in a wonderful neighborhood.
No one's being shot in the street outside of our home, which is how I grew up.
And so art has taken me from being a construction worker, could barely read when I graduated high school, to being in a place where I would been able to educate myself and build something really wonderful, which I'm now able to hand off to my children. Actually, in a week, my youngest daughter, she's 19, is going to be taking over my school.
I'm going to be stepping out and doing some other things, working more in the online realm. And so I've been able to build this business. It's now a family business, and my younger daughter is taking it over in just a week. It's.
It's very exciting as a parent to be able to have built something that one of my.
That one of my children is so anxious to be a part of and to know that she'll be financially stable because she's coming into something that's already built, something that we both have a love for. But for me, because of all of the things that the art world has done for me, what it's enabled me to do with my life, I just want to give back.
I want to open up the world of art to the people who are looking for it. It's that simple.
Art's not for everybody, visual arts, but for the people who are looking for a path to get from where they are to where they want to be. I've. I've developed a system for growing skills.
And the idea is most places that teach art, they're simply throwing a million things at a student, when the truth is all art is comprised of just a very, very small handful. I mean, a minute number of actual fundamental skills. And so I've spent my. I've spent the last 15 years.
Well, 32 years as a pro, but the last 15 years chipping away at how to create what I refer to as a frictionless education.
Meaning that all you have to do is show up and be conscientious, and you will grow, and you'll grow fast, because it's all core values, core understanding.
Kristina:That is awesome. And, you know, it's what something we talk about with our families is. We're talking about them for their education of their child.
Like, what are your core values? What are the basic principles you want to build your family on, your child's education on? And it's the same kind of principle.
And it's amazing that, you know, people sometimes like to skip over that. They're like, oh, no, I've got that part handled already. And I don't really want to go back and kind of, like, rehash things.
So talk about how you get your students to understand a little about how those basics are so important and how our parents who are listening can also kind of understand that, you know, oh, I want my child to be creative, but at the same time, maybe these basics are super, super important.
Kevin Murphy:Right? So kind of going back to what you just said, like, as a parent, we raise a child and we want our child to be kind. Right? Just. That is a.
That is a core, like, characteristic. We could teach them a thousand things about kindness, and if we throw it at them in. In the wrong way, they.
They understand the lessons in the places they've seen it. But if we teach it to them as a core value. Right. In large part through our example, they learn to be kind in all circumstances.
And so when I'm teaching art, I'm thinking, like, that how, what, what is the, what is, what are the simplest things. So as an example, somebody will, the old masters would say that figure drawing, anatomy is a fundamental skill.
But I'd make the argument that if you are painting abstract art, you don't need that, that's not a fundamental skill. And so if it doesn't apply to something that's realistic equally to something that is abstract, it's not a true fundamental.
And so weeding through all of the things that are traditionally argued to be core skills, and of course bucking the trend, the tide of everybody saying, no, no, you're wrong, this is how it's been taught forever. Going against that and being willing to kind of stand my ground on it with other professionals.
And to say no, like, if you're teaching fundamentals, which are critical to the development of all kinds of visual arts, you can't have a fundamental that only works in one genre. If it does that, then it's not a fundamental.
And so taking the time to go through, to dig through, and it's a humbling experience to reinvestigate what you believe, what got me to be a professional, I had to turn that completely on its head. That's a humbling experience.
And I, I did a podcast recently and I was saying I learned how to paint because I've been teaching, my students have educated me. I didn't educate myself. And the truth is that as a professional painter, I didn't actually know what I was doing.
I was successful because I was, I was hard working, I was tenacious and, and I didn't care how long something took, so I just worked on it and worked on it until it was done.
I actually learned how to paint by teaching it and realizing I didn't know how to explain any of the things I could do and then actively pursuing what I thought was the easiest way to teach it, to understand it again, without, again, I don't want to eat up too much time with these things, but Albert Einstein said that if you can't explain something so that a six year old understands it, maybe six or five, you don't actually understand it yourself, at least not fully. And so I've taken that to heart. It's like, well, if everything that we do here could be, you could walk a 5 year old through it.
If you prompted a 5 year old with questions, they could answer the questions. And those, those questions, if you can answer them, you can create art like this art like this painting behind me.
And it's because it's comprised of the same Moving parts as a ball on a table. If you did a painting of a ball on a table or a portrait like this, it's the same moving parts, what the fundamentals are.
And so what I believe is that there are no advanced ideas, There are no advanced skills. There are only. There's only an advanced understanding of the fundamentals. And we stay with that. We stay with that through the entire education.
Herb:So that. That's beautiful. And there are the way my brain works. It's like, I take what you said and I.
And I look how it applies to this part of my life and this part of my life. And so it's like some of the themes and the concepts that you talk about is like, how does that apply in other places? And I can make correlations.
So I hurt my head, suffered a traumatic brain injury. Life got very dark and hard. I had to explore alternate medicines to bring myself back.
That helped me so much that I became a coach to help other people do that as well. Because it was so impactful. And it's like more people need this kind of help. And I was reading up some of the.
A little bit about you before this, and I. I read this about. And I would like to quote this to you. Is like, is an artist born with talent? Or can anyone learn how to paint in oils?
And you responded as like, I believe that anyone can learn to paint. I would make the assertion that I don't have any talent. I work very hard. You would never say that. A neurosurgeon is talented in a lot of ways.
It diminishes the work that they've done to get to the level of skill that they have. So to me that I was reading, that just grabbed me. I mean, I spent a bunch of minutes in that, and that was so beautifully well stated.
But at the same time, it's like, man, I can't draw a straight line. Would I really be able to do that? But then a little bit farther later, you also talk about the commitment to it.
When you started painting, you said you would wake up and start painting. And then when you got tired of painting, you would fall back asleep until you woke up again.
And so 15 hours a day painting, people don't have that time. Is it take that level of a commitment. Anybody can do it. So let's bring these concepts around now to. Someone wants to do it.
What does it really take now?
Kevin Murphy:So. So what I would say is that if you've. If you've not read, read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. He talks about this, right?
So you're in kindergarten, and you're the best kid at drawing in the class. Now, why are you the best kid? It's not because you're gifted.
It's because while the other kids are out playing baseball or soccer, you're in your house drawing. So you being the most gifted, the teacher recognizes that and encourages it, gives you the better crayons.
When she pulls the crayons out of the box for the students, the ones with sharp points, right? And so what does that do? It makes you better.
So the next year, you come into the class looking even more gifted, and so they give you even more resources and more resources, year over year over year. And so that trajectory is set for you. And as a human being, we love to be celebrated for the things we do.
And so if we try something and we like it at first, but we're terrible at it, eventually we will get away from it because we're terrible at it, and we want to be celebrated. It's the nature of what we are. And so we will find the places that people say, wow, you're really good at that. And we will lean into those things.
And if a teacher is encouraging us down a path and we're being celebrated year upon year upon year for it, that's generally going to be the place we're going to land in a career. And so, you know, when we're. As a. As a child, that kind of sets the stage.
But let's say you're 40 and you've always loved art and you've always wanted to be great at it, but, like, you didn't start when you were five. Like, I didn't start when I was a kid. I decided to become an artist when I was 20 years old. I wasn't.
Like, when I run into people from my high school, I've.
When Facebook first surfaced and people started looking for each other, people from my high school would find me when they found out that I was a professional painter. They were like, what? Like, you wrestled. Like, you were. Like, you didn't. Like, did you even do art when you were in high school? No, I didn't.
I found it later on.
And so the education, the way we offer it, you can go from not knowing what you're doing at all, having not picked up a paintbrush since, like, again, if you're in your 40s and you haven't picked up a pencil or a brush or anything, maybe since you were in high school, in one year, I could get you to produce some professional level Work. If you show up and do the work. And we're not talking about 40 hour weeks, we're talking about like, you know, an hour a day.
An hour a day for one year. So that's seven hours. If you block out your Saturday afternoons and do that for a year, you will be incredible at the end of a year.
Now there's a, there's a video. We set up a landing page for your listeners. It's evolveartist.com be right. And we have a video there.
It's a, it's like an eight minute video that actually shows all of the fundamentals being applied to a very simple painting, right? To say, like, the first thing we want to do is we want to figure out where light and shadow go, right?
So there's a metric for that and that's described in pretty good. It's pretty clear. Then we show how to take those flat shapes and make them three dimensional.
Then we show how to add detail and then we show how to create depth. Those are the only things you need to know to be able to create very realistic three dimensional paintings.
I demo it in grayscale and then show it in color. It's the exact same painting, just in color. And it's like, so when we teach, there are four fundamental applications. Those four I just described.
And then the next part of it is learning how to color mix and then just integrating color into those foundations. From there, you can now paint just about anything that's put in front of you.
There are, there's more, there's more to be taught after that to fully flesh out the skill set. But it's like, you don't have to have a PhD level understanding of English to communicate in English. And visual arts is a form of communication.
It's visual communication. You don't have to be, you know, like, I get these, I get the.
So there's some things I do and like with the podcast, I get back like, this is the level at which I speak. 8th grade reading level, 9th grade reading level. Like, there's a window in there that's really optimal.
And I'm somewhere between like 8th and 8th and 10th grade is where I speak. If I was speaking at 12th grade reading level, there is a good cross section of people who would not be able to keep up, right?
And I may sound like I'm a little bit crude in my language to somebody who is at a, at a higher level, you know, college level English with English. But communications, that is the, is the whole reason for speaking.
Years ago, there was A, there was a congressman, I forget where he was from, William F. Buckley Jr. He was wonderful. Like, he would get up and he would speak and he had a show called the Firing Line. This was back on PBS back in like the 80s.
And what he would do, I think every time that he didn't have a strong argument is he would start using words that all the other congressmen didn't understand. And you could watch them, like they couldn't even answer what he was saying because they had no idea what he said.
And though it was entertaining, he wasn't communicating. And that's like the whole point of this is to communicate, whether it's verbal or in art. How do you communicate?
What, what level of language do you need to use to be able to communicate an idea?
And I'd make the argument that what I show in that eight minute video on that landing page is everything you need to be able to communicate, to communicate. Any idea you have an art now, you can elevate it from there.
And the program continues to move on, to add in those, those, those more sophisticated ideas. But it's all built on top of these two very, very simple foundational blocks in the program.
Herb:It's so interesting because when I, when I start thinking about art, I start thinking about like Fibonacci sequences and phi and golden mean ratio and, and the, and the, and the, the tenants of artistic and beauty perfection and, and scaling. And so, you know, whenever I hear about art is like all of that stuff comes in and I kind of. But it's like that stuff comes later.
Kevin Murphy:Well, I would argue it doesn't have any place in art. So, so think about this. Let's say that you had a painting of one of your children when they were a baby.
Just there's this amazing moment where you look over and as parents, we know, like it's perfect and then a week later it's a completely different creature. And then a week later it's like they grow. I have two daughters and I stay at home for the first five years.
Creatures, but they kind of start off that way. But yeah, I was a stay at home dad the first five years with my daughters. And so.
But the thing is like you watch them grow and it's like there's this wonderful moment that if you could just freeze it forever, it would just be the best. It's like kittens, at some point they're no longer kittens. And it's like, well, yeah, they're nice as cats, but they're not kittens anymore.
And I Think that humans, as parents, we look at our kids and we watch them go, Go through these different stages as they grow. If we get immortalized, one of those moments.
Now imagine if one of your kids, your firstborn child at 1 years old, you get this perfect image of them just kind of standing up for the first time in this smile. Look at me. It's magic. I'm standing, right, holding onto the table, but I'm standing the excitement, right? They know they've.
I mean, they're a year old, but they know they've accomplished something. They've been working towards this. Imagine if that were painted, but the, you know, the golden ratio wasn't used.
Do you think if that painting was painted by somebody who loved that child, like as a parent, if you painted that child the way you feel about them, even with some basic skills and no understanding of the, you know, Fabianacci and all these other things, do you think that painting would be any less powerful? The answer is no. Beauty is beauty. And it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to be mathematically calculated.
And I think that when you start getting into those things, you start losing the human connection. It's like perspective is a great example of that. People will draw perspective using math. Math and crisp, clean lines.
And another person, a trained artist who's been taught to see, will look down the same street and paint that with a lesser precision. But between the two of them, the one that is done by hand, by eye, and not with the mathematical formula feels right.
The other one might look right, but the painting that's done freehanded feels right. Now, you have to have some level of skill, but it's. There's a human connection with cameras.
Herb:I can. I can do that with cameras.
I can stand right next to somebody and we can both take the exact same picture with the exact same camera, and they are going to look different based on the intention of the person who pushes the button on the camera.
Kevin Murphy:It's the weirdest looking thing, just what you're looking for. You're looking for something that different than they are, and it's. It's connected to your human experience. Each one of us has a different one.
But again, like, going back to the thing of, like painting a child, every parent understands what I just described. Every parent understands the fear of a child getting hurt, right?
These are things that, you know, a million people with a million children, a million different places. It doesn't matter where you're from or that connection is there.
And so these things are universal and so the connection, person to person, person to the environment around us, those. Those things, you can't. You can't. You can't connect to a person by using a mathematical formula to describe it. And so the human.
This is one of the really powerful things about painting, from direct observation, where you have something in front of you when you paint it, because it's your visceral response to it. It's every experience you've ever had connected to the marks you're making.
And so from the standpoint of painting, that's really the most freeing place to be in, the place where the most expression, individual expression, creeps into the work. But the more you do formulations and things like that, the more you remove the human element.
And the human element is really what makes it beautiful and what connects it to the viewers, in my opinion. And there's a place for that. So.
Kristina:So I kind of have a practical question next.
If you are a parent and you think that when you draw, even your sick people look funny because you just have never developed any artistic, you know, whatever.
And so then you're thinking, wow, I want to share with my child art, and I want to share with my child the opportunity to draw and kind of get used to a. Kind of a few things. What would be a place that they could start?
So the parent's not confident, but they really want to expose their child to something. They're not quite ready for classes. What can they do to kind of prime the pump, so to say?
Kevin Murphy:Right? Well, it's. It's really hard. So there aren't many resources. I'd argue there are almost no resources to come in on the ground floor.
Our program does that. And it's not for little children. Teenagers, yes, we have tons of teenagers, but little children know, in the schools, we have a children's program.
It's like preschool for painting. But we are. We're lining them up for the painting program when they get a little bit older.
But, you know, you know, go to the back to these things like, you know, art is not about talent. There is no such thing as talent. Art is about an education. They use the word talent because art is used to generate wealth for people.
And so talent is a word that's used again, like, you kind of go into that quote before. In my experience, talent is never a word used to describe why you can do something. It is always to describe why you can't.
I can't do this because I'm not talented, because you don't want to say, I can't do this because I'm unwilling to do the work that this demands. Again, it doesn't matter what you do. If you, you know, if you are a sanitation worker and you're just the best at it, right?
You go and you, you get your, your eight hour run done in four hours. Because you are conscientious and you're amazing. You've labored to find shortcuts in how you do what you do. That's not talent, that's work.
You spent the time to figure it out. Neurosurgeons. And again, you, a concert pianist, it's like, okay, yeah, maybe you've got good dexterity and you're, you have a sharp mind.
Again, you know, I, a high iq. Nothing you can do about that. You're born with it or you're not.
But if you're born with a high iq, your brain fires faster than somebody with an average iq. You can see how something that someone else might not be able to see where it fits. You can see how the puzzle piece fits in something obscure.
The higher your IQ the better and the faster your brain does that. And it's like, well, you know, that's it. That's a gift. That's what I would think of as talent. But outside of that, not talent, everything.
Herb:So everything. That's me. I'm one of those super smart kids that, that is not talent. That's more of a curse. That is not a pleasant.
Kevin Murphy:No, no. Well, I'm not. Well, talent. I'm not saying that it's a gift, right? They say common sense is not a gift, right?
Because you have it and you're surrounded by people who don't have it. It's a curse, right?
But having, having a high iq, having a mind that works quickly and cleanly and processes data very fast, is able to make sense of obscure data and how it connects to other things you already understand is, you know, it, it allows you to develop any skill faster. And so, so if you come into art or computer science or you go into school to be a doctor and you have a high iq, yes, it's going to be easier.
And then somebody who has a lower IQ doesn't separate you in any other way. You understand the ideas, but you still have to do the work. There's a great saying that talent, no hard work beats talent.
When talent doesn't work hard. Very, very important. I don't believe that I have any talent. I go back, I look, I know what I'm looking at.
I go back and I look at the work I was doing when I was young, I paid attention to detail. I was clumsy, but I paid attention to detail but nothing else.
There's no understand, there's no natural gift of understanding color or having a steady hand or any of those things. I am where I am. I've built the career that I've built because I work harder than everyone else. When I was younger, I slept five hours a day.
I do that naturally. That's just something like there are some people that, that's just what they do. I wake up on five hours without an alarm.
So when I went to work, if I worked, if I worked a full day and my, and my competitors worked a full day, at the end of a week I had worked, I had worked 21 hours more than them. At the end of a month, almost a hundred hours more than them. Over years I was building entire careers in the time that they were sleeping.
And so it just grew, was exponential. Like the way that I, the way that my skills developed because I was getting these, these three hours a day, three hours a day, three.
One on top of another, on top of another while they were sleeping because they needed eight hours of sleep. And it's just, I just worked those hours and worked them and worked them. And like I said, I didn't know how to paint until I started teaching.
I just did it through hard work. I delivered paintings and I worked for major companies. It wasn't like I was like funneling around in like, you know, low, low rate magazines.
I was dealing with major publishers in New York. I did a cover for the Rolling Stones. Like you don't land there by accident. You have to have the deliverables.
Herb:But I didn't like things about Kobe Bryant. And he talks about he wasn't the best basketball player. He just outworked everybody.
And if he ever found anybody that put in as close to as much effort as he did, he stepped it up to be put even more. So he says he wasn't great, he just did it more.
Kevin Murphy:Yeah, you just show up and do the work.
Kristina:Yeah. So would you just encourage parents to have those arts out then when they.
Kevin Murphy:Were little, when they're young, encourage them to create, let. And it doesn't matter what they're doing, let them play. Right.
And what will happen is if they, as they grow up, you know, I, I'm not going to get into the argument about art being really great for the mind, for the brain, for development, because music does the same thing. And there's a lot of things that, that will develop those Portions of the brain. But art definitely has its benefits, right? It's a creative outlet.
And not all of us need a creative outlet, but enough of us do. We sing and we dance and, you know, some of us make art, some of us make music, right?
We need a creative outlet to feel, to be at peace with ourselves. Like for me, I could be stressed out weeks and weeks on end just doing things.
I sit down in front of an easel, within an hour I am just weeks of stress just gone. And even if I'm struggling with what I'm painting doesn't contribute to stress. It's where it's home for me. It's where I center. It's where.
It's where everything quiets down, the world falls away and it's just me and I'm, you know, and like a lot of people, like you see them when they, like even little kids, you see them, they'll start to draw and it's like three hours later, it's like they're still drawing. Hey, we're gonna go out. You want to? I don't want to. I'm drawing, you know, and it's like those kids are very likely going to.
They're going to need a creative outlet as they get older. It's part of their makeup. You can't undo that. It's part of their makeup.
And so, you know, encouraging it and again, doesn't have to be steered in one direction or another, but just encouraging that they have the time to play with these materials. Right. I come, I had a student in here, a parent the other day, saying, like, I very often discourage art universities with my students.
If you want to go for art, like, go for something else and then do art on your own.
And I try not to, I try not to be so heavy handed with that because there's a lot to be had in art schools depending on what major you're going into and where you're going. But as a general idea, I'm not a big fan of the way that art education is done. And so I. And that's in all formats, even online.
There's a lot of stuff. And again, these aren't just my opinions, they're from my experiences. It doesn't make them right. It's just how I see. And I know what we.
I know the results that we get. And they're not, you know, hit or miss. We get them across the board, one student after another after another.
I mean, I've had the school 15 years, international award winning students, our students just, you Know, we just. We see it over and over and over again, and it's all dependent on their effort.
They come in, they put in the effort, they're all like, like, incredible.
And so to me, like, if you go to a place and they start teaching you things like most art, art venues do, what happens is you wind up with a mess of stuff that doesn't actually help. It gets in the way of. Of. Of actually being good.
I did a video a couple of weeks back talking about how being a good painter can be holding you back from being a great painter.
And what it is, is you come in, you're like, well, I've been painting for 20 years, and through experience, you figured some things out, but you don't really understand how things work. And so you're so good at this point, you're not where you want to be, but you're so.
You're good enough that you think you need to add a more advanced skill on top to get better. When the truth is what you're missing is the, the. The solid footing underneath you.
And so, but people, they don't look back at the foundations because, well, look at where I am. I'm already pretty good. I must know the foundations. It's like, no, you probably don't.
I have a litmus test that I do because I have a lot of people that come in here and they're like, well, could I like, skip over some of the basic things and get to the real paintings? I've been painting for 20 years. I painted here and here and here. And it's like, I'll ask them a very simple question and they can't answer it.
And it's like, that's day one stuff. If you don't understand that, it's not that you can't make paintings, but you don't understand how they're built.
And if you don't understand the building blocks. I gotta describe this. Imagine if you. Imagine if you didn't speak English, but you wanted to. You wanted to learn to write beautiful poetry in English.
Imagine if you came into a place and they just started. You speak Cantonese, and they start. Give you a pen and paper and try to push you to write poetry in English. Like what? Here. Just write what you feel.
You're just making scribbles. You don't even know the Alphabet. So what? Most people don't want to go back and learn the Alphabet. Like, I can speak the language.
Can I just, like, dictate or something? Well, you got to learn the language, right? You got to learn the Alphabet.
Imagine if you learn the Alphabet and some the teacher forgot to teach you five letters, just 20% of the fundamentals, the language becomes clumsy.
It doesn't, it's not completely ruined, but something that you might be able to describe concisely in one sentence now might take you three paragraphs to kind of circle around it to get to that point where you've said enough things this but not that, to then cordon off the one thing you were trying to say, right?
So it becomes clumsy with just 20% of the letters missing if you couldn't use them and if the, if the person teaching you forgot to teach you the vowels, the entire language collapses. There's no communication at all. And so when we're learning how to make art, we think of art as a visual language. What is your Alphabet?
I described it already.
And again, that landing page, I demonstrate all four of those fundamentals in action and show how you go from a blank canvas to a compelling three dimensional painting. And it's like four things. Well, that's not that hard. It's not that hard if you've got them, if you don't have them.
Herb:So in what I do in, in, I help people learn how to breathe. So some of the, some of the medicine work that, that we do, you need to learn how to breathe.
And it sounds weird because people just think, oh, I've been breathing my whole life, I know how to breathe.
Kevin Murphy:I'm an athlete, I know what you're talking about.
Herb:But if you start learning how to breathe, if you start changing the way you breathe, your life takes on a whole new aspect. So, you know, yeah, go back to the fun. I've been painting for 20 years. I don't want to go back to the fundamentals. I want to get this, this event.
No, when we go into the medicine work with br.
Breathing, it's like, no, you have to go back to the fundamentals because there are sometimes in that medicine work where all you have left is your breath. And if you don't understand that and you lose your breath in that, it can become a very painful, uncomfortable moment for you.
So, yeah, even the fundamentals of breathing, everybody's done it for your whole life. It's like. But you don't know how to breathe.
Kevin Murphy:Yeah, well, you don't know how to see either. We talk about that in here all the time. You open your eyes, you walk around. People are blind and they don't even know it.
They have no idea how blind they are. They think they see because they Perceive stuff. And it's like it, it's, it's. Seeing is not what we think it is. No, seeing is a completely different.
Like, we don't see with our eyes. We see with our brain and our visual cortex, and it's not even there. It's portions of it are there and it's.
Then it's farmed out to other pieces of the brain based on, like, it's a face or it's letters.
What we see, all we see with our eyes, is a spattering of color light bouncing off of objects, those objects reflecting portions of the light spectrum in the form of color. And then it hits our eye.
Our eyes are sensitive to it, and that sends an impulse to our visual cortex, which then makes sense of it and sends it off to other places to connect it to what we understand and don't know. The image that we see, that we think we see with our eye is completely created from whole cloth by your brain.
And it's like it's built on expectations. And so if you expect to see something, you actually do see it because your brain made you see it even though it wasn't there.
That's how optical illusions work. We expect to see something, and so our brain shows us the images that it expects to see.
Kristina:And I can even take this a step further into reading. Right. We do the same thing with kids, those who kind of like picked up reading on their own, but then they're stuck. They can't go.
And so the teacher has to look at that and say, what did you miss down here? What was that fundamental in reading that's keeping you back from moving forward? Yeah.
Kevin, this has been such a wonderful conversation about art and all these different things. I wanted to jump back to the beginning where you were talking that your daughter is actually going to be taking over parts of the business for you.
Were they, were your children homeschooled? Were they public school schooled? How did they kind of get interested into stepping into the business?
Kevin Murphy:Yeah, well, I, I wish I had homeschooled my kids a real, like, as, as time has gone by, I really wish I'd bounced it around as an idea. But the thing is, I wasn't going to be around nearly enough.
Kristina:Yeah.
Kevin Murphy:And so I, so. And we have a very good school system out here where we are. But a lot of things that my kids were, were taught that I, I wish that they weren't.
And so my, my kids went to public school, and at about 13 years old, my youngest daughter told me, actually, no, it goes back well, before that, maybe around nine years old, she told me that she was going to take over the school when I retired. That's what she told me. I want to. I want to run the school when you're done. I was like, okay.
And then when she was 13, so this was six years ago, I was. We had so much stuff going on with the online program and all these other things, and I decided, you know what? It's time to.
It's time for me to step away from this. And so I had a couple of students who were here that were interested in buying the school. They had been trained.
They would easily take over the school and just. It would just run. No hiccups. So I was talking with one of the guys, and my. And Hallie, my daughter, was standing next to me. She's 13 years old.
She's, you know, like, that's my school. And what was that?
Herb:That's my school. Cancel that. That's my school.
Kevin Murphy:Well, that's basically what she said. After. After I finished talking to the guy, I turn around and she's there with one tear, like, hanging didn't run down her face.
Just sitting there waiting for me to see it. And then it ran down her face. I swear, she's a professional at this. And. And I said, what's wrong? She's like, nothing. And I was like, what's wrong?
I thought I was getting to school. I was like, you're 13, really? And she was like, I've been telling you for years. So I was like, okay, we can talk about this.
And we talked about it a little bit over the next couple of weeks. And then I pulled back the offer for the sale of the school. We had to move. We were at capacity, and we were turning away students.
We turned away 25 students in one month because there were no seats for them. And so it's like, okay, like, if I'm going to hold on to the school, I'm going to need to get a bigger space.
And so we moved into a much larger space and started. And that school, even that we went from 25 seats in a class up to 37.
And that school filled within two months, like, eight classes running, and every seat was filled. And I was like, oh, I should have gotten something bigger, but I'm trying to build this out for her. And then Covid hit.
Kristina:Yeah.
Kevin Murphy:And so we want to. We want to close for almost a year. They never gave us permission to open. We eventually, just like they did. Like, we were forgotten.
You know, certain businesses, they weren't like, okay, you guys can open too. They're just, eventually just everyone just opened their businesses and we were in that last grouping and it was very hard to build back from there.
And so.
But my daughter's been there from the very beginning after Covid building the school back and now she's 19, she's going into her second year of college in next month and she's taking over the school. The school's a part time job. It's only about 14 hours a week. The hard part was building the platform.
But the school runs like clockwork and so and we have students of all ages from like seven all the way up to mid-70s and working at all different levels. There's a curriculum so they just move through the curriculum.
And so for her, she's been teaching here since she was 13 and she's internationally recognized. She took third place in the top Realism competition in the world when she was 15.
So yeah, and it's just, it's nice like as a parent, like to have her again just going regular school, doing a normal stuff. But she loved the idea of, of being here and doing this and, and so now she's stepping into it and it's, it's nice for me.
I'd rather see it in her hands than in the hands of some other student. I don't want to say random student because none of them are random. I have wonderful relationships.
We have like 200 people that come in here and I know them all. I interact with them every week when they're here. And so it wouldn't be handed off to some random person.
But the fact that my daughter wants to take it over is really nice. It's really nice. And I've not pushed her in any way to do that.
This is entirely on her that she decided to do this and she's doing it while she's in college. She's sacrificing a lot of things at college to be here to do the work. It's only, it's mostly weekends, but that means no partying on the weekends.
And she's mature enough to understand that.
Trade off that she's stepping into a business that's going to be, that's going to allow her to build a wonderful life for herself and give her like an incredible level of freedom in exchange for not partying at college the way that most of our friends will be. And so it's really nice. It's really nice. I have an older daughter who has no interest in this. She's doing something completely different.
She's doing landscape architecture. She has zero interest in the school, and it's fine. You know, like I said, I didn't push my daughters one way or the other.
I want them to do something that, that makes them happy. Find or do whatever you do. This is what my parents did with me.
Find something that you enjoy so that you don't feel like you're working when you go to work. Do it to the best of your ability every day, and you will find a way to monetize it.
Herb:And so landscape architecture is art as well?
Kevin Murphy:Yes, it is.
Herb:I'm living out here in the woods, moved into a place with my mom, and I'm Started taking care of her property, and I'm turning it into a park, and I'm. I'm looking at it like artwork. So the way I'm going through and making things, I'm beautifying the property, so. So your daughter did go into art?
Kevin Murphy:Yes, a lot more.
Herb:There's just a lot more manual labor involved in the. In getting the canvas right.
Kevin Murphy:Well, you know, the thing is, like, with her, it's interesting because she's very artistic. She's actually a lot more. She has. She leans more into it than my younger daughter. She is creative all the time in everything she does.
She crochets and she knits and she does all of these things. She's. She builds things. She's, you know, she's. She loves to do that kind of stuff. My younger daughter, she paints. That's about it.
Other than that, she's what you would think of as a normal, average teenager, but she paints at an extraordinary level. And she's, she's very mature for her age. Being able to step in here and take over the school is evidence of that.
But my older daughter didn't have any interest in this kind of art. And so I didn't push her. I just let her do what she wanted to do. I just tell her, like, you know, put everything you have into what you do.
That's all. Find something you love so that you. You put your. Your, your, you know, you put your. Your love into the thing you do. Doesn't matter what it is.
Herb:That's a great piece of advice at any age for any person, because there are so many times where I started following something and then just for whatever reason, stopped, wasn't encouraged or. And. And so there's a lot of things that have been kind of dropped along the way.
Kevin Murphy:Well, I'll say, like my parents. My parents encourage me and my brothers. I have three brothers. To do that. Do what you love, but do it to the best of your ability.
I have an older brother who's a PhD in computer science. He's the chair of a department at a university. He's the chair of their tenure committee.
He's the chair of their finance committee for the whole university. Not pushed. Just do what you love. I have a brother who's a year younger than me. Business. He's got a master's degree in business.
He joined the military after September 11th because he's like, somebody's got to do this work. I don't have a wife or kids, no real prospects. So somebody's got to represent our country there, right? So he goes and he does that.
And then I've got a younger brother who's got a master's in education. He teaches in the South Bronx. He teaches in a school that's in a war zone. Travels an hour every morning to get there from. From a decent area.
But it's important to him to give back in that way. And so we all do what we enjoy. We do what we enjoy. And because we enjoy it, money comes from it. We don't worry about the money.
We weren't raised to think like that. The money comes from the love of the thing you're doing and contributing to society. You know what I do? I'm not.
Herb:Here's, here's. Here's one of those. Those smart guy problems that, that became kind of like the curse thing you, where you said it was a talent because I was smart.
Stuff came easy for me, and I became a jack of all trades. Because when it started to get difficult, it was like, oh, I can do something over here that's easier. And so I became good at a lot.
A lot, a lot of things, sure. But I didn't have that advice to get into it and put it all into one thing.
So Even here at 55, it's still hard for me to put that kind of a commitment into one thing, because I can do all of this. And so I keep doing all of this instead of.
Kevin Murphy:Well, but that's a. I. I think that that's just a natural predisposition. Like, for me, I don't do a lot of things, but what I do, I do really well. I am all in, 100% in. In the things that I do.
But I am careful not to spread myself out into things that are not of really, really high levels of interest to me.
I'm curious about a lot of things, and I will dabble, intentionally dabble, but not try to do much with it just because I'm curious, but I focus on certain things. And so. And those things I do at a very high level, but I couldn't do that for everything. There's just no way. There's not.
You don't have no brain as enough mental bandwidth for that.
And so I think some people, they're really, really designed to spread themselves out and find, you know, the curiosity drags them in tons of different directions. And so you experience all of these things, which is a very interesting way to go about life.
You know, part of what I want to do when I am fully retired is do that type of stuff. Not commit to building like a career out of something, but just play. Play out there in the world and experience things.
You know, see what my boundary, what my limits are.
Kristina:Yeah, exactly. Kevin, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you for bringing your perspective.
Perspective, your intuition about art and your knowledge and helping families understand a little bit more. I really appreciate this conversation. Thank you so very, very much.
Would you make sure that you say out loud how people can get a hold of you if they want to find out more? And of course, everything will be down in the show notes as well.
Kevin Murphy:Yeah, absolutely. And again, thank you so much for having this. Been a lot of fun. But we've set up a landing page for your audience alone.
It's evolveartist.com and so on that page is the video that shows exactly how the fundamentals work. It's a really wonderful video called this or that. And because basically the program's broken down into this or that answers.
Here's a question, the answer's either this or that, and all the fundamentals are managed with like an a B answer to a single question. And so. But that video, and that's all free. There's a bunch of other resources there. But that video, if you're curious about how art is made, that's.
That's really going to drive the point to how simple it can be when you. When you know what you're doing. And it really is as simple as the video makes it look like. Really, truly that simple. But.
But thank you again for having me. This has really been a lot of fun.
Kristina:You are very welcome. Thank you for being here.
Herb:Yeah, I would like to thank you for being here as well. You know, so many people, especially when there's new changing art and people telling you no, you can't do it that way.
And most people, you know, when they get to that point, they just back off and they hold themselves down. But instead, you, like, buck the industry. You said, no, this is a better way, and I want to reach more people.
So you went out and you fought the dragon, the hero's journey. And then you got your knowledge and you came back and you're sharing it with the village and you're sharing your. The. The knowledge that you learned.
When so many people get that knowledge and they hide and they keep it to themselves, you're out there and you're. And you're sharing it, and that makes you, on the hero's journey, a hero. So thank you for being here today.
Thank you for making the world a better place, and thank you for sharing yourself.
Kevin Murphy:It's been a pleasure. Thank you again.
Kristina:Yeah. All right, audience, you know what time it is. It is time to share, like, review all of those things.
Make sure that if you have a budding artist in your family, in your community, send them this direction. Have them listen to Kevin and see what else might be possible, possible for them.
Herb:Go to the landing page and watch that video and watch their brain go, wow, I can do this.
Kristina:Exactly. And of course, we are always looking for guests who can spread information and inspiration to our families and guests.
So make sure that you're liking sharing and letting other people know about this wonderful podcast, this resource for parents and helping children to grow up happy, healthy, and successful. Until next time. Bye for now.
Herb:Bye for now.
