The Speech Source
Mary Brezik and Kim Dillon are two pediatric speech-language pathologists with over 25 years of combined experience. As speech therapists, we are often the first professionals to assess young children once they are referred by their pediatrician. Either they are not talking well or they are not eating well. We get to know our patients, their families, and how they are developing. We have a front row seat during the first critical and formative years of development for those who receive our services. Because of this, we have developed relationships with other professionals, observed what parent questions and concerns often arise, and see a need to share the resources and information we have compiled over the years. Join us as we dig into topics that show all of the overlapping aspects of child development and intervention. We invite you to be a part of our collaborative platform as we discuss, learn and grow for the betterment of our kids!
The Speech Source
S3E5: Behind the Murals with Katie Paintbrush
In this episode, Kim and Mary interview the talented Katie Murray of "Katie Paintbrush," an artist, muralist, and teacher who's made a name for herself both locally in Fort Worth and nationally. Katie shares her journey from a passion for art that began as early as kindergarten to eventually establishing her own business, working on stunning murals and curating art projects.
Katie’s career path is full of twists and turns. She initially studied fashion merchandising, then switched to architecture before eventually earning her degree in graphic design. Her love for art, combined with her fascination for geometry, played a significant role in shaping her creative style. Despite working in graphic design and teaching, it wasn't until her friends in real estate encouraged her to paint murals that she discovered the unique niche in the city of Fort Worth. Creating the “Dream On, Dreamer” mural snowballed into multiple mural projects around Fort Worth. She also speaks about her work as a curator and how much she enjoyed collaborating with other artists, helping to make art more accessible and exciting in her community.
Katie's creative process involves a lot of intentional thought. Whether she's working on murals, portraits, or large-scale installations, she draws on her background in architecture and graphic design to create visually striking, meaningful pieces. One of her most intensive projects was a mural installation for an architectural trade show in Chicago, where she incorporated unique elements like screws, glass, and Legos to create a stunning impressionistic piece.
Throughout the episode, Katie reflects on the balance between being a business owner and an artist. She candidly shares her struggles with burnout and the constant demand of freelance work but also highlights the joy and satisfaction of working on projects that align with her artistic vision. She emphasizes the importance of art not just as a form of personal expression but as something that can inspire and beautify the community.
From managing clients and projects to finding ways to stay true to her style, Katie’s story is an inspiring example of how following your passion can lead to incredible success, both personally and professionally.
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Today it's exciting. We have a guest Her name is Katie Murray with Katie Paintbrush. Katie is an artist, she's a painter, she's a muralist, she is also a teacher. She has taught college classes. She's a wife and a mom of two sweet little boys. I know her through that avenue, through elementary school together, and I've just been able to get to see the amazing things she's been doing, not only in our city of Fort Worth but also just all around the country. Now, katie, you have done some amazing things and we wanted to have you on today to talk about how you took your passion and developed it into this business very specific to your niche and what you love. And we also know that you're a mom of two and you're a very involved mom, so it's constantly changing and ebbing and flowing, and how you've moved with that. So welcome Thank you for being here.
Katie :Thank you for having me. This is so fun. I'm so excited to talk to you guys.
Kim :I've listened to some of your interviews before and read that you've always had a passion for art and being creative. You graduated with a degree in. It was graphic design, right, but then you have a master's in art and you've had a lot of some architect along the way and lots of bits and pieces that have landed you where you are.
Katie :But if you'll tell us a little bit about how you got to what you're doing right now with Katie Paintbrush, I feel like I've taken so many different avenues and got to experiment and play with so many different fields within art, which I've been very lucky to do. I think when I was in kindergarten, art is what I wanted to do as a profession. I remember saying that at my kindergarten graduation, so I knew I was going to try to be in that field some way or another. And when I started college I started actually in fashion merchandising at TCU. Fashion is my passion and fashion merchandising is so much different than fashion design and I learned that very quickly and so I transferred into interior design, loved that.
Katie :I love math. Geometry has always been my favorite subject in school and I started working for an architecture firm in Dallas one summer and the principals said to me that's fine if you want to study interior design and even be an interior designer, but really you should get an architecture degree. Tcu does offer that. So I ended up transferring to Texas Tech and studied architecture and I really loved it. It was so hard and pushed me to my limits and I did not sleep and I did not see anybody. I was solely in that building when I studied architecture, but I loved it so I kept going. But when I met Jeff he was living in Fort Worth and so when I transferred back hoping to finish my architecture degree at UTA, they didn't accept my credits from tech just two different programs. So I ended up switching to graphic design. So graphic design was just something to finish my degree. It wasn't necessarily my passion, and I had a lot of friends growing up who ended up studying graphic design and were in that field and I knew that I could not compete with them. I don't know why architecture and graphic design needed to be so different, but to me and my mind and the way that I operate, they just were. So it was something I struggled with. But I ended up graduating and went to work for a paper company in Dallas, not really doing graphic design, but just getting a job just to start, just to do something. And they ended up letting me do some graphic design for them. And they ended up letting me do some graphic design for them.
Katie :But I just felt like this was a little stale and I didn't have the confidence to go out and look for a position, a true graphic design position. So I sat down and thought what do I want to do with my life? I want to be happy, I want to have fun. What's going to provide that for me and still allow me an avenue to make money when you study art? A means to make money from that field, if you have a degree in it, is to teach. So I think that was just an easy path I'll study art, I'll get my master's and then I'll try to teach, and I don't know why I thought that would be. It's going to be so easy to get a college professor job. So I graduated and I had Charlie like a month later. After I graduated and stayed home with him for about six months and was getting all sorts of board, I needed an outlet and so I applied for a job at TCC Southeast and they just gave me an adjunct position for design to teach their design course, which thankfully I had experience in because that was my major in college. So that was actually a really fun experience. I really enjoyed teaching the college kids. I ended up getting to teach a art appreciation class with somebody who I got my master's with. It had always been our dream to open a gallery together, but he was always on the track to be a teacher and he was an incredible teacher, so he encouraged me to go along this path as well. So we taught together.
Katie :I had two roommates when I was at TCU who were in the real estate biz and commercial real estate and their passion was always to have their own business one day. So when they both left their respective positions and started their own company, they really wanted to do something different. In Fort Worth Disruptor was the popular term like five years ago, right, but that was their thing. They wanted to be disruptors in Fort Worth and they were always very passionate about art and always supported me. And they started their company, mtg Ventures, and asked me if I would put a mural on their first property, which I think the name has changed, but it's where Sejuan is, over off of Kambui.
Katie :That was the first mural. That was Dream on Dreamer. They had acquired three other properties and they wanted this to be a theme. This dreamer theme that kind of involved the three of us because we were best friends and dreamers and creators, and so we designed two other ones. One went into the Foundry District and one went on Magnolia next to Avoca. And they were all different. They all had different concepts. One was more community driven, one was just an experiment, because I had no idea how to do a mural. I was not in any of my realms, like I didn't even think about murals, to be honest, and I think I did a mural tour in San Francisco when I was younger, but I just thought that's a specific genre for a specific person and I'm not that person. So it was really intimidating and I'm always and will always be grateful to them for pushing me and for encouraging me and knowing that I could do it when I couldn't or when I didn't think I could.
Katie :So that relationship grew. They hired me on as their chief creative officer and I was in charge of all the art and their graphic design, branding, et cetera, while they were young and growing and that kind of expanded into oh, we have this empty space that we haven't leased out yet, where we somehow need to promote this. How can we promote it? Why don't you use it as an art studio in our gallery or find some sort of use for this space? So that's when I got back with Nathan, my old college friend, and said, hey, we have this space and it's free and I don't know how long we'll have it, for this is what we've wanted to do, let's try it and I was just newly pregnant with Campbell, my second. I don't know why I do this. Every time I have these like huge opportunities grad school art gallery I get pregnant.
Katie :So we ran that and we ran ourselves into the ground because it was just us two and the art community in Fort Worth at the time was pretty small and very traditional and they had worked hard to become who they were and to a certain extent they were exclusive and so we were trying to push those boundaries and bring in a new audience for the art community in Fort Worth or just art lovers in Fort Worth who maybe didn't feel like they belonged in this kind of original group. That was probably one of my favorite times in my life, because I decided that curating and finding new artists and talking to them and just exploring art outside of Fort Worth and outside of Texas was just really encouraging and inspiring to me. So I think of all the things that I've done in my life, curating is definitely my favorite. Covid happened and we had to shut down. We moved around a couple of different times. We ended up getting a permanent space over in near Southside and it was incredible and we were teaching and holding classes and we became a nonprofit and we really grew it, but the two more business-minded people ended up leaving.
Katie :So now it's just me, and so I'll probably close it down. But when I look back at everything that I accomplished, I'm like I'm tired, I don't know. I know there are still so many things to be done. Mostly the mural commissions come from word of mouth, so I'm still doing that, and then I'll do some portraits now. Now, this year has been a little slower. I've always thought that I will hang on to this ride as long as it lasts, because the market is getting more saturated. People are figuring out how to do this work and I just I don't know how much longer it will last, but I will hang on as long as it does.
Kim :That was one of my questions for you. I know I had asked you yesterday to find it out, but when you were working for the company and you were doing the murals on their buildings, obviously people took notice of what that was and you started that movement, that mural movement, for our city at least and so people took notice and if they wanted something like that and they did want to hire you, was there just some discussion that happened that maybe, if you were going to do some of these projects or take on some of these clients that were outside of that company, was that natural? Were they fine with that, or was that it just evolved over time?
Katie :Originally what we discussed was I wouldn't work for competitors. So if there was another commercial real estate company who was looking to jazz up their properties with murals, that I would stay away from them and work mostly for small retail. Or people hired me to do murals in their homes so I would stick to just non-competitors. And then, as time went on, we had a conversation a couple of years ago because the work at M2G wasn't as prevalent and they encouraged me to go and do whatever. I wanted full support. So that's when it blew up, because there was a lot more opportunities, because commercial developers seemed to be really inspired by this artistic movement. I don't know that I realized this because the only people I had worked with were Susan and Jessica and we worked really well together. They give me a lot of creative freedom and they have great ideas. They're very creative. So we meshed well together and I think I took that for granted to a certain extent, because it's hard, especially when you're doing multiple jobs for multiple different people, you're having to engage with their personalities and their likes and dislikes in a different way and then that project's over and then you move on to somebody else. It's just an adaptation of knowing that, yes, I get to make art, but also that's only almost 20% of it, because learning new processes and dealing with the people and then figuring out accounting stuff and marketing yourself it is so much work. And then finding the jobs and agreeing to all the terms and figuring out contracts there's so much that goes into it, and one of my girlfriends said that she would love to just be a consultant for me and for people who are in my position where they're doing freelance work. But there's so much that goes along with it the lawyers and the accounts there's just a lot, and it would be nice to be able to put that on somebody else and just to get to focus on the art, and that is something that I could look into.
Katie :I always wanted speaking about the curation. I thought about starting a company where I would find the artists and the businesses and I would figure out who would meld dust with one another. When it was really hot and I was getting a lot of jobs, I was having to source those out to other artists and I liked doing that because I wasn't just choosing any artist. I had made a place in the community and so I understood everybody's different styles and I liked thinking not that I was trying to play a puppet master or whatever, but I thought that I had a good grasp on this company needs, this particular kind of artist. But I think there's an art company called Artist Art Uprising Artist Uprising They've hired me for a Coca-Cola project before, but it was exactly the concept that I wanted to start. But that's not. I'm not a business person, so it wasn't really my forte. But had I found somebody who could possibly do that job, I would have loved to have done something like that.
Mary:Hearing your background. That makes so much more sense now, when I look at your art, it is so diverse. How would you even describe style of?
Katie :art. That's such a good question. I like to think of myself as a chameleon, especially working with M2G and them having so many different projects and being able to figure out how to do different styles for each of their projects. And it's also something I struggle with because people will tell me you do have a style when I see your work. I can see the similarities in your murals and I see it more now that there's more of them. I see it a little bit and I think it's a combination of graphic design.
Katie :Thank goodness I have that degree and that understanding of how to use the computers and draw digitally. Most of my murals are done from a digital drawing that I've made on my iPad and then those are projected. I feel like a lot of that was also inspired because some of the beginning projects that I had were community driven. I had to make a kind of coloring book-esque style in order for the community to come in and paint on the mural. I had a lot of murals like that, so that kind of also influenced my style at the beginning.
Mary:I see a lot of impressionism also in your work, in addition to graphic design of source, and then there's some pop culture kind of in there and you've got some even cubism, like this really cool architecture.
Kim :When you said you love geometry, I was like this makes so much sense to me now.
Katie :Yeah, I know, especially with some of the patterns God, I love doing the patterns because it is all math based and I'm like I know this circle is this and this has to be this, my portraits that I do, small scale portraits, which I love. I love painting people in both mediums and small scale and large scale. It was what I finished with. My final body of work in grad school was portraits, and I wrote a whole thesis about why I paint portraits and why I paint them the way that I do. So my small scale work is probably more impressionistic and I've been dying to figure out how to paint impressionistically on a larger canvas. I think it's just a little intimidating to me, so I haven't done it yet. But yeah, what you said is a great description of what I do Impressionism, but also a little pop art, a lot of geometry, just a mix of a lot of things.
Mary:One installation that you did in particular was really intriguing to me, and I am a lover of art but I am not very knowledgeable, so I'm just going to talk in very general terms because I don't know the real way to describe this. But you did this incredible ocean in Chicago. There was glass and there were all of these screws in there and then all the Legos. You had Legos in your art. Let's start from the beginning there. Okay, I see the end product. I'm looking at this incredible piece, my mind's going and I'm just really appreciating it. But I'm wondering how in the world did this start? What idea did it start with and how did it get here with Legos and glass and screws?
Katie :Oh my gosh, this project. It was so incredible. It's probably the most intensive project I've ever worked on. My husband and I have a mutual friend, a coworker, who ended up leaving his company to go work for a glass company just outside of Fort Worth called Claris, and she was in charge of their trade show, which is in Chicago called Neocon, which I had never heard of. But I can't believe I've never heard of it because after going I'm like I want to go every year. This is so fun, but it's just an architectural trade show in Chicago and she tried to describe it to me as it's like Vegas on steroids, but it's insane and we have a showroom and we need to put on a spectacular show and we have a huge wall and we want you to create an installation for this wall. So I ended up talking to one of the women who was also in charge of this and she really wanted, from what I understood, she wanted it to feel I'm going to use the word impressionistic again like in Clueless when they talk about how you're up close and it's a big old mess, but you step back and you actually see the image. That's essentially what she was looking for with found objects or just a collage of objects. That was the original concept.
Katie :We knew we wanted to use blues, so I started thinking of just a variety of different architectural elements that you might think of but you wouldn't think to put in an art installation. And since they're a glass company, there was definitely a glass heavy component. I brainstormed with other friends and with them, and so we thought of Legos because of building. We didn't want it to feel cheesy, we definitely want it to be an elevated product. We didn't want it to feel cheesy, we definitely want it to be an elevated product. We didn't want it to feel crafty. So when we thought of screws, I had seen a painting where it was just all screws and I'm sure it was a tiny painting because the amount of screws that we had to use I just I weep when I think about it because I don't know how we did it all.
Katie :But basically we went through a bunch of different renditions and I liked the idea of these variations of light waves that again, I digitized the image. When you digitize the image, you get and you can pick how many colors you want to show up. So I knew we were going to have six different objects. So I knew I needed six different colors and then each of those objects needed to fulfill the color of the shapes that were created by this digital image. So when you step back you can absolutely understand what it is. But again, up close you're like these are just a bunch of screws, this is just a bunch of Legos put together, and I could tell there was a lot of hesitation and I've never done something like this before. So even I was a little nervous. But I think my math brain and I really love a process and I knew that if I could think of each step in the process and how that could be executed, that it would turn out like if I could just get to the next step, everything would be okay. I think for the show, the word, or maybe for their specific space, was perspective, perception and the difference between those two and the similarities between those two. So we wanted those somehow to be mirrored or reflected into the works.
Katie :So got on site, projected the image, painted it all in. I think I had four days to do all of this. I completely underestimated how much time it was going to take me, but filled in all the images with paint, had to bring in extra workers to screw in all of the screws. We had sandblasted I think a thousand to 5,000 screws before we got on site. Those went in. Those maybe took up like this much of the wall, of course, because they're screws. We ended up shipping I think like 10,000 to 15, maybe 20,000. I think like 10,000 to 15, maybe 20,000. I can't remember the exact amount of screws and then I spray painted them on site. We brought in a bunch of glass broke that brought glue guns. We're having extra people.
Katie :I ended up reaching out to a friend and said hey, I know your aunt's an artist in Chicago. Is there any way she can connect me with the art students here Because they have an art school? So contacted one of them. She ended up bringing six friends on site and I just paid them an hourly wage to help me finish this project. So it ended up taking 10 people.
Katie :I stayed up all night every night finishing this project. I had to leave for the airport. It was not finished. I just had to depend on these students I had just met and these construction workers who are like what the heck is this? I've never done this before. And they ended up doing it. They made it work. It was incredible. It's only up for a year, which is sad. There were a lot of tears, there were a lot of blisters and all the things, but we made it and I really think it's one of the most incredible things I've ever made. I'm so grateful to them because I know it was a lot of money and probably unexpected amount of money and they allowed me to do it amount of money and they allowed me to do it.
Mary:I cannot even imagine being in front of it in person, because I saw I believe it was a reel on your Instagram and you just see people there's reaching out. They just want to touch it and they just want to be a part of it and want to be able to feel and explore as an artist. So you weren't there for the big reveal, to see the people who had hired you to do this and all of the people who are coming to this show. What does that do for you as an artist? To see their reactions.
Katie :I was very sad, but I was also so tired. So when I left I was like, whatever it's done, like it's out of my hands, I don't want to see it again, I don't want to think about it again. But I started thinking about it. We sent the kids to summer camp for two weeks and the show was technically two weeks after I left and I was like you know what, when do I ever get a chance to just fly by the seat of my pants and do something just for me, and I don't have any dependents here to worry about? So I ended up buying a ticket, like the night before, and went up for the show Good, good it was, and it's the best feeling. And I had forgotten I hadn't signed it. I'd forgotten to sign it, and so I'm so glad that I went up there and got to do that.
Katie :And they ended up hiring this artist who paints people into objects. So she, live, painted a woman into my mural. So if the woman were to just stand there, she would be camouflaged. But it was insane. When she started I was like, how is this going to work? But she did it. If she stood there, you couldn't see the woman when she was up against my wall, so anyways, getting to see all the stuff was amazing.
Kim :It sounds like they hired you to do this job but you had so much creative control over what you were going to do, even though they gave you a concept. And to me, when I think about being an artist and being a business owner, like you said earlier, you are an artist but you're going to work for somebody who's wanting you to do something and that probably takes a little bit of that creative feel away from it. Figured out a way to balance that, as you're owning your own business, or do you just feel like you find enough people that give you that creative outlet? That that's part of the game. Would it be easier if you were just painting and selling what has led you to keep taking these clients on? That might take some of that artistic freedom from you besides the money.
Katie :You know what? I get asked that a lot. I think it goes back to that whole. I'm worried this isn't going to last forever, and so part of me just feels like, even though there are certain clients who may suck all the energy out of me and all of my love for art, at the end of the day I have to think of this as a business, and if I am being professional, I can't really In my mind I know other artists would disagree, but in my mind, as a business professional, you treat each client the same and this is a job and you do the job. So if I need to access some of my creativeness or artistic freedoms elsewhere, then I have to figure out how to do that and I have to make time for that.
Katie :I haven't really done that recently, and I think towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year I really struggled, being inspired to do anything. I just didn't want to do anything. I didn't want to work, I didn't want to paint, I didn't want to do anything, but I knew that to get out of that I just had to keep going and just do it. So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm taking on other projects that are outside of the murals and the portraits. There's a scarf company that I've been working with and doing some little illustrations for them, and I'm not really an illustrator, so I'm having to learn the new craft, which is fun. Maybe it will spark some inspiration. So that's what I'm hoping for.
Kim :And I would also assume that as people continue to hire you, they're seeing your work and they're hiring you for what they know you can do in your style. So I do hope that some of those big projects like I know you did Fort Worth Zoo and Meow, Cat and Grapevine I hope that you felt like you were able to stay true and authentic to what you like to do and what you feel like defines your art.
Katie :I think there are definitely people that are looking for a specific style and I'm grateful for those. I'm grateful for the clients who come to me and they've looked at my Instagram and they're like we love this particular piece. Can we do something similar to this? That makes it so much easier for me, because then I know exactly what they're looking for and then all we're having to work on is subject matter. It is really a relief and a joy when I get to work with people who know who I am and know what my style is and are expecting. That. It makes me feel confident that they're coming for me and not just a sign painter are coming from me and not just a sign painter.
Mary:When you are curating a piece for a client, art is obviously so personal and it's your job to create something that is personal to someone else that you don't know very well, and it might be a business or it might be an individual. And my question is what does that interview process look like? What, when you meet with them, are you trying to hone in on or find out about them? Or do you like to meet them in their space or see how they dress? What kind of things are you trying to figure out, what their style is or what they might like?
Katie :I love to meet clients one-on-one and get a kind of a sense for who they are and what their mannerisms are like, and I think I do a fairly good job of reading people. I like to know the background of the project. I like to know the history of who they are. If it's a business, I like to know the history of who they are, if it's a business, what they do. I love all the nitty gritty facts.
Katie :I just like to pull all information, because then I use those words that they give me and I go and look up visuals that represent those words. So I like to go on a deep dive. I'll just type in a word and then I'll go down a rabbit hole of oh, this word means this, which makes me think of this and this seems to be associated to this, and so I'll create these kind of word maps that eventually lead me to an idea or a concept, and so then I usually present a couple of different concepts to them and figure out which works best. But that is a good question, because a lot of times the work that I've been doing are for corporations, but they're interior murals, so they are reflective of the culture of the company and their employees are really the only ones who are going to see that, or the employees' customers, as opposed to some of the public murals, which has to cater to a whole community of the city or the state or wherever it is, while also reflecting whatever that company's values are.
Katie :You have to take an extra bit of caution when you know that your audience is bigger or smaller, and I think that the client is well aware of that as well. They generally do a good job of hey, we got to keep this tight or this needs to be like no religion, no politics, no whatever. We just want to keep it generic, reflective of our company in a very loose way. So I'm grateful when people are thoughtful about that, and if they're not, then I remind them. And yeah, but again, everyone's different and everyone wants something different.
Mary:I think it's so incredible All the art that you've done around Fort Worth. It just makes our city so much more vibrant. You just see your legacy and your footprint everywhere. We love it. You were talking about, when you were in school, finding your degree based on making sure you had the job security later on, Since you are an artist, that, like you said, sometimes are going to be really saturated lots of projects coming in and then other times dependent on the economy or we're in election year, what's going on but you are going to be affected by those things. How do you try to incorporate that into your business plan or into your goals, your pricing model, all those?
Katie :kinds of things. My mom is an accountant and my dad is a lawyer, so they are left brain right brain whatever.
Katie :So I'm grateful to them because they give me a lot of help and feedback. And my husband's in business. He's. Anytime you want to work on your business model, I'm here and I'm like. I know, I know.
Katie :I think I've been very lucky that I haven't had to market myself very much, because a lot of it is word of mouth and I was able to get in early and so I'm still getting jobs without having to do anything, getting jobs without having to do anything.
Katie :However, if I truly wanted to focus on a niche and only say I want to have clients like this, I know that I could probably start marketing myself better and get those kinds of clients and also know that the portraits are pretty popular, know that the portraits are pretty popular.
Katie :And if I needed to transition and just do portraits for a little while if, for whatever reason, the mural game wasn't active, I think I'm not positive, but I think I could probably transition into doing something like that. There's a lot of give and take when it comes to the amount of work that I have to put into it, when I'm working really hard, and then also the other stuff being a mom full-time. It's a balancing act that I haven't quite figured out. I think my FOMO is so challenging because I struggle with and I want everything for them and I want everything for me and I try the best that I can to do it all, and sometimes I'm going to get burnt out and sometimes it's going to be magic. So I think I'm just letting life just carry me along as opposed to being in charge of it. But I'm okay with that for now.
Kim :When we're in charge of it, it usually doesn't work out how we think anyway, so I think that's good advice.
Mary:I know it's time to wrap up, but I have one last question for you, and it's just a really broad general question, but I would love the opportunity to ask this to an artist is what is the purpose of art in your life?
Katie :For me. I think a lot of it is about beauty, and we studied this in school. I took an art history class and this theme of beauty came up and at that time there was a lot of conflict between kind of the traditionalists and what beauty meant back, maybe in the Renaissance, versus now, where you could see a toilet that was painted gold and it's. This is art. Is that beautiful?
Katie :So we had a lot of arguments about this and I think for me art is about true beauty and I know that it's subjective and beauty isn't the eye of the boulder, to be cheesy, but I think I'm such a visual person that I'm just constantly looking for more beauty and new ways that it can be expressed. I'm also really interested in the thought behind the artwork, because sometimes for me maybe it's not visually there, but then I read about the artist's intent and that's beautiful to me. The same in all different art forms music, theater. There's so much out there that's art related that people don't generally think of when they think of fine art. But I talked about fashion, the clothes that people wear, the way that they remodel their home. There's so many different fields and I think I'm always looking and inspired by and trying to create more beauty.
Mary:In the way that I see it, I think about this with healthcare actually Mirroring art is this whole yin and yang of beauty and functionality and how they really come together. Or they play off each other, or they totally don't even pay attention to the other one. Maybe it's fully just functional or fully just beauty, but do you see that as well? Are you thinking about those two elements as you're creating your art?
Katie :That's definitely a concept that we talked about in architecture is form follows function, and so, yes, it is something I think about. Sometimes it doesn't work out, or sometimes it just works out on accident. I like to be very intentional I like to use that word when I describe what I do because I feel like, if nothing else, I want to be intentional, and to do that, I think you have to think of how the form is functional, and so, for me, if that's the case, if that's the goal, then let's make that really incredible. Let's make it. We don't have to make that plain, we don't have to just paint that white.
Katie :How can we make this so that it's accessible? Also? I think that's really important. How do we make art which can feel a little hard to understand sometimes? How do we make that accessible to the community? I think that's a really important part about making it functional is to provide inspiration to people who wouldn't have looked there otherwise, and maybe they get inspired and then they do something else that is creative or inspirational. I think just allowing it to continue rolling down and trickle down is also really important.
Kim :I'm glad you mentioned that because I did want to end on that and say that's a big piece of what you're doing in our community is you're not only an artist for our city and beyond, but you are very instrumental in being involved in the schools not even your own kids' schools. You're definitely involved there, doing all of the artwork for our auctions or helping the art teacher and then the other schools that they're not even at yet, both middle schools. I know you've done a lot in the community and you're teaching younger generations about art and the purpose of art, and so you're definitely making that happen and I appreciate that my own kids get to benefit from that having you in the community. So we're excited for all that you're doing. Thank you for just sharing how that works. We have not had someone that has a career that is a little bit more abstract like the artist world, so to be able to see what that looks like as a business owner is very intriguing, so I appreciate you sharing.
Katie :Thank you for having me. This is so fun to get to talk about it.
