Demystifying Art: Permission to Fail: Andy Warhol

To , you know , try to make something of ourselves , but , more than anything , try to really grow as artists and create great art . And you know , we're , at the end of the day , we're two artists trying to navigate the art world , just like every other artist out there , like it's a constant navigation of what do I do , where do I go , how does this work .

And you know , as we discussed , obviously , our title , it just made sense that Just Make Arts , the title that goes with you know , what are probably the most impactful quotes by a famous artist that I ever read , by Andy Warhol , who people either love Andy or they hate Andy , but at the end of the day , you have to completely respect Andy .

He is just so influential in art as an artist , but also as a collaborator and an innovator and somebody that has hands in music and film and all these different areas .

And this quote , just you know , means a lot to me and it hangs in my studio and it's the first thing I see every day when I come into the studio and it says don't think about making art , just get it done . Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad , whether they love it or hate it . While they're deciding , make even more art .

And so , like I said , it hangs in my studio Every day I walk in . It's the first thing that I see , and there's a big , big reason for that quote being impactful , and I know that you know you and I have talked about this quote .

You know at length in various things , but when I went full time in the art world and left my past life that I always created art and had a full time job as my own patron to support myself . And I went full time , it took me a while to be able to create because I had all these voices in my head that were just telling me oh , what are you doing ?

You blew it , you're not going to make it , your work's not good enough , you don't have enough work , you don't even really know what you're doing , even though you've been painting for a long time , and so it took me a few months of just sitting in front of a computer and in front of books , reading and researching art and looking at a lot of art , and I

came across this quote and basically it was permission for me of why are you worried about what the world thinks ? Just make art . Just sit down and create and make art . Don't worry about anything else , just freaking make art . You know , I don't know how you felt the first time .

You know , either I shared the quote with you and you heard it , or you came across it . I don't know if you had the same kind of impact that it made on me with that quote , but yeah sure , your experience with that A&B quote .

You know new artists and new ideas , and so when you rolled this one out , I think it was kind of early in the way that you got your program structured , if I remember correctly . But you know , when I heard it and then when I got some time to think about it , I find it to just be really liberating .

You know what I mean , because I think that it's kind of a one size fits all , you know mantra .

You know , regardless of what one is trying to do , you know , with their creative practice , from , you know , the occasional hobbyist to , you know , trying to get your name on plaques and museums or whatever it might be in between , you know everything filters down to .

There's not a conversation to be had , you know , unless you're actually in the act of making art , if being an artist is the overall objective , right ? So I kind of like that , you know sort of one size fits all to whatever it is that I might be stuck in my head about or frustrated about .

That ultimately comes back to hey , if I'm just making art consistently , the rest will , you know , kind of take care of itself , or at the very least that's the foundation , that's the starting point , right .

I don't know why I had this perception that the entire outside world was looking and judging everything I did in the studio , Right , and I still I mean , this is still something as artists we deal with all the time is we perceive that the outside world , the audience or the viewer watches us in the studio , sees everything that we're doing , our failures , our

mistakes , because not everything we do is good . Right , there's a whole lot of crap that we create on a regular basis to get to the beautiful piece or to get to the really strong work , and it's like it's so weird to me that we have this perception , and I think it's .

There's a lot more pressure today because of social media , right , we feel like we need to be sharing our work constantly , and I think , you know , there's a that's a scary thing because we feel like everybody's watching , but at the end of the day , nobody's watching what we do in the studio unless we actually share it and bring it out to the world .

Right , so we should be constantly working and making as much art as we can to get to those strong pieces that we actually share with the outside world , because , at the end of the day , we need to see how the outside world reacts to our work . Right , because that's the only way for our work to get out there and get seen and shown .

And you know why do you think that is , nathan , like you know , as you started , you know , your studio practice months ago right , this isn't like a year ago , but months ago when you went full time , like , did you sense that ?

Did you feel that , even though you weren't in a position where maybe you're in galleries and your works out there , did you feel that pressure at all ?

You know , without getting to all the details of my back story , I made a very dramatic transition when I , you know , went from the business world , you know , to pursue art full time , and so I think that , you know , being somebody who cares way too much about what other people think which I suspect I'm not the only one that falls in that category , you know

but I think that there was a lot of , you know , internal pressure that I put on myself to sort of , you know , prove that I had made a good decision and like show and the people that were already like in my life that like , hey , this wasn't , this is a pretty pretty , you know , boldly , but it wasn't completely nuts Like there's , there's something , you know ,

behind it . So that was the pressure that I felt within the people that were , you know , already like in , you know , in real life . You know that I knew .

And then , when I started to share my work , you know , on Instagram and tried to sort of start to put myself out there , that opened up a whole new , you know , category of like oh boy , is this , is this good ? Are people who , you know , haven't known me my whole life .

You know and are just going to give me a high five and a whatever positive comment , because they know me and like me as a person . You know when you're being judged on . You know your art , you know exclusively .

That opens up a whole nother you know element at least it for me of like oh you know , is this even good enough , you know , to be put out there ? You brought up a really , you introduced a really important word in the conversation , which is permission , and I don't want to misquote you , but I wanted to unpack that a little bit .

You said you know it was permission for me to . To what exactly ?

But you know , at the end of the day , if we're not taking risks and we're not constantly learning in our practice as an artist which means trying new techniques , trying new mediums and mastering things that we don't know yet , because , at the end of the day , we're only as good as what we know right now , right , and in art that's limited , you know , because

art's a long game . It takes a long time to become a very strong artist , and so I think you know that quote really gave me permission to just feel free to not have this pressure , to not have , you know , all these voices that are constantly in our heads as artists , because we spend a lot of time with ourselves in the studio every day .

So you know what's the worst thing in the world ourselves looking at ourselves in the mirror most of the time , right , so we're , we're our harshest critic , our strongest judges , and I think it gave me permission to just operate and freedom , right , play , experiment , test , try

. Like you know , I had a horrible failure in the studio yesterday . Like horrible failure I mean I was this morning . I was in tears when I came in because I was working with cement . I love working with cement . I've used it in the past . I haven't used it in a few years . So I applied a ton of cement on a ton of work .

Love the way things were going , just as texture , background texture . Well , temperature dropped from about 65 to 20 here in Texas last night and so I walk into the studio this morning , I pick up a canvas and the cement is just falling off everywhere and I'm like so then I just drop a canvas on the floor to hit the edges and the whole thing to slid .

So it didn't bond because the temperature change was so drastic . But at the end of the day , it's if we don't have those moments . We're not constantly learning that this will not work this way . I need to do something else . I need to find this . But Andy gave me permission to just play experiment . The world doesn't have to know that happened .

I just told the world , or at least the 20 people that may listen to our first episode , or 200 , I don't know . But like nobody needs to know , that happened Right .

Unless I share it , unless I talk about it , it's between me and it's just a growing pain which we're going to experience a lot of in the art world , so that I think that's where it really gave me permission to just operate and freedom .

Like , if you're going to experiment , if you're going to push things , if you're going to progress , there's going to be failures , and if there aren't , then you're probably not pushing things far enough to see how far you could , you know , potentially go .

When you said permission , what came to mind for me was just , you know , the permission to just not care , you know , about whether or not it's good . I mean , that's a core . I think component to this quote is like , hey , you know , even bad art is , you know , that still counts , you know .

And so I think with that , with that freedom to not care about the result , it comes back to the process of the making itself , which is much more controllable . Right , like that's one of the things from my previous life that was a big sort of you know mantra is control the controllables .

I can't control if a piece is going to work or if it's going to be quote , unquote , good , whatever the hell that even means in the context of something as subjective as art , but I can definitely control the controllables . I can show up every day when I intend to . I can , you know , make some marks and see what happens .

So I really like that , that permission . You know , component , and you know there's certainly a time to consider is this good , is it not ? What do I do with this ? Is this something that should be shared ? You know where does it go from here , but during the making itself is not the time to be considering , you know , is this , is this , is it working ?

Of course , we're going to make , you know , thousands of micro decisions along the way as we're working , you know , through a , through a piece , of course , but thinking about how it's going to be received by others . You know the making is not the time to be thinking about that specifically , right ?

I really like , when I'm working and mentoring other artists , I like to use the term strong and weak , or mature and immature . When it comes to art , I don't like using good and bad because I feel like that that's a very audience represented term . Oh , that's a really good work of art , that's a really bad work of art .

Right , it's relative to the viewer , right , everybody's eyes different . Everybody likes specific art , hates specific art , doesn't like this , whatever . To me , that's those are terms for the audience , for the artist . I like immature and mature , strong and weak , and so like , as you said , should we let immature work out of our studio ?

Not if we don't have to , right , like early on as an artist , when you have a studio practice , whether that means you're able to work 30 minutes a week because you have a full time job in the studio , or whether you're able to work eight hours a day in the studio , right ? That's relative as well .

An artist does what he can or she can to make art period , no matter what the time constraint is . You're working to create work . So when you're younger , the work's going to be immature . The more you learn , the more you study , the more you look , the more experiment it matures over time and becomes stronger .

So when you're younger and I don't mean age , right this in art when I say young at old , I'm not talking about your age , it's the matter of time you've spent working on your work , because the art world doesn't care if you're 70 or if you're 18 . It just doesn't right .

There could be an 18-year-old that's worked on their work for 15 years and the work is more mature . There could be a 70-year-old that just started making art two years ago and their work is immature . So you know , at the end of the day , we wanna show our more mature work and our stronger work to the outside world .

And , man , it frustrates me today that there's so much pressure with . I need to show my work on Instagram , I need to show it on LO or I need to tweet about it , and artists are showing mature work with very immature work .

So there's an imbalance which there was a time when artists would take their strongest work to the salons and show the gallery owners or show the dealers their work and usually it was the strongest pieces , not every piece and then that gallery owner , that dealer , would select which pieces they would show or send that artist's packing and say come back in two years

when you have a stronger body of work . Today I feel like , you know , social media has put so much pressure on artists I gotta show everything every day so I can fit that algorithm and I can keep my followers up and I can keep .

And so you know , there's this pressure of I have to show everything right Rather than being selective and just showing what your strongest work is . It's showing immature work with mature work and I see that as a problem .

But you know , I think about , you know , from the perspective of somebody who's you know earlier , you know , in their art career , you know I don't always know right Like what's strong or what's weak .

I mean , there's certainly times and you know , outside of this conversation with somebody today , where I think the more time that passes between the making you know , viewing a piece as the maker and viewing a piece as the observer , you know , the more time that passes , I can look at things that I've made , you know .

You know even a few , you know a couple a few months ago , and I can look at it much more objectively because I'm not as attached to it emotionally . Right , there's some time has passed .

But even that being said , I think you know , in terms of the feedback loop also being much , much more short , you know , like what you described , there's a very good chance that the pieces that they were , you know , throwing under their arm and you know , deciding to show others , they had already had a chance to spend some time with it and , you know , sort

of decide like , yep , this is representative of you know how I want to put myself out there and the work that I want to do . So anyway , long way of asking a question , but you know , what advice would you give to somebody as their sort of ?

I think this probably comes in with maturity , but how do you sort of develop your eye and become better at identifying , just for your own work , what's on the stronger side versus what's on the weaker side ?

That kind of say I don't need , I don't want to look at art , I don't want to study art history because I want to create something original . Right , I've heard it over and over and over again .

I said it when I was in art school I don't want to look , I don't want to read a bunch of art because I just want to create original works like well , you're not going to , everything has been done , everything has been created . Are there new forms of art that are happening currently ?

Yes , in the physical , traditional mediums , no , but in you know , nfts may be another conversation for another day for us , but these are . Those are areas where new art is being formed in different areas through technology and things like that . But the only way to truly inform your eye and to grow and mature as an artist is to study the hell out of art .

Read art books , go to museums , go to galleries , see art always be in front of art and it in turn , subconsciously , you start to understand why you create what you create , how you create it , how other artists did , what pieces look like , you start to you know , have a really good understanding of composition and depth and you know all these different things that

if you're not looking at art constantly and studying it and looking at how other artists create techniques , what mediums use , how these mediums work like you know , I always say , filling your backpack with you know , knowledge and wisdom you know that helps your eye . Obviously , having other artists as a community is massive . You know that .

You're learning that in big ways . Having other artists as community , whether that's just on Instagram , sharing your paintings and talking back and forth and having discourse over your art and critiques and things in person , is huge .

Not as easy to do it in person today as it was three , four years ago , but that's massive to be able to talk about art regularly with other artists . But , man , the key is look at art . Jerry Saltz will say it go see as much art as you can . Look at art . You hate study art . You hate study art .

You love like you've gotta be constantly looking at art .

If you want to separate that out , you know , from the work itself I think that applies to quotes as well . I think there's a lot of , you know , good wisdom to be learned from people that maybe aren't exemplary human beings in every single category across the board .

I'm going to bring that up because I'm just curious how you would like and you're much more educated in terms of art history than I am but I just think about , you know , warhol as a master marketer . You know somebody who you know certainly made a lot of work .

You know , especially in his design career , you know , before becoming a fine artist was very much focused right on . You know what people are going to think about it . You know what I mean .

So I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on how you would sort of you know , resolve , the person , the career and that aspect of his , you know , very genius ability to market himself and market his work and make a lot of money doing it with the quote itself .

I mean , that's the end of the day , we've got to find ways to make money . You know there's great quotes out there . You know Jerry Saltz talks about the art critic Jerry Saltz talks about you know , I think it's Jerry , but he talks about how he wants every artist to be rich . You know what I mean ? Because artists need money to make more work .

And you know there are quotes about how , when bankers go to dinner , they talk about art . When artists go to dinner , they talk about money , right ? So it's like we have to find ways to market ourselves in order to sell our work , right ? We can't just create work and it sits in our studio . It doesn't go anywhere , right ?

We have to find ways to get it out there to the world . Today we have a lot more opportunities with social media to get it out there in ways artists have never been able to do in history , but we still have to get to the gallery , get to the dealer , get to the interior decorator , get to places for art to get out there right .

And I think Warhol was that pre-social media guy who found every little niche and way he could to get in and get his work in areas to make money right .

And then he happened to be in a great place at a great time when so many other things were blossoming in New York , right From film to music to photography , to so many different things , and he had his fingers in all of it .

And look , if you look at his career of art which I went to the Art Institute of Chicago , warhol retrospect a few years ago , pre-pandemic when you look at his stuff from junior , high and high school , he's making newspapers , he's drawing fashion designs and things right .

As a young kid he was interested in arenas that were very public-facing right , like fashion newspapers . He's creating these newspaper articles that are art and all these things . So he was already looking at mass public facing things to be involved in as a young boy in Pittsburgh , right .

And as he grew into New York he found his niches and he , you know , in a lack of a better term crushed it . You know , as far as it . And that's where a lot of people don't like him . Right , they say , oh , he's a sellout . Artists are sellouts .

Well , find me a musician , find me a filmmaker , find me an artist who doesn't sell out at some point in time , if they can make a living off their work . You know what I mean . And people look at sellout as making money . Now , sellout would be creating work and never growing just because it sells .

Right , the anti , you know the anti sellout would be a Larry Poon's who created work that the art world loved and wanted more and more and more of , and he goes no , I'm not sitting here and this work that I've created because I'm growing as an artist and I have new work , and he left the art world because of that and now the art world , I don't know , 30

years later , has welcomed back his new work . Does that make sense ?

He was in his 40s when she moved right to New York to live with him . But anyway , from at a young age , his reward every time he completed a sheet of his coloring book was a chocolate bar , which I just find interesting . I just planned , you know , armchair , you know , psychologist of like .

The feedback loop from a very young age was , you know , when you do X , you know you get Y . It's just an interesting , you know he was performing for an audience of one , but there were still certainly , you know , something at the finish line that was going to be , you know , rewarding .

So let's just , as we kind of start to wrap this up , you know , for today , let's make this tangible .

So one of the things that you know we're setting out to do with this , with these conversations , is to , you know , take a big idea , you know , dissect it to the best of our abilities , but then also make it , you know , tangible for , you know the working artist of all types who wants to , you know , do something with it and take it into the next thing that

they're going to be doing . So you know what would be some tangible takeaways . This one kind of you know answers its own question . But what does it look like in practice ? To just make art ? Right , cool idea , how do ?

I'm like , at the end of the day , you just got to make art . A bunch of it , a lot of it . You know , and I think the tangible thing is , with whatever you have , make art with it .

I mean , there was a time in my life when I was taking the sheets off of our bed and using ink and painting on sheets , right , and so it's like there were times when I didn't have paint . I couldn't . So when I painted with coffee , I painted with Kool-Aid , I did watercolors with different Kool-Aid colors . You know what I mean ?

It's like 15 cents a packet and I'd get every color I could and I'd make water colors from it and I'd just use paper . So it's like there's no excuse , right , the excuse is fear . That's the excuse , it's fear . So it's like just make art , right . I mean you were in my studio a week ago and you were using my old coffee grounds .

Right , you're in my studio . You don't have your stuff in your studio , but you wanted to make art for a while . So you have paper , you're using coffee grounds , you're using pencil . It's like just make art , just make , make , make , make , make , and you'll find a spot somewhere within that making where you go oh wow , this looks really strong .

Oh , my gosh , I'm cultivating something here . Now I need to grow this idea , but at the end of the day , you just have to make art . Period , lots of it .

There's a much less direct path to get to good , but there is a pretty direct path to get to stronger , or or more mature , right , and the traditional definition of those words . If I want to get physically stronger , I need to , you know , do things and move physically . That's going to make me stronger , right ?

If I want to become more mature , I guess , just , you know , don't die , I suppose . But you know , from an age standpoint , if I want to mature , become more sophisticated in my work , right . But again it's back to that . That broad funnel of every path leads back to just make more work and it will inform what's to come . It'll make the work itself stronger .

It'll make you more mature as an artist . Yep , absolutely Sounds like that might be a good place to end .

So , both Nathan and I , you'll you'll be able to find us on Instagram and look for our art as well , so that you can see we really are artists and trying to navigate this world together as well .

So if you do have questions about these quotes , or if you disagree which artists we love to disagree shoot us some questions and we'd love to have discourse with you too .

So with that we'll sign off and , yeah , hopefully you'll join us for the next episode .