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Artist who work full time in their craft are usually illusive. I understand the desire to be the proverbial fly on the wall, to learn how they work, think and create. This first episode of A Robert McAffee Podcast series is an introduction to my path in art and an open invitation to join me as I interview professional and semi professional artists about the roller coaster life we live. The ups and downs, the high points and how we navigated the low points.
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Artist who work full time in their craft are usually illusive. I understand the desire to be the proverbial fly on the wall, to learn how they work, think and create. This first episode of A Robert McAffee Podcast series is an introduction to my path in art and an open invitation to join me as I interview professional and semi professional artists about the roller coaster life we live. The ups and downs, the high points and how we navigated the low points.
Listen to The Lost Paddler Podcast with Robert McAffee by Robert Mcaffee Artist MP3 song. The Lost Paddler Podcast with Robert McAffee song from Robert Mcaffee Artist is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 48:20. This high-quality MP3 track has 1058.4 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 26 Mar 2023. Stream and download The Lost Paddler Podcast with Robert McAffee by Robert Mcaffee Artist for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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In 1969, the speaker recalls a memorable visit to Uncle Jack's house. Uncle Jack was an artist and took the speaker, who was just six years old at the time, down to his basement studio. Uncle Jack gave the speaker high-quality watercolor paper and allowed him to paint while he visited with family upstairs. This experience sparked a lifelong passion for painting in the speaker. Despite struggling in school, the speaker eventually left high school to pursue a sign business. The speaker looks back on this decision with some regret but has made sure to provide his own children with the tools for success. In 1969, my mother, my Aunt Linda, and my Aunt Rosalyn all packed into a little Volkswagen, and of course, I climbed into the little cubbyhole behind the back seat. You remember those little cubbyholes? There was no seatbelts. Of course, in those days, pretty much everyone's seatbelts were tucked down between the cushions. You couldn't find them, and in fact a lot of people thought in those days that seatbelts were deathtraps. Well, how could you get out of a burning car with your seatbelt on? What happens if your car turned over sideways and you couldn't get out because you had a seatbelt on? Well, that's the way it was in those days, and when I was six years old, climbing into that little cubbyhole was the greatest fun in the whole wide world. I had no idea where we were going. All I knew is we were going in the car to visit one of my uncles, who I had never seen before, and my mother was from a large family, many brothers and sisters, so there were quite a few that I had never met by that point, but this one would change my life forever. When we arrived at the door, there he was, almost bigger than life, a big figure, brush-cut hair, dark-brimmed glasses, but he smiled, and his smile was just like a little boy. He was so happy to see his sisters and, of course, the little nephew that came along for the ride. He ushered us in the door, welcomed them to come and have a seat in the living room, and he took me by the hand down the stairs into the basement, but this was no ordinary basement. It was wide open. It was spacious. It was very tidy. There was a sofa against one wall. There were a couple of coffee tables, but right in the middle was a big drawing table. It was the old-style drafting tables. It had a big lever on the bottom that you could press with your feet, and it would raise it up higher or lower. It was an extremely long drafting table, not the typical kind that you would see in anyone's house. This one was clearly from a real architect's office or a draftsman's office, and it was quite cool because it had all kinds of mechanical levers on it, and when you're six years old, that just looks like fun waiting to happen. Uncle Jack hoisted me up onto his big drafting chair. It was cool, too, because it also had little levers at the bottom of it that you could raise it and lower it, and he moved it up to the highest position. After all, I was just six years old. He set me up at his table, and he pulled out a piece of paper, and it was kind of bumpy. It had textures on it. I didn't know that it was Arches watercolor paper. I didn't know the difference between cold press or hot press, but this stuff was a little different from the normal children's drawing paper that I had at home. Everything was so neatly organized on his drafting table, and I also noted that even though the table could be turned two angles, he had it quite flat. I would later learn that as a watercolorist, we don't work on tilted tables. We work on flat surfaces because, after all, we don't want the watercolor to run all over the place beyond our control, but in that moment, all I knew was there he was, brush in hand, dipped it in some color, olive green, I believe it was, and he moved over to the piece of paper in front of me and, in just a few quick moments, rendered a little pine tree on a rock. In no time at all, he handed the brush to me, and he said, Now, tell you what, I'm going to go upstairs and visit with your mom and my sisters, and he said, You just stay here and you paint to your heart's content, and if you want a little bit more paper, there's a big stack right over there. You help yourself. Jack Reed, little to my knowledge at that time, after all, I was only six years old, but he was my mother's second oldest brother, and he had gone through quite a tumultuous life in his early years. Always an artist, but his life took many twists and turns through various careers and jobs just to make ends meet. Somewhere along the way, perhaps after his fine painting years, perhaps after working in graphics shops, perhaps working in book binderies like many of my aunts and uncles did in my mother's family. You know, they lived in a very poor part of Toronto, and they weren't wealthy whatsoever, but from such difficulties and from such struggles and challenges in life, it made many of my uncles and aunts on my mom's side very, very successful in their various fields of business. Somehow, sometime, after 40 years or so of my Uncle Jack's life, he found his way into a more serious approach to his watercolor painting. I've seen some of his work from those very earliest years, and I know that they were nothing substantial. They were quite simple, and many of them were actually quite dark. But even from those early stages of his work, there was a signature that was undeniably Jack Reed. And it's funny how art is. When artists apply themselves and paint steadily and work at it every day, even from the very beginning of their evolution of their work, their style takes on its own personality. And this was very true with Jack Reed. His work is recognized today around the world, and he's one of the most highly decorated Canadian landscape painters in watercolor. I had no idea, being six years old, I thought everything revolved around me after all. But the truth is, what my uncle was doing was not just setting me up for a great little art lesson, but in fact, he was ingeniously tying me up so that he could go upstairs and sit down with tea and visit with his sisters. But of course, little did he realize that right down there in his basement, in his sprawling studio, up there on his amazing drafting table, sat a little boy, just six years old, holding his brushes, working on his finest watercolor papers. He didn't just put me up there with a cheap old piece of paper or a pad, no, he gave me his wonderful cold press Arches watercolor paper. And it was the finest paper that was known to any watercolor artist in the world. And there I was, working on it at will. And in those moments, it happened. I became bitten, truly smitten, truly touched in the very deepest part of my soul. I wouldn't have described it like that when I was six years old, certainly not in that moment. But what would transpire over the years that followed was a deep-seated love and a great passion deep inside for this craft of painting. It would go through many changes in my life, and my life would take many twists and turns. But truly, in 1969, in Mississauga, in the studio of my late great uncle Jack Reed, it was born. There are simply far too many details to lay out here in a short podcast. I want to try and keep it interesting for you. So I'll just skip through and say that my years in school, in junior, in middle school, and in high school, were quite tumultuous. I like to say that my body was present, but my mind was definitely not inside the classroom. And I didn't have a really successful time throughout my education. I had outside passions. I was a drummer from a very young age. I was also into photography, and I also loved my art, and these things served as great distractions for me throughout the course of my education. I didn't see them as distractions. I saw them as priorities, and I suppose that's where the problem came. But in grade 11, in the middle of my grade 11th year, after three, well, two and a half years of not really achieving very much, I knew and the guidance counselors knew that this is probably where the extent of my education would come to an end. And that's in fact what happened. I'll never forget that day in my biology class. And let me say, as a little caveat here, with all irony intended, that my biology class was one of my favorite classes, and Mr. Abrams, who taught the class, was intriguingly interesting, and I just absolutely adored being in that classroom. But I knew that my education on a bigger scale was pretty much, well, too far gone to fix at that point. From earlier on, I had started a small sign business, the Robert Sign Company. It was going extremely well. I was working at home out of my parents' house, and it was competing with school. And I just knew, I just knew that I wasn't going to finish my high school years. And so, that fateful day came, in the middle of grade 11, when I raised my hand. I asked Mr. Abrams if I could be excused, and he granted it. I went to my locker, gathered up all of my things. I walked down the hall, and I went to the guidance counselor's office, and she was waiting. She saw it coming, I guess you could say. And her words to me were this, I guess you're done, aren't you? I gathered my things together, and walked across the field. Heading towards home, I distinctly remember, not even once, not even for a second, thinking to turn my head and look back. I was determined to go on with my life from that point forward, and never return. And that's exactly what happened. I went home, I broke the news to my mother. I really don't know, to this day, what she felt. I suppose we should have that conversation, I would think. But at that time, I was determined. And when you're a 17-year-old, and you have a determined mind, there's not very many people that can change what you're thinking. Now in my 60s, I look back at those days, and that decision that I made to leave high school. I think that I would have done well, had I stayed with it. And I've often regretted that I didn't go on to some kind of secondary education. But it was done, and too many years passed before those regrets began to set in, and it was too late to change. But in my own children's life, I've given them all of the tools, including completely paying for all of their education, all of their post-secondary education, their university and their accommodations. I gave them everything that I possibly could, because I never want them to have those regrets. And I want them to have all the tools possible to equip them for a better life than what I would go through in the following years. The following years came with many ups and downs, and many challenges, and many victories. I did continue with the sign company. The Robert Sign Company did very well. However, it was right at the precipice of a new thing called computers. You know, the kind on your desk, and oh, the amazing things that they could do. But what I didn't see coming was how this business that I was in, which was entirely hand-painted signs, lettering on trucks and vans, posters for butcher shops and bakeries and grocery stores, the things that I made my living at those seven years would come to a complete halt. And the reason why was because those computers on people's desks were becoming more and more capable of more and more amazing things. Most significantly for me was the fact that signs no longer had to be painted with a brush. In fact, a computer program could lay out the sign. You could send the signal to a cutter or a small device that looked like a printer with a roll of sticky back material on the side of it. And in other words, the roll would start turning, and the cutter would cut out the letters, and the sign company could take that roll or take those letters to the business and put them on the window or the side of the vehicle or whatever. The sign business was changing forever. It was quickly becoming automated. It's a long story, but the short version is that at that young age, I didn't have any credential whatsoever when sitting at the desk of the loans officer at my local bank asking for the $114,000 that I needed to equip myself with the new technology. In other words, I didn't qualify. I hadn't been in business long enough. I wasn't old enough. I didn't have any assets. I was too young. I still lived in my own parents' house. And so the Robert Sign Company came to an end. Sometimes in life, these kinds of changes cause us to reflect. We look back on where we've been, and we question the value of it. Sometimes we wonder if it served any purpose whatsoever. Why did it come to a crashing end? Why did it fail? And how is it that I've landed in this heap of misery and self-loathing? When we go through such times of change, it sometimes causes us to reflect negatively. We wonder what the value of all of that time was. Why did it fail? What caused it to come to an end the way it did? And we wonder if we couldn't have done something more valuable with all of that time. I tried my hand working in bigger sign shops, companies that had the technology, that of course were well-equipped in the new computerization. It just didn't feel right to me. I was a sign painter. I used brushes. I used paint. And it was where I was most comfortable. I didn't fit well in the new technology. I left that kind of work, completely leaving the sign business behind. And I began a long career with the Blacks Photo Corporation. Yes, it was a retail job, and it was one of the lowest-paying jobs in society. Such jobs were never meant to be long-term. In fact, I remember one of the executives, one of the Black family, saying that, in fact, none of these jobs were created or intended to be long-term jobs for anybody, even though many people within the company had been working there for many years. And certainly for me, I had no intention of being there very long whatsoever. I really was just taking it to make an income while I figured out the next stage or step in my life. But six months would become ten months, would become twelve months, would become five years, and it would become fourteen years. And through those years, I worked in various stores all throughout the greater Toronto area. I worked in some of the busiest locations, some of the fanciest shopping malls. And I eventually found myself working at Black's head office in Markham, where I did things that I never thought I would do, like working in the marketing areas and working in the warehousing facilities and learning all of the different aspects of how a large photo retailer works in Canada. I can tell you for sure, I never thought of it as valuable. I really thought of that as a wasteful time in my life. I wasn't making very much money. I certainly wasn't becoming anything substantial, nothing to write home about, as they would say. But, in fact, I did enjoy the work, ironically. I enjoyed interacting with people every day. I really loved it when people would come in with a need, and I could investigate, have a conversation, get to know them a little bit, and with that, discover what suited them best. And when they went home with equipment that was most suitable, most advantageous to them, it would give them hours and months and years of joy. That was a pleasure for me, and I got it. I understood that right there on the floor. I understood the value of what I was doing, and I enjoyed it every single day, even though, financially, it was not a very rewarding career. Many times, on reflection, after leaving that business, I've often thought to myself, what did I learn from 14 years with Blacks Photography? Well, Blacks Photography, for those that don't know, was Canada's largest photo retailer. They had over 600 locations across Canada, and they were working on plans on moving across the border into the United States. I have no doubt in the world that they would have become a substantial powerhouse there as well. They were successful because they valued the customer. They were successful because they had a rotation of marketing strategies that worked well. They anticipated customers' needs well in advance. One of the most valuable lessons I learned is how they planned ahead. For example, in the spring, anticipating the summer travel season, they would market products that were geared towards travel with your photography equipment, camera bags, film packages, straps for your camera, all kinds of things that made your traveling with photography equipment safer, more fun, and, of course, more fulfilling. And there were many other strategies I learned from them. Blacks Photography was a school in marketing for me. I really didn't see that in those days. But later on now in my career as a full-time artist, I can say that those strategies learned then have been employed many times over and over in my current career as a full-time artist. Life comes with changes, and the next change for me would come while I was working at a Blacks store in Toronto's PATH system. It was a series of underground pathways that used to be just service pathways between the different bank office towers in the banking district. But they eventually became populated with retail stores, and Blacks Photography took up space in one of those paths underneath the TD Bank Financial Group's TD Bank Tower. And it was while I was there that a friend of our family, who worked for TD Bank, arranged for me to get an interview with one of the department heads. I went up there in my suit and tie, and I made my way into the office and sat down where Cecile Hernandez gave me the interview that would eventually mean leaving the retail organization that I was with and becoming a banker. And that was like putting a square peg in a round hole, and it was not an easy change for me. I would start out at the mailroom, quite appropriately. I think that's a great location for anyone to start out in the bank. First of all, you get to know all the different departments. You get to meet people from every aspect of the bank. And in a bank the size of TD Bank, with 60,000 employees around the world, you become quickly acquainted with all of the different jobs that are within the bank. There were doctors who worked for the bank. There were certainly lawyers. There were accountants. There were carpenters. There were electricians. There were people who looked after premises. There were cleaners. There were mailmen. There were everything you can imagine. And as a mail clerk, delivering mail to all of those different departments, I had a chance to meet people from all walks of life, from every level within the bank. One of the most valuable lessons I learned at the bank was, of course, the management and the investment of money. I would never have known anything about the stock market. I would never have known anything really about the workings of how money grows. And because of that, I was able to learn quite valuable lessons that I would take forward later in my life and in this career of art. Among the many other hugely valuable lessons learned at TD Bank, I also learned that people are people, no matter what kind of shoes they wear, no matter what kind of suit they wear, no matter how high up their office is, or no matter what kind of a position they hold. People are people. And they all have feelings and they all have passions. One of the lessons I learned, and I will never forget this because it became integral in my career as an artist, that while we sat in our cubicles doing our office work all day long and doing the things that were sometimes somewhat mundane, other times kind of exciting, but we all stared off into the window looking out of our 29th floor at the lake just down the street, thinking about places that we'd rather be. I knew about people who had cottages and went every weekend up north, I mean up north being in the Omoskokas and Algonquin Park and places like that. And I knew that people daydreamed all week long about being at their cottages and being out in the nature of things. And that stuck with me because all through the years of working at Blacks, all through the years of working at TD Bank, I continued to paint every day, almost every evening and weekends on my own time. Among the many lessons that I took from my years at the bank, there was one pivotal moment that I will never, ever forget. It was a day when one of my associates came to me, his name was Louie, and Louie worked in the tech department and he came with his BlackBerry. You know, all of us bankers had BlackBerries in those days. That little phone, that little cell phone with the flashing red light. Whenever it would flash, you got excited and you couldn't resist checking to see who was emailing you. This technology was all brand new. And as bankers, we were issued phones and we had it before most other people did. But those bank issued BlackBerry phones had very low pixels. The picture quality was very poor, 1.2 megapixels, I think it was. You know, in 2023, we have commonly 35, 40 megapixel cell phones, and the sharpness is unbelievable. But in those days, just having a cell phone was cool all by itself. Forget about the picture taking ability. And Louie came over to me with his BlackBerry and he said, Hey, Robert, you know those paintings that you're working on every night? Why don't you take a picture of one of them? There's a really cool website that just started. It's called Kijiji. I had no idea what Kijiji was, or what it was all about. I just knew that other sort of new websites, like eBay, had paintings posted by artists in the millions. And most of them were priced at $25, $30, $50 and weren't even selling. I really wasn't interested in what Louie was suggesting to me, but I decided that night when I was at home, heck, I'll give it a try. I set up a 20 by 30 painting of a waterscape, a little peninsula, very blue, against a very blue sky and very calm water. I put it under a good light. At least I knew from my photography years that there was a right way and a wrong way to shoot a picture. And I took a snapshot and I cropped it and I uploaded it to this brand new site called Kijiji. It had been quite a while since I had seriously promoted my work as a painter. At this point, I had morphed out of watercolors and into oil paintings. The reason for that was because after a lifetime of painting in watercolor, I really hadn't sold very much or very well at all. I like to think that I was a pretty good watercolorist. After all, I had the great Jack Reed as a teacher and mentor and I learned really some excellent techniques and I thought that I was quite advanced. But whatever I was doing wasn't resonating with the broader audience. I didn't know why, but there came a point when I completely stopped painting. I guess that was around 2007, roughly, and it lasted for about two years when the world of oil painting became apparent to me. I had wandered into my local Whitby Curry's art store and there I picked up my first little five inch by five inch canvas. And the paints that I would use were at home already. In fact, a few weeks earlier, an aunt of mine, another profound artist, Rosalind Reed, had dropped by my home and given me this box. It was covered in cigarette ashes. It was covered in cigar ashes. It smelled to high heavens. And inside, very sooty, very dirty, very, very nasty tubes of paint. You couldn't even see the labels. The brushes were encrusted. They had obviously been sitting for quite a while. She explained to me that an artist friend of hers that lived in her building had passed on and before he passed, he asked her to give his art supplies to somebody that would use them. That's kind of a funny aspect all by itself. I had been a watercolor all my life. And those artists who are in watercolor or oils, they know when you're in one of those mediums or the other. It's quite common to think that the other guys aren't real artists. It's just funny, really. It's not meant as serious critique. But one likes to say that when you're a watercolorist, those oil painters, you know, they can just paint over their mistakes. And oil painters, they look at watercolorists, oh, well, you guys are just a bunch of paint by number artists. Using those child's watercolor kits that you got when you were six years old, well, for me, change was happening yet again. And I quit my watercolor painting, really feeling like it was a lost cause. And two years went by. And even though my Aunt Roz had given me that package of paints, I didn't use them. I set them up on the shelf and pretty much ignored them. I remember saying around the house at that time that if they wanted to hang Ikea pictures on the wall, that's okay. You have to know that when you're an artist and you say to your spouse that she can hang Ikea pictures on the wall, as nice as those Ikea pictures may be, that's a real gut punch and that's a real sign of dejection because you have written yourself off as an artist. You've reached a low where you've decided that you no longer want to display your work and you don't care anymore. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth because I did care. And it was truly a sad time for me, a real dark period of depression. The thing that I loved to do more than anything wasn't resonating and it wasn't moving and I had stacks and stacks of watercolor paintings and didn't know what to do with them. I decided to completely stop. Round about the end of 2008, I broke open that box of paint. I didn't know what to do with it. I had never painted in oil paints ever before. I dropped them all into the kitchen sink and poured dish soap all over them and washed them clean. The aluminum tubes shone and the labels with their bright colors were so beautiful and beckoning. I just felt like this was something that I needed to try. That same afternoon, I drove to Curry's Art Store in Whitby where the sales lady helped me and I chose a five inch by five inch canvas. In fact, I thought if I'm going to do one, I'm going to do two. I purchased also a tube of Prussian blue and a small tube of titanium white paint just to palette the color. I brought them home, I set them up and I painted my very first small oil landscape. It's visible on my website. You can see it. It's the St. Lawrence Seaway looking eastward, northeastward from Quebec City. I don't know why I chose that scene, but it just seemed pastoral and beautiful. And as an artist, we love to paint hills and water and sky. And it just came to me that way. It was a painting that would change my life forever. It sort of bit me like a fever. After painting one, I had to paint another and another and another and many trips ensued back and forth to my local Curry's location. It was perhaps one of the most joyful painting periods of my life. The viscosity of the oil paint, the ability to manipulate it one, two, three days after beginning the painting was something that was quite new to me. In watercolor, when you make a mistake, you scrap it and start again. But with oil painting, I had the ability to live with a painting for a period of time and to evolve it and to create it and to add to it and to layer it up. These were wonderful new freedoms that I had never known as a watercolorist. And to this day, I still paint in watercolor from time to time and I still love it passionately. But this new thing, this oil painting world was quite liberating for me and I would never look back. So here we are. I've just taken a picture of my 20 by 30 peninsula painting, shot it as well as I possibly could and uploaded it to Kijiji. Thank you, Louis, for that suggestion. I disregarded what would happen after that. I uploaded it, closed my computer and went to bed. The very next morning, that flashing red light on my BlackBerry was going. And of course, I thought for sure it was a message from work, something I had to do, an assignment or something I had forgotten and needed to get around to as soon as I arrived at work that day. But no, it was an email from a woman that had seen my painting on Kijiji. She was so touched by the painting that she needed to have it right away. She lived in Sarnia, Ontario and I lived in Whitby, that's five hours driving distance. She was sending somebody because she couldn't get out herself. She was sending somebody from Sarnia the next day with cash in hand to purchase the painting for her. I already thought that was incredible. In fact, this was my first experience with selling any kind of art online. The whole idea of selling art or anything online was quite incredible. And I was amazed already that the process was doing what it was doing. Not to mention that this person was going to be coming from five hours away. But sure enough, the next day, right on time, the friend of the nurse that came from Sarnia arrived at my door, had the cash on hand, paid for the painting, said thank you very much and went back into her car and drove five hours back to Sarnia again, all in the same day. That all by itself was astounding. Not to mention the fact that I had money in my hand from the painting that I had just sold. That was astounding too. You just want to know that I went down into my studio that same day and painted another painting and uploaded it to Kijiji and another and another. And in that first year, I sold over 90 original oil painting canvases. It was an astounding year. It was momentous. It was earth shattering. I never experienced anything like that artistically in my life. And I don't know if it was because it was oils or maybe it was because of the internet reaching such a wider audience. Up until that time, I had only done art gallery presentations and I had only done local outdoor art shows. I was completely new to this whole internet thing. But it reached far and it reached wide and it changed my life forever from that day on. During this time, I was, of course, a family man, wife, three children, house, two cars in the driveway, and all of the mountainous responsibilities that come with that. And I have always taken my responsibilities deeply and seriously. I was committed on every level. And now painting was beginning to take up my time. With every sale was the need to fill the gap with another painting. And painting after painting began to leave the house and hang on clients' walls and in their offices all over North America. This presented new challenges for me. I had to work very hard to keep up my inventory. I learned from my Uncle Jack earlier in my life that one of the greatest killers of artist careers is when they can't keep up with the supply. When people are calling and you don't have work for sale, it makes things very difficult in terms of keeping a steady income, keeping your liquidity alive, and being able to pay all of your bills. So I felt quite convicted about that, and I painted fervently every night. Of course, spending as much time as I could with my children, my wife, and the life that was normal for us, but I was beginning to feel the stress from working at my day job and working now at my new night job. I remember in my little studio there in the basement of our house, I remember feeling the stress, bowing my head one day and praying and saying, Dear God, I believe that you have given me this gift. And yet we've reached a time when something needs to give. Either my painting has to take a back seat and slow down, or perhaps my career at the bank needs to come to an end. But my commitments were too deep, and I felt too convicted on all ends. And I didn't feel the ability to make that decision on my own. And I prayed, Dear God, whatever change comes, I pray that you will bring it, and in a way that I had no choice whatsoever. There's another saying, I'm sure you're familiar. It goes like this, Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. I like to say, Be careful what you pray for, it might come true. And for me, just two weeks later, the bosses came together in our office. The HR department had their representatives, and they were all wearing their black suits. There were also stacks of envelopes on the desk. And they gathered us together, all 63 of us, and I want you to know that when the speech starts like this, you're probably toast. When they say, We want you to know how valuable you are to the organization, and how much we value your input over the years. And then silence, only broken by the occasional whimper. As I looked around, I could see people wiping tears from their eyes. I could hear the crying. Most of us were middle aged. Many people in the audience were early 50s. You know, at a time in your life when you're not quite ready to retire, but maybe you're a little too old to retool, to start another career, to do something completely different. By this time, pretty much everybody knew that our whole department was being eliminated. Their jobs were being outsourced to a company that had the ability to do the same work for half of the cost. And I know that around the room that day, that morning, there was some real pain. I remember for me, it lasted about 20 seconds. I felt all of the pressure, the family, the house, the groceries, the electric bills, everything that we had, that costed money, that my wife and I shared the expenses of and bore that burden every single day, weighed heavily on my shoulders. But in about the 21st or 22nd second, I felt relief. I realized that in that moment, my prayer had come true, that I had just become a full-time career artist, whether I liked it or not. My role on the floor went from feeling loathing and self-pity again, to suddenly going around the room, holding hands with people who were watching their lives being destroyed before their very eyes, sobbing mothers, single moms, single parents, grandparents who were looking after not-quite-independent children. All kinds of situations were represented in the room that day. But I knew that mine was secure, and I knew that I was on the right path, and I knew that I was finally about to do something that I would probably do for the rest of my life. And I was sure of myself. There was not a moment's doubt. And I went home that day. I broke the news to my wife and to my kids, and to my great joy and to my great pleasure. I was not met with, well, okay, let's look for another job, or let's brush up your resume. Nope. My wife and my kids all supported my move. And there was never even one word said about working in any other capacity. In fact, it was all about the art now. They knew it, I knew it, and the green light was on. That was on May 29, 2009, just a day after my birthday. It was like a gift, and it was like a gift that would continue giving. What would follow would be the most amazing years in art that I ever could have dreamed. I never could have dreamed for the life that would come. There is no such thing as an easy art career. Artists who are full-time, they know the roller coaster that comes. The good times, the bad times, the high times, the low times. There are times when you're making a lot of money and you're selling paintings like crazy, and there are times, long stretches sometimes, where nothing is happening. You wonder why you're even in this crazy business. You wonder if you'll ever sell a painting ever again. I like to say, every time a painting is sold, I like to say, I wonder how long it will be before I ever sell one ever again, if ever. But I digress. The story of the years that followed is a book worthy all by itself, and another podcast for another time. I will conclude this with one story that was quite funny. I remember just two weeks after leaving the bank, I entered my first outdoor art show. It was the Purple Turtle art show, and it happened on the grounds of the Breyer Resort in Jackson's Point, Ontario, on the south side of Lake Simcoe. It was a beautiful resort, and there were lots of other tents there when I arrived. I set up my brand spanking new sparkling white tent, and I hung paintings all around the walls from chains, and I was quite proud of myself. What I didn't realize was that after 14 years of working in one of Canada's largest banking institutions in the banking district of Toronto, there I was, dressed a little out of place. Once again, in quite an ironic way, I was very much a square peg in a round hole. Here I was, setting up my tent, hanging my paintings, standing there in my shiny black shoes, my dark blue business pants, and my light blue business shirt. Well, if you've ever been to an outdoor art show, you know the kind where artists set up tents and hang their paintings, and people come walking their dogs and out for their Sunday stroll and look at the artists. The artists are quite casual, let's just say khaki shorts, floppy hats, you know, a little bit on the bohemian side, and there I was, dressed in my banker blue. I couldn't have been more out of place, and it was quite hilarious. But I was quite far from home, I had no change of clothes, this was it, so that's how it was for my very first outdoor art show in Jackson's Point, Ontario, a place by the way, I have to say, is still near and dear to my heart. I still return there quite frequently, I love to have dinner at the local Chinese restaurant, and I also like to occasionally have dinner at the Briar Resort. I remember that first show fondly, and it will forever and always be the most precious first weekend as a full-time artist in my life. I have now been in art full-time for 14 years. I can't believe it. When I look back, all of the experiences, the difficulties, the glories, the low moments, the high moments, the amazing sales, and the long stretches where nothing happened, it's been quite a road, and I don't see any end to it anytime soon. In fact, one day, if they find me leaning up against my easel, you know, I took my last breath, sitting there painting and painting, I will say that I went the happiest person on earth. But until then, I've got a lot of work to do, and a lot of years to put in, and there's a lot of paintings yet to be done, so I hope that you'll stay with me and watch for the next podcast. I'm going to talk a little bit more about what transpired in those years as a full-time artist. There are stories, there are reams of pages that could be told. In fact, maybe even a book one day. We're going to launch a series of podcasts where I'll be interviewing other artists and getting their backstories from the perspective of an artist. And this will not be a painting workshop type of a podcast series. It'll be about real-life experiences, real-life developments of artists that have forged through the difficulties and managed to make a career for themselves. I hope you'll join me, and I hope you'll be with me as we travel down the artist's road, right here on robertmcafee.com.
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