The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show 201 Carol McQuaid, Fine Art Artist

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

Carol McQuaid, Fine Art Artist

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from TheChrisVossShow.com. TheChrisVossShow.com. Hey, we're coming to here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Wonderful audience and yeah we've just been surprised at the numbers constantly growing on the podcast. Be sure to refer the podcast to your friends and neighbors, relatives, all that sort of good stuff. Get people involved in the show so we can keep building a show and bringing you better guests and all around better performance so go to iTunes comm or Google Play and you can subscribe to the show there you can also go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss and hit that Bell notification button so

you get all the notifications for all the great shows that we do on the Chris Voss show I've got a wonderful guest here today, Carol McQuaid for the show. And Carol, tell us about yourself. I know you're an artist, but let's talk about what you do as an artist. Sure. I'm principally a painter and a printmaker, and I do a lot of cityscapes and therefore travel a ton with my work. I teach internationally, which gives me a unique opportunity to go around as I travel and interview guests for a podcast I do about art and artists cool so you you have your own podcast for artists what's the name of your podcast it's called two artists walk into a bar two artists walk into a bar yeah is there do you have some punch lines you developed on for the premise well it's really fun because I started the show with just the

first half and at the end of each episode I asked the guests if they have a punchline or a funny story or a joke something from their art life and it's amazing how many people write a punchline for me so super fun outro to the show every week yeah that's good yeah one of my faves was one of the first episodes I had this awesome guest who she's has this great French accent and I said you know Sandrine shows called two artists walk into a bar and she says oh yes I have a punchline for you two artists artists walk into a bar, and they must leave because they begin to draw a crowd.

So it's all stuff like that. They begin to draw a crowd. That took me a little bit. I must need some more coffee this morning. They begin to draw a crowd. It's early, Chris. It is for me when it comes down to it. And I'm not just keen on artist jokes.

I guess I need to spend some more time in the genre to get my artist jokery topics down. So there's that. So you travel around. You're internationally recognized, I think you mentioned, and awarded. You travel around and talk about art. Of course, you're a painter. You know, I've always been impressed with the ability that creative people like yourself have

where they can take a blank sheet of paper and put something on it that's beautiful, elegant, sometimes very descriptive of whatever they're painting, if it's a painting of something. Not an abstract i guess uh i i have no and the reason i appreciate is because i have no artistic ability when it comes to drawing things and painting or or anything of that nature i can i can do your really good stick figure but even then it's gonna look awful you know it's gonna gonna wave your lines you're just gonna be like is that is that a is that a stick figure or a zombie mutant stick finger what's going on and so I've always had a great appreciation for people who can see design I have a I guess a very simplistic binary thing maybe it's being a guy but I know there's artistic men out there but I just I just see things

that black and white. I remember when I had my company, I'd have some of the artistic employees come to work with me, and they'd be like, how can you stand to work in this room where it's just white? I'm like, I don't really. I've never looked at the walls. I didn't know what color it was until you pointed it out. We're just here to make money. And so i've been

always interested in stuff like that especially when it comes to business where you know you go into these opulent uh restaurants and and buildings and office settings that are beautifully designed you're just like man someone sure uh someone sure is an artist because i i do not have this talent and nowhere near this talent probably never will have this talent um I'm nowhere near this talent. Probably never will have this talent. And so I have a lot of appreciation for what you guys do. Well, thanks. Yeah, it's fun and it's different. And I find teaching, a lot of people come into a session

and say exactly what you said, you know, can't draw a stick figure. And people surprise themselves. So you never know, you might hit a point in life where you start to follow that thread, and you'll be surprised by what you do. Definitely, most definitely. So tell us some of your stories and adventures that you've been on,

either with a podcast or traveling around the world. Well, really the podcast started because I was traveling around the world. So I just did a project this last year called the 150-Day Art Trip, and I go I go into art Residencies in different places and I teach art on the cruise ships so I ended up with three art residencies and three cruise ship jobs that had me traveling for 150 days and I found myself going to these like one of the residencies was in Tuscany, one was in Mexico, one was in Sicily. And so you stay in these houses with a group of artists from all over the world,

and you're all working on your own thing during the day, and then we'd get together and cook and eat and drink wine and talk at night. And it was always sitting around having these conversations with people about what we're doing and what we're thinking, how we're approaching it, and they were fascinating. And it made me think, wouldn't it be cool if people everywhere could hear these kinds of conversations? So that's sort of what led into the podcast, but the trip itself was amazing.

Like it was five months of living out of a suitcase and creating all kinds of art and teaching, meeting people. It was just an amazing opportunity. That sounds like fun. Is it easy to teach people to paint or does sometimes you just want to smack them in the face? I think it depends on how you're approaching it. But for me on the cruise ships, for example, they're all doing watercolor. It's something fairly simple. We are traveling to these amazing places these amazing places so you know if we've just been to Athens we we sit down and we take out photos of Athens and I paint and I just share the running dialogue that's going in my head and they listen and then they go to

paint and and it's actually pretty simple I think it's surprisingly simple it's easy to show because it's a very visual thing and people surprise themselves and on the cruise ship it's people who are not necessarily they don't think of themselves as artists they just they're on a ship and that day we're at sea, they've got nothing else to do. So instead of learning how to ballroom dance, they come hang out with me. And by the end of the cruise, they're always super emotional about what they've been able to do. And they're really proud. And it's just a great moment.

It's a really fun place to teach. Probably give some people some ways to stretch themselves and to enjoy themselves on a vacation get away from you know the norm and and maybe discover some new things about themselves that hey I'm an artist yeah honey I'm leaving you I wanted a cruise and now an artist so it's interesting these watercolors can sitting on a cruise yeah see if I ever did painting on a cruise ship it would just look look all wavy and all messed up and then I just be like it was the ship going up and down I looks like it looks like a Renaissance picture but it was the ship. Sometimes that happens. I did one in, where was it? It was in Thailand last

year and it got super stormy and people weren't even leaving their cabins. And I thought, well, there's no way there's going to be a class today. But I went up and sure enough, all the students were there and we'd put our little cups on the table to be able to dip our brushes in and as the ship would would uh would heal over the the water cups that start to slide across the paint the table and it was a real adventure just trying to keep our stuff on but uh but people love it so it's it's a good diversion yeah i've always i've seen those guys that take paint they just like throw it or something or they have a dog walking the pain and walk across an easel or something like that. That's not something I'd be doing on a ship.

I'd be like, when the ship rocks, just let weird stuff happen. It's called art. But no, it's always interesting to me when people can do art and stuff. So a lot of the people you have on your podcast, they're, they're artists. They're talking about their art. Some of the aspects around it, probably some of the great stories. I know I'm kind of an artist when it comes to being a photographer.

I'm not a great photographer, but I love photography and I've done jaunts where I go out, take a day trip and, and do photography. And I think it's, it's kind of, it's, it's along the same lines of where you're going

and evaluating scenery and going, let's capture this moment either in paint or in a photograph. And, of course, you're trying to present it in the best light or whatever sort of, I suppose, atmosphere you want to present it in. And I've always appreciated the ability to look at something and and try and recreate that image uh and and uh and do it well and of course you know getting right angles on what you're looking at and everything else um it's it's very interesting to me and and and of course some of the best stories i have and images i have are the stories behind those travels. Yeah. Where you know like one of my favorite things used to be was taking a

long lens like a Canon 70-200 going down to Venice Beach and there's a little restaurant that I would take and eat at and I'd sit and I get a booth by the walkway of Venice Beach and I would shoot down the walkway. Now, a lot of people don't like you taking photographs of them, so I use the long lens to shoot way down so that people, you know, anytime somebody started looking at me, I'd pull off. And so you just try and capture people in their natural setting, their natural habitat, if you will.

And if Venice Beach has its own natural habitat when it comes down to it it's pretty wild um you feed the animals there but it was always fun to me of watching and the stories that you would get from photographs you would take and and trying to capture those sort of things and some of the funnest stories I have are from taking those or from looking over those images and going, oh, yeah, there was that one guy and that thing. And so I can imagine you guys have a lot of fun with the details of your job of doing art and traveling the world.

Yeah. Well, we do a lot of what you were talking about too, where there's this whole movement called urban sketching where you sit outside, you sit in a cafe or on a ship, wherever you are and you're drawing people and the surroundings and it's always interesting drawing somebody there. If you look at urban sketching online you'll see some people will just travel buses and draw the backs of people's heads or wherever they capture it and those those drawings of people just sort of not you know not knowing they're being observed

it's there's something very intimate about them and a lot like photography like street photography yeah you try and capture people he's trying to capture their essence their soul maybe what they're feeling and and you um he's trying to capture their essence their soul uh maybe what they're feeling um and and you know it's interesting too because like you say with the street uh with with what you guys were doing with art uh you're sometimes you catch people and they're in a crowd but you can see how sometimes um how maybe alone they're feeling or or whatever feelings they're exhibiting and trying to capture that moment i think for me it's very easy to be a photographer because boom you take the picture once you've got everything set up and sometimes you take a series of picture and you

find the best one that captures what story you're trying to tell or hoping to capture um but for an artist you guys you know it takes longer for you guys to capture something But for an artist, you guys, you know, it takes longer for you guys to capture something and to put it down. Do you have to be really good at keeping an image in your head of what you saw? Or do you have to be in front of that image for a long time? Or what are the challenges that you run into in capturing a moving image or an image that's not sitting for you, say like in what you mentioned in your urban captures right so it really depends on what you're doing if I'm out painting in the wild I sit in a place and and I'll be trying to capture the general sense of a place so if somebody's sitting there if a car is

there and it moves and another one takes its place the piece ends up being sort of a melange of all of the different things that have gone through that space. But it kind of captures a broader moment. If I'm at home painting in my studio, I a lot of times will be working from a sketch like that and while I'm doing it, I'm taking photographs repeatedly. So I can go through the photographs, pick my favorite elements look at the sketch and that that sort of informs how I felt at that time and all of those things get get threaded together to make

the to make the bigger studio piece so yeah there's some photography involved there's some sketching involved there's a lot of memory involved I find whatever I was listening to at the time if I'm listening to music that triggers the memory and and gets me back in that space do you sometimes use music where you you play music uh that is motivating you or keeping you in like the emotional moment of of uh of what you're trying to capture totally when. When I do residencies, I make playlists based on my experience in that place. And then when I'm doing the work from those trips, I'm listening to that.

So I have residencies from SEZ and all these different places that are absolutely like that. It gets infused and it gets so infused in the work that if I paint something, I can look at it 10 years later and I'll know what I was listening to when I painted it. That's very interesting. I do the same thing with my dogs,

especially my dogs that have passed on. And sometimes when I'll edit photos in Lightroom, I'll take in, you know, sometimes I'll be spending hours trying to find the right, the way, just the whole right way to edit the photo and embellish it right the way the the just the just the whole right way to edit the photo and and and to embellish it in the way that I want and and sometimes I use music or whatever the mood is that I had it's kind of surrounding the photo or my memory the photo um don't keep me in

that emotional moment to kind of help search for the best sort of way to filter and edit. Maybe sometimes I want to go black and white. Maybe sometimes I want to go color. Sometimes black and white is a really great way to capture an image and to really define it. And sometimes that really makes an image pop, sometimes based on the color of your subject and, of course, the color of some of the ambiance of the photo, its surroundings, background, etc.

And so it's interesting to me the different artistry way. I suppose I paint in some sort of format of edit when it comes to Lightroom, when it comes to photograph because I'm putting different colors to it and doing different things with the contrast and trying to find the right sort of, I guess, the people from Instagram would just say filter, which isn't that simple in Lightroom. In fact, there's a lot of times I walk away after a couple hours of Lightroom

and I go, I just can't find the emotional core or the center of this photograph. I just can't figure out a way to make it work. But, you know, I grew up as a kid in doctrine, in a cult, a religious cult, a really strong religious cult. They taught us that nudity was evil and, you sex was bad if it was a free production and just the most horrible repressive stuff you can imagine when it comes to just the human body and and the naturalization of the human experience and I was lucky enough that in my neighborhood there was an artist who lived in my neighborhood. And his name was actually Art, which was kind of ironic.

I used to go up to his place and we used to play in his yard. He had this giant, massive, just beautiful yard, multiple buildings. He was a very successful artist I don't know how successful that was on a scale of artists you know but he was he was obviously successful with what he did and he was a sculptor and he would sculpt women and he would do nudes of women sculpt them uh and he'd do these beautiful bronze works of art that were just amazing um and and i so i i remember when i first went up to his studio i think we used to play in his yard and i think he used to pay me to mow his lawn i think that's how i got to know him as i was

mowing his lawn or something at recent playing his yard it was really nice and he i remember going to his studio and seeing these images of naked women that were bronzed There were bronze statues that he made and I remember going well, you know, my my mom he told me that's bad and and he explained to me the beauty of of Humanity the beauty of being nude and and that it isn't a nasty thing, it isn't perversion, it's an appreciation for the natural beauty of being human, and that there's nothing bad about it. He even really told me, he goes, this isn't a sexual thing,

this is an appreciation of art. And that's where I really got my first indoctrination about what art really was. This was long before I went to, I think, junior high. I think I took an art class that you had to take. And it really helped me appreciate the other information I had gotten and moving away from that and really realizing that, hey, that was my first experience of seeing you know i never seen the statue of david and other nude art pieces that

are very famous and so i never been exposed to any of that whatever exposure i had i was probably told that it was you know that's bad you know i wasn't allowed to watch mash because of ash had too many sexual innuendos it was a perverted show three's company was was like a might as well have been an x-rated show on our tv um and so since then i've always had a really good appreciation of art and the fact that people can draw things and do things and and that and and really what the core value of art is in in appreciating it and sadly a lot of people still take certain types of artists of perversion but appreciating that as an artist and seeing what you guys do even though I can't be but I have an appreciation I

guess that's what I'm trying to say when it comes down to it yeah well good but sir that must have just totally opened up your world discovering that it's bullshit but that was one of the first really cracks where I was like there is a whole other world here and it's not about it's not about perversion or sexuality it's it's a I mean I suppose in some way doing a bronze of a woman who's naked I mean that is in a form of a slight sexuality but I mean that is the human experience when it comes down to it in reality so what do you what are your favorite things to paint what do you like to paint I'm I'm known as a

cityscape painter so I do a lot of like just the chaos of being in a city. I do you know the cars and the people and signage and a lot of times I paint it but a lot of times I do it in a printmaking method where I will, I'll draw it and then I'll take that image and I'll carve it into a piece of wood and some of these are like nine feet long yeah full panoramics and and then I roll that piece of wood or linoleum whatever it is with ink lay paper on it and I can transfer it so then it becomes it's an original but you can repeat it and so some of these images when they come up they're black and white and then I'll take them and I'll paint them and yeah it's it's a very it's a slow

it's a very traditional method but the way I do it is very it's modernized because they're big urban city centers Wow super chaos II and and really fun fun. This is another reason I'm not an artist, because I'm freaking lazy. That sounds like a lot of work. I mean, you carve the wood, and then you do the overlay. Yeah. Wow. So where's the website we can check out some of these pieces of art to see my art you would go to carol mcquade art dot com and uh that's the same my my instagram and facebook is at carol mcquade art and it's mcquaid mcquade um to see the podcast you go to two artists walk into a bar calm or on social media it's at to the number two artists podcast that should be awesome that should be awesome the yeah I'm gonna turn some of this art because I'm really

interested to see you know how this comes out with you overlay that cityscapes are interesting like I say when I used to do Venice Beach that was one of my favorite places to go and people watch and shoot. And I just have some really funny photographs. And yeah, you're right. There's a lot of chaos. There's just always an interesting group of people, especially in larger cities. And I hadn't really thought about what you use a good word there, chaos. And I really thought about that really is a lot of information overload when you go into big cities when you really think about it i can't imagine someone coming from uh you know little some little town like kansas going to the big city for the first time i remember when i went to big city for the first time actually it it was uh it was

overwhelming but it was exciting and thrilling all at the same time and i suppose if you can capture that in your art pieces that's uh got to be great yeah and for me I grew up just outside of the city Vancouver Canada and when my dad would take me into the city I'd be in the back seat of the car and we'd head in and I would be looking out the windows and seeing these you know neon signs go by and and you know sometimes we'd be there late coming back at night and it would be all the lights and and it just totally I was like oh my god this is where I want to be and and I think that's really a big part of why I do the pieces I do yeah which is funny because now I I mean I live part-time in the city but the rest of the time I'm up in this little mountain hideaway in the

middle of nowhere there's not a human in sight other than the people that are here with me and so we live part-time on a mountaintop we live part-time on a on a beach down in Mexico and and so when I go to the city it's like I'm here to work and I love it like I just want to absorb as much of the crazy chaos as I can. Definitely. Definitely. The,

I was, yeah, I was going to ask you for Canadian. Your, your boot was giving you away. I love my Canadian friends and it's either a boot or a, that will give them away. You say boot.

And yeah, Canada is beautiful country. I'm a big rush fan. So I, Oh, right right and that was my first concert ever was right oh really wow okay do you do you want to give away which concert that was we might be both giving away our ages but i'm not saying nothing okay all right all right yes it was the last album yeah yeah i've been a rush fan all my life and one of these days I got to get up to Canada and toot a little around uh some of the famous sites from some of their albums and and stuff

although uh I guess Neil Peart uh moved down here to California so he's no longer Canadian Canadian yeah I think I think we watched Bob and Doug McKenzie the movie about I don't know 1,000 times as teenagers something really fascinated with the with the funniness in that movie and I was a rush fan before them but yeah I is it is it is it hard to travel the world and be an artist or do you just have to find the right gigs or you know? How does someone become a traveling international artist? I suppose I'm sure somebody my audience is wondering that yeah No, and it's uh It is some Finding the opportunities is a huge part of being an artist in general.

And finding places where you can show, finding things to get involved in. You know, sort of the nature of our work, we're in a studio, we're focused on a very, you know, we've got a pretty narrow focus. We're working on something super intensely and it's really uh to be a professional artist and especially to be a traveling artist you need to shift back and forth between studio time and searching for opportunities time applying for things being involved in your community and that's a lot of the message of the podcast actually is um is as an artist uh figuring out how to find those opportunities figuring out how to find your community and you know knowing what things there are to apply for it's all you know um we are like most self-employed people you're you're

continuously recreating your career and continuously uh your next gig, your next client, your next show and it's a huge part of the excitement but there are a lot of very talented artists out there who don't sell their work because they're in their studio and that's where their focus is and to really make a career of, you need that balance between the two. So finding the international gigs, a lot of it is doing residencies is a huge part of it. So they are usually anywhere from a few weeks to a year. And you find them, you write to them, you show them what you do, you explain what you want to come there and do. And they give you a place to stay in a studio and you go and do a new body of work. And that's been, for me, when I started doing those, that was really a turning point in my

career. It gave me visibility, it gave me new subject matter. And more than anything it gave me all this contact with other working artists we could swap secrets and and uh ideas and support each other and that's a huge part of how i how i grew my career yeah you know i i was just looking over my sleeping puppy my four-month-old sleeping puppy yeah and and and i've realized that that uh she's not peeing on my floor she's making art puddles she's very talented and maybe maybe instead of cleaning that up I should start taking photographs puppy art puddle pee puddle book there might be some art there that there could be a National Endowment of the Arts thing but no I just that was just a comedic piece.

I'm not peeing on the floor, Dad. I'm giving you art. What is that? What is it to you? I'm pretty sure that she thinks it's art. In fact, I think everything that she's chewed up of mine is destroyed. She thinks, look, Dad, i made your phone better with art she's a sculptor at heart yeah she's a sculptor at heart that's really what she's doing she's not

just chewing my legs of my dining room table she's sculpting that's what it is she's carving a uh an art piece and someday i'll look at that and i'll be crying so there's that so I don't know what to do with that but there it is anyway guys thanks for tuning in and give us your plugs once again so people can check you out Carol so the website is Carol McQuaid art.com and on social media it's at Carol McQuaquade art and it's c-a-r-o-l-m-c-q-u-a-i-d and the podcast is two artists walk into a bar.com and on social media it is at two artists podcast sounds good sounds good and thanks to our audience for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys coming by the show be sure to refer to your friends and relatives,

neighbors, dogs, cats, mistresses, pool boys. Go to iTunes, Google Play, and also YouTube.com. Of course, that's Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time.