Noelle Phares - Art Startups, Mixed Media and Environmentalism

I'm actually recording right now.

Oh, okay, awesome. Just heads up, I'm recording.

Yeah, I was thinking let's turn the music off. Hey Google!

Sorry, hey Google, music off. The future. Totally. Can I get you something to drink or anything?

We do an Alexa thing.

I'm gonna get you some nice water.

That sounds good.

I got a soda water, so cool. Yeah.

Hello out there, you're listening to Horizons, a series of talks with the people who make, collect, and present artworks representing the American West.

I'm George Irwin.

Before we get started today, I'd like to ask you for a favor. If you could, please leave a review for the show on iTunes. It makes a big difference in getting the word out about the show. Also, if you can think of anyone who might like the show and you can send them a link, that would be great too. Thanks so much. So I just got back from a big road trip with my wife and two young sons through New Mexico and Colorado. We spent some time with my family and with some friends and got to spend a little time going through galleries and checking out some artwork. And also I was able to do a couple studio visits to chat with some artists for the podcast. First one of these is today's episode. I was talking to Noelle Ferris in Lakewood, Colorado, just west of Denver, where she works out of a home studio painting with watercolor, acrylic, embroidering sometimes onto the paintings. Her work has a really cool mix of a representational naturalistic style along with some abstract geometry that really plays with the tension of man versus nature. Anyway, my family dropped me off at Noel's home studio and took off to go— my wife took the boys to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to check out the Space Odyssey exhibit, which apparently was great. And I rung Noelle's Nest doorbell, and she answered holding a little gray dog that was barking at me a lot. His name was Indy, named after a famous fictional paleontologist, I believe. I don't know, I'm making this up as I go. Anyway, Noelle showed me in, gave me a little tour of her studio, which was charming and overflowing with paintings and prints, framed prints that she was getting ready for a series of art shows she'll be showing at. So then we sat down in her living room and had a good talk about her work. So I hope you enjoy it.

Here you go.

I think, I think your level's probably okay from there.

Okay, I can lean forward a little bit.

Yeah, we can— we're all right.

Move the couch forward a little bit.

So is this your full-time gig now?

It is. It's been almost 2 years since I've been doing this full-time.

Cool.

Yeah, I did not ease into it at all. I like one day was working as a scientist for a tech company in San Francisco, had gone to undergrad and graduate school for kind of some different things within the hard sciences, and then a couple years ago just like made the starkest U-turn and Didn't even plan on doing art full-time when I left my last job, but after a few months, I was painting every day and I'd built my website and I just kind of remembered that little dream that we all have in the back of our heads. You're just like, what do I wanna do when I grow up? And for me, I always very much repressed it, I think 'cause I come from a background of a lot of people in medicine and sciences and really no fine arts. So, yeah, but the little dream in the back of the head for me was this picture of myself in overalls splattering paint all over the place as a job, and it just never seemed realistic until I kind of got some really intense business training inadvertently through working for the last tech startup that I worked for.

Okay.

Leading a product team there. We were an agricultural tech company. So my master's degree was in environmental science-related stuff. So I worked in kind of agricultural sustainability from like a data perspective. We used satellite information. So I led kind of the engineering team that took satellite information, mostly imagery and other kind of spatial data layers. And yeah, combined those together, you know, through just various, various modeling techniques. To just better understand how crops use nutrients and water. Okay. But we were a really small company. It was called Mavericks. We were a super small company. I think I was their second or third hire. And by the time I left the company, about 3 years after I started, the company had grown to about 60 people. So yeah, even as, you know, the like staff environmental scientist, you start with a tiny company and they're like, oh, you've built a product, you know, figure out how to market it.

So you see all the different aspects of it.

Yes, yes. And, you know, crash course in sales and product market fit and all these things that I just had no idea about. So when I left, and actually that was my last job, my last, I guess, employed job, not in the arts, right? I realized I had this business background that sort of gave me a new insight into just what creating a business would look like. So although I'm an artist now, I very much think of myself as a small business owner too. Right.

Which, you know, you know how it is. I mean, if that's your— even if like you're just doing the art and somebody else is taking care of all the business stuff for you, you're still ultimately a small business owner for yourself.

Yeah, right.

It's not like you're an employee of somebody as an artist, right?

And I think, you know, you make better art— at least, you know, I— not everyone's intention as an artist is the same. For me, what I get the most satisfaction out of, beyond just creating work that is meaningful to me with my science background— we can get into that more— but, you know, the most I guess impactful thing on just my own motivation is just seeing people enjoy the work, right? And not for the money, but like when people buy it, it's validation that you're creating stuff that people like. Love seeing it in people's homes. So for me, you know, being in touch with who are my customers, what are they responding to with sales techniques and all this, all that just like leads back to creating better artwork for them. Mhm. So I don't— the business and art perspectives really feed each other.

Yes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Um, so that's been— wow—

an interesting journey.

Yeah.

Cool. Oh my gosh, when I think about what's changed the most now versus when I started 2 years ago, I mean, it's, it's everything, of course. But one of the hardest things, as someone who's, you know, had no experience in the fine arts before, um, really didn't have any connections or mentors or role models until a few years ago in the fine arts. Just diving into it and saying, okay, I'm an artist now, we're gonna do this. It was really wild to figure out what does the day-to-day look like? What is— what needs to be done first, you know, to be able to build a brand and get into, you know, a decent gallery and all that. So I think I'm— my artwork's evolving for sure, but just my day-to-day efficiency, and I think the order of operations in what I do to be successful is getting better. Thank God. Yeah. You know, less, less time spent on stuff that doesn't return much for me, I guess. Right. So that's been really nice.

So you've been doing this like full-time for like 2 years. Were you doing it kind of as a hobby initially while you were still with the tech company, or?

Yeah. Yeah, I've always been— I have a twin sister. My twin sister and I were both just really into drawing and watercoloring, which, as we were just saying, it's funny that watercoloring is an early paint form for people because now—

crazy—

you realize it's so technical. It's like kind of wild to give a kid a watercolor set, and I'm so sorry.

Well, maybe just like— it's wild to give a kid a messy maybe.

That's true. Yeah, all you really need is like some water and oil.

Yeah, it's so portable.

That's fair. But I've only done a little bit of instruction in the arts, but I've led a couple of watercolor workshops, and you know, you realize really fast how much training it takes to produce a good watercolor. Um, just in that, you know, I'll do the like, okay, I'm gonna paint, and you kind of follow my steps along, and you know, expect everyone's to look like mine. Not that I'm an expert watercolor, but you know, relatively experienced, but then you look around and you're like, oh my gosh, this is not intuitive to people. They just don't look the same. So anyways, I'm sorry, tangents.

That's okay.

Watercolor.

Oh yeah, so you're watercoloring and drawing as a kid.

Yeah, and in college, I get my undergrad was in biochem, so I was in labs all day, but I still, my college roommates can attest to this, I often had a big canvas just going at any given time. And I used to oil paint back then.

Okay.

Um, really different stuff from what I paint now, but it's always been back burner for me, and I always really loved it.

So was the oil— had you taken classes in that, or did you just pick up some oils and some stuff and try it out?

Yeah, I've never really had any formal training. I don't even think I've been to— I, I did, you know, one short art workshop when I was maybe in middle school, but other than that, it was all self-taught. Wow. Although the resources online, I'm not gonna lie, there are times when I'm like, I really need to improve on how to capture depth in a complicated landscape, for example, and I will pull up a video of an expert watercolor, for example, painting, and there are times when I will sort of paint along just for practice. And that's been super helpful. Super helpful, especially with some of the more technical stuff like layered watercolors.

Yeah, you know, well, that's cool. You know, like, at least you can, I don't know, see where you want to improve on things, like, yeah, you know, getting things to have a deeper appearance, and Google that, you know. That's cool.

Yeah, some— I keep harkening back to watercolor just because I think it's, it's interesting to talk about and think about, although I paint more with acrylic these days. But, um, So much of watercolor painting is, I think, a little bit counterintuitive, just in that, you know, in other types of painting, when I'm painting with acrylic, for example, I'm typically painting dark to light, and you have to do almost— I do more composition planning now, but like you have to do very little planning because you can layer as much as you want, right? But with a watercolor, you got to keep the light areas light. It's— yeah, that's so much planning involved. Mm-hmm. So, and then just this, the spectrum of dry to wet and working along that spectrum to produce different effects. Yeah. With both the paint and with the water on the paper itself. I think some of watercolor technique is a little bit counterintuitive, so it has been really helpful to get a little more expert training even via YouTube for that. I've seen more progression in my watercolor technique than in my acrylic technique, for example, even though I use acrylic more. Yeah, huh.

Yeah, I'll have to check those out because I mean, I've been doing some watercolor sketches and doing the past few, I've noticed like I wish I'd left some more white for— right, you know, I don't know, sky or something.

Watercolor's curse. Yeah, I always wish that. There is a workaround though, you know, the workaround, right?

You can—

you can get it wet and kind of like blot it off, right? Um, I've never— maybe I've never tried scraping it off before. Maybe if it's really thick paper, you could almost take some paper off.

Yeah, I think that a lot of like, uh, professional watercolors have like an X-Acto on hand.

Yeah, that's, that's reasonable. I can't say I've really tried that, but you know, the other, the other workaround, um, I think watercolor purists think it's cheating a little bit, but sometimes I pull in that white gouache.

Yeah, or white acrylic or something.

I almost always have a lot of gouache on hand that I just go back and you know, touch up a watercolor with at the end. Some of them, actually, this one that is on the left here, that was all gouache other than the, like, geometric stripes on the side were acrylic. But I really love gouache. It's just such a different effect with the kind of the chalky opaque look.

Cool.

So it's been really fun. I think the other thing that I've really enjoyed learning throughout just diving deep on on this fine art process in the last couple years has been having a design in mind that I want the end product to look like and getting better and better at knowing which techniques and what types of paint to use to get there.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah, yeah. I think I used to sit down, piece of paper, say this is going to be a watercolor, um, and just kind of try to force it. Um, and sometimes I think that's really good for training, but Now, often I'm so much more flexible with saying, okay, instead of deciding this is going to be a watercolor, I instead I'm going to just think about what I want the end product to look like, and I will use acrylic where acrylic is going to be more powerful even on paper. Yeah, I'll use watercolor in some areas, gouache in some areas, pencil, chalk, oil pastel, whatever. I just think a lot less about making myself stick to a a certain medium, which has been really, I don't know, freeing, I guess, as a technical artist.

That's an interesting thing because, you know, so many artists I think are just like most comfortable in one medium and just stay right there. And so they're like, when they're thinking about their next painting, they're not thinking about what do I want to accomplish and what, you know, medium would be best to suit this that I want to use. They're like, oh, another oil painting.

Totally.

Which is You know, oil paintings are great, but—

Yeah, I mean, there's a belief set for that, right? I mean, they say it takes 10,000 hours, you know, of doing some task or some practice to become expert. And I think, you know, if you're an oil painter, you know, it's nice to stick to oil because you're just going to get better and better. But for me, I've always been very much driven by new challenges. I have a very hard time wanting to stay in one spot and like repeat something to get better. I never paint the same thing twice. I'm so much more interested in, I guess, almost trying something new almost every time. So yeah, I don't know, I'm constantly being drawn to trying new techniques and—

Yeah.

There's just different ways to approach it, I guess, right? I'm hoping that my 10,000 hours will be an amalgamation of trying different techniques and my expertise will be more in producing something that the end product looks like what I want it to independent of the technique.

Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And then, you know, 10,000 rule thing is like, well, yeah, I mean, it's a big number, right? But like, I think that like, especially, you know, you have all this experience and the business with your startup background. And so that transfers into like knowing how to be like a professional artist, you know, like those hours count, I think. Not towards like the painting technique, but they count towards like knowing how to like be professional, right?

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense.

That kind of stuff transfers, I think, which is interesting.

Yeah, I appreciate that. That's fair.

Trying different techniques like these.

Okay, so you totally set these ones out, but they kind of are all different.

So can you tell me, like, for listeners, what the titles for these three are that we've been looking at?

Yes, um, we are looking at—

and are these—

are these prints right now? Yeah. And these are— two of them are prints of paintings that I've done in the last month and a half. They're actually up in a gallery right now, um, and those are titled Watershed Down and Northern Hill.

I like the Watershed Down. I remember reading— seeing that title and be like Oh, that book.

Yeah, I'm still, I'm just enchanted with that story. Is that this one? Yeah, so we're looking at a painting that's acrylic and gouache for the most part, and this was actually the last painting that I did in a 10-piece run for this gallery show that's actually up at a gallery called Space Gallery in Denver, but I was doing this entire series on landscapes that have been impacted by climate change, various landscapes, and this one in particular is a scene of kind of canyons and running water up in Northern California near my hometown of Paradise, California, which was a small town. The only reason why people know it now is because it just burned down last year. Yeah.

Gosh.

So that's my close closest firsthand experience with actual serious damage from climate change. PG&E was, at the end of the day, blamed for it, but really, in reality, these fires happened because these landscapes are just parched. They've been experiencing serious drought for a long time. There's a lot of data to suggest that it's very much been exacerbated by climate change. So yeah, the tidal water shut down was just a play on, you know, obviously the classic novel Watership Down where those little rabbit residents just had to flee their home looking for something new, and that's really what all of the residents, including my own parents, of this area in California had to do.

Yeah.

So that was sad, but I've really enjoyed— I never actually painted my hometown or the area around it until this fire happened. And I've painted a few pieces in the last few months. It's been really fun to just think a lot about home and, you know, the landscapes that I grew up with.

Yeah.

So we're also looking at another piece called Zenith, which is another topic that's been— I've been painting a lot since I moved to Colorado about a year and a half is a mountain range in Colorado. So I'm either painting landscapes that I've been to or that I want to go to or I have some kind of personal tie to, or, you know, of course there's a draw towards painting the landscapes that I think my core audience really want to pay attention to, which a lot of my collectors and clients are from Colorado and live in Colorado now, so I've been painting more and more Colorado scenes.

Makes sense, yeah.

But I try to keep it diverse. You know, the thing that most inspires me when I'm thinking about what I want to paint is thinking about, you know, areas of the world that deserve more attention, I think, from not just art collectors or art viewers, but, you know, from people thinking about what is vulnerable on the planet right now.

That's interesting, yeah.

From kind of an environmental science perspective, I guess. That's what really makes it interesting to me to paint them, is I typically kind of embark on a little research phase first where, you know, sometimes someone will commission me to, you know, for example, paint New Zealand. I did a painting of a glacier in New Zealand earlier this year, and my kind of process for, you know, start to finish, what is this painting going to look like? I typically start off by doing a bunch of research around what makes that landscape vulnerable. And, you know, glacial melt in this part of New Zealand is, is certainly evidence of climate change and just a changing landscape. So for me, I try to make, you know, some resource that's imperiled a little bit, okay, as the topic of the painting, whether it's obvious or not to the viewer. But it's kind of a fun— I don't know about fun, but I guess an intriguing talking point when I'm talking to people about the painting because inevitably I end up selling prints later.

Yeah, and it serves multiple purposes that way too. One, it's— some people are buying prints or buying the painting to hang in their home. They enjoy the piece and for whatever reason they bring to it. But also then, if it's an imperiled piece of nature, you're raising awareness of that, right, and telling the story of it, but then also kind of documenting it, you know, should it disappear or—

that's a good thing, that's a good way to put it—

or should it change, right?

Right. I've been thinking a lot about— I've just been writing a lot for various purposes, but writing a lot about the work I've been doing the last year and, you know, always trying to rethink, like, why am I painting what I'm painting? What does it mean? What does it mean to people? And I keep coming back to— certainly I have this environmental science background that feeds, you know, the topics that I paint about, but I also recognize that a big reason why I paint, why I think a lot of artists do paint, is just simply because they want to capture something really beautiful. And you kind of said it before, right? If you're capturing maybe just a snapshot in time of a landscape that's rapidly changing, I think that's important. People are just intrinsically drawn to beautiful things and there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. So when I'm thinking about a composition and a palette and whatever beforehand, you know, certainly what comes to mind most for what I wanna accomplish is to create something beautiful at the end. And it's not just for the sake of creating something beautiful, it's so that when someone looks at it and they say, "Oh, this is an area that was impacted by climate change," after I've yapped about it on whatever platform, I want them to look at it and say, "Oh my gosh, this is really beautiful. Where is this? Oh, it's Paradise, California," and realize that that beauty exists exists, or it did exist, and just wanting to preserve it. Yeah, however we can as a society, even if it's just for the sake of preserving beauty. I think that's a really good starting point, right?

Definitely. Yeah, it's fun to hear you say that, uh, you've been thinking a lot about what you've— what you're painting and why you're painting it, and putting a lot of thought into that. I was talking to somebody not long ago about understanding your mission or you're the reason you're an artist, you know? And it came up that a lot of times as visual people, or like people who have learned to express themselves best visually, it's hard to put that into words. And so writing about it can be a real challenge.

Totally.

But then if you look kind of at your body of work to date, you can start to go in and pick out what you've done and why, right?

Find a narrative along those lines.

Yeah.

Yeah, I can totally see that why that would be the case. I think I have, you know, come to art from a really different background.

Yeah.

You know, where, you know, most of what I did before was either, you know, actually out doing studies, you know, repeatable science, whatever, but so often as a scientist or many other professions, you know, most of your work comes out as a— in writing. So I I think came from a background, was really used to writing a lot about abstract ideas, which is a skill that served me so well as an artist now because, right, that's what we're doing is often, you know, writing about really abstract concepts. I always really enjoy reading more, hearing more about, you know, the stories behind like truly abstract art because, you know, that's where you really need to hear it from the artist to understand what it's about. My fiancé's mother, her name is Amy Métier, is a professional artist and she actually lives in the Denver area too. She's been very helpful since I've moved here, but she's a very abstract oil painter and it's been really interesting, you know, asking deeper questions about her process and sort of learning what art is like to her, who's just had a very different path than I have, and her work is really different. And, you know, you look at a painting that Amy does, and they're beautiful, but they're really abstract. So I think to myself, or to anyone who's not right there next to her listening to what is this about, you look at it and you have no idea. But of course there's a story behind why she's painting what she's painting. Yeah, everyone has their own story, I guess, for what what their art means, right? But I wasn't even really into looking at art that much before I started painting.

My next thought is like, do you have— like, are you like a contemporary art fan?

I mean, I have my favorite artists, absolutely, and the deeper I get into this world, the more I enjoy it and the more necessary I think it is to look at other art. But I wasn't really raised going to art museums. It hasn't been a big part of my life up until a couple years ago, so I was absolutely the person that any sort of modern art museum looking at the artwork and being like, "God, what is this?" I have a hard time even seeing the art in this, but kind of coming back to what I was saying about Amy, now that I understand what my own practice is like and other people's, now I look back at those pieces that I almost used to balk at and realize, oh my gosh, there's a long story behind this artwork. And that's been really cool, I think, to like reinvent the way that I look at other art. Definitely. Hopefully, I think we all do that throughout our lives, but—

Yeah, so before I started posting pictures on Instagram as Western Gallery, I had a lot of exposure to like Southwestern art and then kind of, I guess, the the wider art world, I guess, as well. But, you know, for the longest time I didn't think about people painting landscapes or animals or pictures of cowboys or Native Americans as like, almost like, as a valid form of art. Like, I was like, no, this is just kind of like— this is just kind of like painting a—

just painting right what you see in front of you.

Yeah, yeah, there's not much to it or something. But I don't know, at some point I came back around to to it, but I think it's interesting to hear about people who are doing representational art who have a bigger appreciation for contemporary and other art forms, I guess. Because it really helps to kind of connect those dots, and I think that I'm not alone in not valuing the Western representational art in the same realm as big contemporary art, but I think that that's wrong now.

So what, what is wrong?

Like, I feel like it's wrong to not value it as much, um, or, or to think that it's like a different kind of thing.

Gotcha. That's funny, I came from the opposite side of the spectrum. I, before I started doing this, I mean, to me art was the perfectly captured landscape or portrait. Uh-huh. Um, like I said, didn't, didn't I didn't spend a lot of time in museums, but when I did, the artwork that I really looked at and was like, oh my gosh, this was amazing, were like hyper-realistic Renaissance art, right? Which is the layman's art exposure because you go to the Louvre. So I feel like it came from a really different side, and I'm learning to put that on one shelf and try and raise up the value to me of highly abstract art and learning why that's art too. So I feel like we kind of came from different perspectives. Which is interesting. But I question that view that I had before a little bit now. I mean, I certainly think it's, I love hyper-realistic art. I think it's important, you know, if only just to capture snapshots in time. They used to be the only way that people could capture snapshots in time, right? Was painting. So it played such a different role in past times than it does now.

That makes so much, I've never thought about that before. The way that the documentation of contemporary art kind of veered away from representation as the availability of photography and whatever has become—

I haven't really thought about that either, but it doesn't make perfect sense. We have better tools now. Yeah, but no, that's— it's interesting to me now. I don't necessarily strive to create hyper-realistic artwork, but I still think the purpose of capturing a realistic scene serves the same purpose that it did back then. I, you know, still want someone to be able to look at a portion of a painting, and it's rare that like a whole painting is, you know, of one landscape because I like to chop things up, but I like to be able to produce a painting where someone can at least point to like one mountainscape and say, "You know what, I know where that is," because then it grounds the piece for them a little bit, and it creates a really good starting point point to talk about it.

When you started, I guess, exploring painting as you were thinking about leaving your other job or whatever, were you doing mostly just like kind of straight representational stuff? How did you introduce the abstract, the abstraction into it, or where did that come from, I guess?

That's a good question. When I—

or has it always been like that?

No, it hasn't, it hasn't always been like that. I think it's been about a year and a half since I started combining this kind of fractured architectural geometry.

There was one piece that I feel like maybe it was your turning point, maybe it was just one that I saw.

It was actually the one that you featured on the podcast.

The hexagonal one?

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny, or sorry, in your Instagram feed. That's funny that you were able to pick that out.

I think it just really, that was like one that came up when I was like scrolling through Instagram. I was like, oh, well this is pretty cool.

Yeah, and I've looked a lot at your Instagram feed and, you know, most of the work you feature is so different from mine and really different from that piece that you posted. But well done. That was one of the first pieces, I guess, that I started exploring this sort of style regime that I'm in now. Oddly enough, it's still one of my most popular paintings that I've ever done. Sometimes beginner's luck is great, right? I don't know why, but that's kind of become like a hallmark mark of my work, that piece. It's often that, you know, some magazine or whatever wants to like do some little feature and they're like, "Oh, this is the piece you want to feature." I'm like, "No, let's use a different one." But no, so I used to absolutely— my view of artwork was how well can I capture what I see in front of me before I started this as a full-time gig. So when I made this switch, I was living in San Francisco. My then-boyfriend, now fiancé, and I were sharing a one-bedroom apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. You know, a million dollars a month for rent, practically. But no, I had a tiny space. So functionally, I did say to myself, how can I make painting something that I can build into my life? Even before I quit my job, I kind of you know, recognize that I missed painting. I steered away for a while, so I started watercoloring. As we said before, it's much easier to contain a watercolor practice than it is a big oil on canvas. So I started watercoloring. So a lot of my early work that I still sell prints of now, but early work from, you know, when I started doing this full-time, were, you know, kind of objects, natural objects that I would watercolor, not complicated scenes, which now again, complicated scenes with depth and watercolor are, they're more challenging. So I think I started with easier stuff, but I very early on thought a lot about what was the beginning of a business like in the tech world. And the beginning of the business is, you have an idea and then you go out in the world and You see if people have a problem that needs solved, like is there a market for that, right? So very early on in my painting, I was like, I have to figure out if people want to buy my art. I have to figure out if my artistic voice is something that people want to listen to, or I guess look at. So I started experimenting a lot. I knew I wanted to paint landscapes and something in the natural world, but you know, much like the product research you do at first, as any sort of other company would, you know, I had to think about what is my niche going to be. And so I started thinking about what I used to do in the natural sciences that I find to be really interesting and that I think is an important thing to think about in the world. And that is how is humankind forcibly changing landscapes? One of the most obvious ways is you look around and, you know, almost any natural environment you look at is going to be dotted with buildings. It's going to be dotted with like human footprint.

Yeah, I mean, as you were about to say that, I was looking out near this like big picture window here in your living room and just I can see this house across the street from you, like just kind of part of it above the bush there, and behind it like big evergreens and other trees, but like there's just like the straight lines.

Yes.

You know, like, that's not—

so true—

something that happens.

No, it's everywhere.

Yeah.

So I started looking around, and it's funny, now I still, you know, when I go to an art festival or, you know, a gallery that has my work in it, a common response from people who haven't seen my work before is, "Oh my gosh, your work is so unique. You're doing this, like, cool geometric landscape stuff." And I appreciate that, but you my response in my head is like, actually, that's what the world looks like. Nature is now cut up very much so by these stark geometric shapes which are man-made, and that is what I'm capturing in my work now. Even if it's not clearly a building sitting on a mountain, that is kind of the point for me. The environmental story comes from saying, what does this landscape look like alone? And I might capture a landscape fragment, you know, like I said, a recognizable mountain range or something. And then I start building in some architectural features or geometric structures. And these three examples are kind of really similar in how I do that, but I have kind of other ways I build that style in. But kind of the point for me is I think trying to get to a place where people can kind kind of see that combination as beautiful. It's interesting that we're talking together because you focus on artists that capture the West, right? And the West in past times was the frontier.

Yeah.

For sure, as populations moved westward centuries ago. And I think there's this still-present notion that the frontier is basically like where man meets wild.

Right.

And they oppose each other. But really, I think like the most optimistic future for humankind is like a future in which those forces coexist instead of oppose each other. We need to think more about the resources in the area and the other life forms when we're designing urban structures or whatever. So, you know, my artwork is an attempt to let people look at these seemingly opposing shapes together and realize, you know, these can be really beautiful together. Does that make sense?

Yes, absolutely.

Cool.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great description of what you're doing. That's cool.

It's actually— it's been a journey to, like, to realize— to think a lot lately about what I'm painting and sort of You know, some of that was deliberate and some of it, you know, any artist I think, you know, you find threads in your work after they're finished even though there's deliberate design up front, but certainly looking back at how the work's evolved, I think that's a story that really makes sense for me and I think will keep driving the work as it goes forward.

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Well, I already like showed you this one a little bit, but, um, oh yeah, yeah, sort of started on— I don't think this is like a style regime that I'm going to stay on for long, but this is one of a few-piece— oh, thank you so much— a few-piece series. Um, let's just put this right here. Cool. That I, I don't know, it's been, it's been a departure. Like, like I said before, I have a really hard time you know, wanting to stay in the same place. I'm always kind of wanting to paint something new. So I've started— I don't think this is going to last long, but I've started introducing people into it, which I never did before.

Yeah, before you had the people in there, you were showing progress shots of this one. I was like, oh, this is really architectural.

Yes, I mean, so the goal of this one— it's called Observatory 1, there's an Observatory 2— but, um, and I think I'll go with this for, I don't know, at least a couple more paintings. I haven't— these are new, so I haven't exposed them to anyone yet, but kind of the point is ex— just exploring the idea of how people experience nature in the modern world. Um, and in this piece, you know, there's, there's very much a sweeping landscape in the background, and then there's kind of this abstract building, um, and there's sort you know, some little faceless people just kind of like stuck inside this building, just looking outwards at this expansive landscape. And it's a bit of a commentary on how sad it is that so many people experience nature like through their windows and their screens. Yeah. A little bit.

Yeah. And you could say the same thing for art.

How so?

And just like so many people see art through their screens more than in person now too.

Totally. Yeah, no, that's an interesting parallel. Absolutely. But I don't know. I like it. I think it was kind of a natural evolution for me, just given what we already talked about with my topic story and evolution to introduce people at some point. At some point, because that's kind of the tie, I guess, back to the whole thing is really for better or for worse. I'm not condemning development or progress at all. I just think sometimes we need to be a little bit more deliberate thinking about what development means.

Yeah, I mean, this has shown with separation. Yeah, and you were talking about previously how people and nature need to kind of integrate.

Yes.

Better. So.

Well put. Should have just said that. Yeah.

I mean, or—

No, I think that's exactly it. I never want— I had this professor in grad school who I used to be very much a doom and gloom environmentalist where I used to write for this green blog and you do a ton of writing in grad school and a lot of the point of at least the master's program I went to, is how do we actually create change? Not just let's do science and understand more about the world. I very much, my graduate school at UC Santa Barbara had the focus of, okay, let's understand the science and also let's figure out how to change the world with it a little bit.

Like policy or activism?

Yes, exactly. Both. I mean, so I went into the private sector and worked for a technology company where you know, so my way of changing the world was we're building better tools to allow farmers to waste less chemical, right, pollute less basically. But I used to have this professor who very, you know, intelligently was like, Noelle, or, you know, other students who had the same kind of tendency, he's like, you know, people hate sad stories all the time. If you really want to create change in the world, you know, whether that's through your writing or through policy or through products and technology, people don't pay attention if you're doom and glooming all the time. So I try to repackage it into a positive statement about whatever the story is. And I guess in this series that features people in separation from nature, it's meant to just be more a reminder of of how beautiful the landscape is outside, you know, the dominant scene in this painting. And, you know, it's twin, it's the landscape, it's not, you know, it's the section with the humans. It's look at how beautiful this world is that we live in. You know, a little nudge like, oh, we're a little separated from it.

Maybe get closer, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know, so hopefully I accomplished—

I think so, yeah.

That. That's great. Cool. Thank you.

So I know we only have a couple of minutes left, but it's been really fun talking about your actual artwork. But I'm also curious about how do you start— okay, I'm going to ask you 3 things at once.

Okay.

How did you start selling your work? Was it Etsy, or did that come sometime later? And then, um, I'm curious about your collaborations that you've been putting together.

Cool. So I think that's 2 questions. I can handle that. Okay, cool. So how did I first start selling my work? I very much knew, as I referenced before, that if I was going to be an artist that was sustainable, AKA, you know, supporting myself on art, I needed to make sure that I was painting stuff that people wanted to buy. So actually, you know, it was— and you asked about how I started selling it, but they're kind of one in the same. When I started even just pondering this possibility, I started my Instagram account that was just for art. And I very much, you know, even though those at the time were just like friends and family that were looking at that, you know, I started really actively maybe putting myself in a vulnerable position, but I was okay with that. That, you know, very, very early on, just posting what I was painting and just looking for some feedback from people that wasn't my mom, right, or my boyfriend. So yeah, but kind of multiple stages of, you know, kind of validation, like, is this worth it before I invest a lot of time and money in this? So yeah, I was getting really just good feedback on that. And before I even, I think, started selling anything on Etsy or you know, at any sort of like an in-person show, um, just from my Instagram inquiry into the business, you know, I had a couple of requests for commissioned paintings from like people that I knew in my network, right?

Gotcha.

And I was like, yeah, totally, I'll do this. Let's see what commissioning a painting is like. So those were my first, I think, like real sales of full paintings. I didn't, you know, you know, sell any of the large paintings that I did back in college and before. So I did a couple of commissions, and for me that was just early validation, you know, the people were really happy with them, I enjoyed painting them under pressure. And so it wasn't long after that, you know, a few months after I quit my job, that I'd been just really into painting heavily, knowing that I needed to have at least I think I told myself kind of arbitrarily, but I was like, I want— I need 8 prints to sell on Etsy. Like, I need 8 different pieces.

Like, you're like, I'm gonna open a—

yeah, I was like, I'm gonna open an Etsy shop. Okay, let's just try it. Like, I don't know if strangers are gonna buy this stuff. Um, still most of my audience was friends and family, but I was like, okay, step 2, let's see if people buy stuff online. So I kind of dove into creating a, you know, somewhat simple like works on paper that would translate really well into print, launched an Etsy shop, and yeah, stuff started selling like pretty, pretty early on.

I was just a complete stranger, or how did they find yourself?

I mean, I think my first 50 or 200 sales were to people within my network, right? People that were like following me on Instagram, you know. I'd started saying like, oh, I quit my job, I'm like maybe 'Painting now, not really sure.' And my first, yeah, 50 to 100 sales within, you know, I don't know, the first month or two were those people, people that already knew me. Awesome. And then I just, I don't know, I did a lot of research into what— I saw the value of Instagram for growing a following, and not just a following for likes. It's like, for me, having a big audience on social media is it's a marketing platform for sure. So now, and I can actually segue this into the branded stuff, the product-related stuff for other companies, focusing on growing my Instagram following through in-person shows, through gallery shows, and through like strategic— I've done some of the branded work kind of early on and had some some big accounts like feature me, where that's where like my first big followers came from. Um, so organic growth, but can you remind me what some of those were? Yeah, um, I did some work for a ski company, a Colorado ski maker last year, Meyer. Um, I did some work for like this winery out in Napa. I've done a bunch of work for some breweries. And let's see, I did not necessarily branded work, but there are a couple of like media companies like She Explores that has, you know, a decent online following of mostly women, right? Like outdoorsy women. Yeah, totally my target audience for my artwork. People that resonate with the story behind it. Yeah, you know, I sent some artwork to them, wrote a story, and was like, hey, feature me, you know what I mean? Awesome. Um, and those kinds of Those things have been where the organic growth has come from.

So did you do a similar thing for the, like, the ski company or the winery? Or were those just kind of like networking things?

Those all came to me. So I guess, yeah, those all came to me. And honestly, most of them came through, like, Instagram. Wow. Them seeing, you know, I write something for She Explores or, you know, some other— you know, I did send a lot of just literally, like, images online to companies that have big Instagram followings, being like, hey, you have viewers that want to look at, you know, unique artwork, like, within your topic space. Like, here's some artwork. You want to make it easy for them to, like, want to do something for you, so you have to do something for them. As businessy as that sounds, it's just the way it goes.

Oh yeah.

And that's just where my growth has come from.

Interesting.

And now my sales started on Etsy and then I started doing some kind of in-person shows in San Francisco before I moved here. Like big group art festival type stuff. More validation, right? These are strangers, these are strangers walking by and being like, do people's faces light up when they see mine versus like the next landscape painters? I felt like I was really onto something with the new kind of style that I was starting working with, with this kind of structural geometry with landscape. So it's very much been an iterative, like, let's try something new, see how my customers and how strangers are reacting to it, and sort of like alter the course accordingly, just stylistically anyways. And that's, that's worked really well. So most of the, the product-related work I've done, which the one I'm really excited about, I can't talk about it too much, but I did some work for Merrell recently, kind of the outdoor brand, and that's going to be hopefully, you know, That was a really fun project and probably the biggest brand that I've done some work for, but that stuff came to me organically.

Cool.

They saw my stuff on some magazine feature or something that I sent them in some artwork and some writing and they liked the story. So the stuff just kind of feeds itself, I guess. It's been fun. Cool.

Awesome. Did you learn about doing some of that marketing outreach kind of stuff with the startup you were with?

Yes. I led a product team there. Okay. And the product that my team worked on was this very complicated spatial data modeling product for farmers. And farmers are— I love agriculture. I think farming is so important. But if you can segment big Iowa corn, soy farmers out you know, you put a box around them that says, you know, not very tech savvy, not necessarily progressive. And so this was the audience that I had to learn how to market these like complicated tech products to. So a big part of my job was figuring out how to market these really abstract products, and a lot of that is through visual like infographic, graphic design, yada yada. So there was artwork involved in that.

But that answers another question I was thinking about, is like, where does your design ability come from, you know, with no like real training?

Like, yeah, it was like learn-on-the-fly stuff for previous jobs. Okay. So I built a website for a biotech company that I worked for in my early 20s, and then I actually started my own company out of grad school with some colleagues, um, that was in the sustainable agriculture space. And that didn't last too long, but it which was a really interesting company, and again, we were a bunch of nerdy scientist graduate students that had to figure out how to market a product. So I don't, I really, a lot of it's the same. It really is. It's like, tell a story about your product that people are interested in. Learn who your target audience is and spend your time getting your stuff in front of them. You know, don't waste time spraying it as far as it can go. Be very targeted.

Yeah, I mean, that's straight up marketing.

Yeah, yeah. I've been really lucky in that I've been able to bring on, you know, some like almost full-time help too. The last 6 months, you know, we've been talking about how running an art business is like running any other business. That means I probably have at least 40 hours of work, of 40 hours a week of work to do that's not painting.

Yeah, right.

It's like order fulfillment, framing. Exactly. I sell a lot of prints through retail shops, so there's always like getting those orders out, coordinating with them. I don't know, you know, there's just so much that goes into it. And I was almost— I love what I'm doing now so much, but it was getting to a point about 8 months ago where I was like, oh my God, I'm painting at night I only can paint at night because I'm spending 40 hours a week like banging my head against a wall, you know, on the computer and like packaging prints and cutting backboards and shipping orders. And so I finally just thought to myself, like, I have to make this something that is more interesting to me. Like, a bigger proportion of my time needs to be spent on art. That's where I'm really going to grow, and less of it needs to be spent on the other stuff. So it was a little painful at first to start paying out of pocket for sure for all this help. But, you know, I did a little, just a little number crunching and realized my time is worth so much more painting than it is, you know, paying $20 an hour to an assistant to do that stuff. So it's been awesome. I've now been like outsourcing all of that stuff so I can paint 70% of the time instead of— I was probably painting 20% of the time before. Gosh. Um, so that's been such an amazing change in the last 8 months. Yeah.

Wow. That's awesome. That's really going with that. That's really— hey, that's really like, um, eye-opening percentages, I think, for probably a lot of people listening. Like, uh, yeah, I mean, I've always had kind of like a metric of like, okay, so you spend half of your time doing the thing, and then you have to spend half of your time, uh, doing all the other things. Well, maybe promoting it, but yeah, and then also like the administrative stuff or whatever. So yeah, it's wild.

Yeah, I mean, it wasn't until I really sat down and I actually tried to document where my time was going for a few weeks. I think it was like last fall. Just, I was feeling really burned out and like, why is this happening? I'm not even paying that much. So I did it, I crunched the numbers. I was like, dude, I can't afford not to hire an assistant at this point.

Yeah, that's good.

I mean— So it's been so great. I'm back to like really loving it.

It was great.

It was tough.

Cool. Noelle, I know you have to finish up for your Cherry Creek Festival stuff, so— Yes, we'll cut this. It was great talking to you. Yeah, you too. Thank you so much.

I wish I had time to ask you more about you, but next time.

Oh yeah, there you go. That sounds good.

You'll have to interview yourself sometime. I'll listen to that.

Man, that would be weird.

All right.

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