How Embracing Imperfection and Self-Discovery Can Release Creative Blocks with Kevin Murphy

You might’ve grown up believing you weren’t the “creative type.”

Maybe someone told you your art wasn’t good enough, or life pulled you toward what felt practical. After years of raising kids, caregiving, working, or just keeping things afloat, your creative side may have faded into the background.

But creativity never left — it’s simply waiting for you to notice it again.

In this episode, I sit down with Kevin Murphy, master illustrator, portrait artist, and founder of Evolve Artist, whose work has appeared in National Geographic and Rolling Stone. From freezing construction jobs to stay-at-home dad life and a thriving art career, Kevin’s self-discovery journey is both real and inspiring.

What makes his story powerful isn’t just his success — it’s his belief that creativity isn’t about talent. It’s about process, attention, and learning to see differently.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why the creative mindset is something you can build at any stage
• How creativity myths keep us disconnected from our full selves
• Why painting for beginners is about trust, not talent
• A grounded way to move through creative blocks
• How artistic confidence grows from structure, not pressure
• The link between somatic healing and creative practice
• How to use art as hands-on learning and inner quiet
• First steps to begin learning to draw, even if you never have before

If you’ve been craving stillness, a new outlet, or a way to reconnect with the part of you that used to love creating — this is your gentle reminder: you were always creative. You just forgot to call it that.

Here’s to creating what calls to you,
Laurie

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Transcript

Laurie James: Laurie, hey there. It's Laurie. Before I get started with today's guest, I wanted to take a moment and thank you for being here. Your listenership means the world to me. And if you're new and finding my podcast helpful, please leave me a review. It only takes two minutes, and it helps others find my conversations, and I would be forever grateful. In return, if you'd like, I'm offering a free somatic stabilization exercise that you can use any time of the day or night to help you stabilize your nervous system.

All you need to do is take a picture of the review, email it to me by using the email link in the show notes, or just leave a review out of the goodness of your heart. I wanted to also do a little pre-introduction. I invited today's guest on to talk about creativity because for most of my life, I never thought of myself as a creative. It wasn't until I started writing my book that I realized creativity shows up in so many different forms.

We use creativity every day in the way we solve problems, how we show up in the world, the meals we cook, even the way we choose to dress. Growing up, I used to sew, and I loved mixing patterns with fabrics. Later, I loved putting together family photo albums. Today, I channel my creativity into my business, building Instagram content and marketing emails, and also thinking about writing another book and these podcasts. These may not be traditional creative outlets, but they are all ways of making and expressing something new.

And the truth is, we all have a creative side. So if you've ever labeled yourself as not creative, I invite you to listen to this episode with an open mind. Notice the ways creativity already exists in your life and ways you'd like to show up differently, and consider taking one small step towards whatever it is that you'd like to create more of in your life. So enjoy my conversation with Kevin.

Laurie James: Welcome to Confessions of a Free Bird podcast. I'm your host, Laurie James, a mother, divorcée, recovering caregiver, the author of Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go, a therapy junkie, relationship coach, somatic healer, and now podcaster. I'm a free spirit, and here to lift you up. On this podcast, I'll share soulful confessions and empowering conversations with influential experts so you can learn to spread your wings and make the most of your second half. So pop in those earbuds, turn up the volume, and let's get inspired because my mission is to help you create your most joyful, purpose-driven life, one confession at a time.

Laurie James: Thanks for joining me today, Free Birds. You are in for a treat because I have a very unique guest that caught my eye. His name is Kevin Murphy, and Kevin is a renowned illustrator, portrait artist whose work has been seen everywhere from National Geographic to the Rolling Stone. He's also the founder of Evolve Artist, an online program transforming how adults learn to paint.

With over 30 years of experience, Kevin has helped thousands ditch the talent myth and succeed using a clear fundamentals-first method that delivers real results. And I have to confess, my mother was an incredible artist who painted beautiful pictures and oil paintings and painted this incredibly beautiful mural on my living room wall, yet we don't have a picture of it. She's passed now, and she had that depth perception.

One of the reasons I wanted Kevin on was because I never thought of myself as a creative until later in life. So I'm super excited to share this conversation with you today. And Kevin, thank you so much for being here with me.

Kevin Murphy: Laurie, thank you for having me.

Laurie James: Yeah. Can you start by just telling our listeners, going in a little deeper for our listeners, about your story and how you got into portrait painting?

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, so basically, I was a terrible student in high school. I barely graduated. I had a 68 average when I graduated high school. 65 is passing. And I don't know, school just didn't work for me. It wasn't the right fit. And so I got out of school. I worked construction in the city in New York for three years.

One day I went into work and it was like 12 degrees below zero. I was just absolutely frigid. 5:30 in the morning, no sane person was awake, and I just thought, "I don't want to do this anymore." In that time, I'd been reading a lot of books on the train heading back and forth to work, and I fell in love with a lot of the artwork on the science fiction and fantasy book covers. I had fallen in love with the art, and I decided I was going to do that for a living. I didn't know what the challenges were, but I was like, "You know what? This resonates with me. I want to do this."

And so I packed up all my tools. I gave them to one of the other workers, one of the apprentices. I basically burned the ships. I went home and I started painting. And I painted for about four months. I eventually went to the School of Visual Arts in New York for one semester, and it was really a waste of time. And I don't know if the school was a waste of time or if I just was not the right fit for that type of education. I seem to have that pattern through life where formal educations don't work for me. I need to get in and, like, use my hands and figure things out for myself. I've always been a very good problem solver. And actually, the online program, the education that we offer, is my solution to the art problem: "How do you make art?"

And so, basically, I worked construction for three years. I got out. I became a commercial illustrator eventually, and I worked for about eight years as a commercial illustrator, doing mostly book covers. But eventually I moved out into more traditional things. I did artwork for R.J. Reynolds for Camel cigarettes, of all things, after they lost that massive, multi-billion dollar lawsuit because they were peddling cigarettes to children using the camel cartoon. I went up on that project for a while.

And I did work with Lucas Arts, just packaging designs and things like that with Star Wars and Jurassic Park. I did work with National Geographic and eventually I did a cover for the Rolling Stone, The Bridges to Babylon CD. And at that point, I'd really burned myself out doing illustration. And really after that Rolling Stone cover, I mean, the world just opened up to me, and I packed it in. I just couldn't do it anymore. The work was too demanding, and I was worn out, so I took some time off. I got into doing portrait work, and I've been doing that ever since. I mean, it's been 20 plus years now doing portrait work.

About 15 years ago, I opened up a school. So I was telling you, but when my first daughter was born, my wife worked for L'Oréal at the time in that corporate office, and she was an educator for them. And so I did the stay-at-home-dad thing. I did that for the first five years. I have two girls. Basically, my job allowed me to be flexible. And so I did portrait work, but I did less of it so that my wife could be able to maintain her job and not have any bumps in the road on that path. And so I got to spend the first five years of my children's lives with them. I've got two wonderful daughters. They're now 19 and 20.

Laurie James: So how was, you know, just to deviate from the art piece, how was that experience for you to be the stay-at-home dad with all the other moms that may have been staying home or the nannies, because I'm guessing there weren't a lot of dads staying home?

Kevin Murphy: No, not many. I got to tell you, up until my first daughter was born, I'd never picked up a baby. I was always afraid of breaking them. And so with my own, it was like, "Well, you know, you broke it, you bought it." Well, I already owned it, so I wasn't so worried. But I'll tell you, like, just before she was born, we were at a party with some family and friends, and I didn't know everybody who was there. And all the women were around, and they were, you know, talking to my wife, you know, she was, like, eight months pregnant.

And when she said, "Oh, no, Kevin's going to stay home," all of them almost in unison, like, "Oh, you are in so much trouble. You are going to be so sorry. Blah, blah, blah." And it was like, you know, it was kind of a little rough, you would think you'd get a little bit more support, like, "That's great that you're doing that." But, no, no, they were like, "Now you're gonna see," and it's like, "I didn't do anything to you." But that was actually my first, the first interaction that I had with people. Most of the guys were like, "What are you doing?" But the wives were terrible. The wives were worse than the men. Oh, yeah, the guys were just like, "Why would you do that? Like, your wife doesn't need to work." Like, I did very well for myself. But it's like, this is, she loved what she was doing, so why wouldn't I support it?

Laurie James: But what a great thing to do for your wife, to be able to be willing to take a step back from your career to support her, because a lot of people and a lot of men wouldn't do that. So I think that speaks volumes for the type of person that you are.

Kevin Murphy: Well, I think, you know, part of it is I've never traveled the path that everyone else travels. I didn't go to college. I educated myself. Like, I had a good paying job, and I left it to do something that I was passionate about. I've taken risks. And like staying home and raising the kids, like, to me, it just made sense. I could continue to do my work. I wouldn't be growing my career, but I could do my work, and I could still make a good living and contribute while taking care of the kids.

And what was interesting, like my wife would come home from work. I would have dinner ready. I'd be standing at the door with the baby in hand. She'd walk in, take the baby. I would then go to like, I'd go finish up dinner. We'd sit down, we'd eat, and then she would spend the rest of the evening, which was just basically giving the baby a bath and putting her to sleep, which was time where she was getting to spend with the baby, which was really pleasant, quiet time. And then while she was doing that, I'd go into my studio and work. And I would then work weekends. You know, we'd have family events and things, but anytime that we didn't, I was then in my studio working. You know, we figured out a way to make that work. And it was, what a wonderful experience. Like, I have an incredible relationship with both of my daughters because of that time. It was, I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Laurie James: And that is so important too, to have that relationship, you know, so they can then go pick healthy relationships as they get older and they're choosing their spouses.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, anybody with kids knows they don't pay attention to what you say, they pay attention to what you do, and they see everything. And I think, like, you know, these are things most of us don't learn this. We learn it while we're doing the raising of children. I've not really seen a great book that does an incredible job of describing all of the things that most people do that don't make sense. I was given a book when, actually we had a friend, they gave me a book called The Contented Baby. Wow, that was an incredible book. Like, again, I like I said, with my older one, I had never held a baby in my arms when my first daughter was born. And then, like, just a few weeks later, to be alone at home with her was a little terrifying, to be quite frank. I mean, it was terrifying. You hear all these stories.

Laurie James: I'll bet, because I was terrified. I mean, I had done some babysitting, not a lot, but I was terrified with, and I'm the mother.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah. Well, but, you know, being the mother, being the father, like, you still got to get in there and do the work, and until you've done it, you have no experience. It's not like we're born naturally with these abilities. Like, you know, we might have a better inclination, or we're around it more, and so, you know,

Laurie James: You become more attuned to that, yeah.

Kevin Murphy: But it's like the expectation, like, even for a mother, I think the expectation that you should be able to jump in and be a mother on day one, if you've not been around it and you've not seen it, it's a very unfair expectation, and I think it puts an enormous amount of pressure, like unnecessary pressure. We so easily feel like a failure if everything's not going right.

Laurie James: Yes, and you know, and as parents, we're not perfect, and we're going to make mistakes. But kudos to you for being willing one to do that for your wife, and also then for being willing to step out of your comfort zone and do something that is very untraditional in our society, to take that on, and what a beautiful benefit you've had from it.

Kevin Murphy: Oh, no, I would not trade it for anything. Like I said, my daughters are 19 and 20, and I have a wonderful relationship with them. I mean, just it could not be better, and I'll have that for the rest of my life.

Laurie James: Yeah. And that's such a gift in itself. And before we started recording, you were saying that one of your daughters is coming into the business too, right?

Kevin Murphy: Yes, yes, my younger daughter, she's 19. She's going to be taking over my school. My school is big, like 3,000 square feet. We have like 180 students. She's going to be coming, and she's been teaching here since she was 13. She's going to be taking over. Like, she opened up her own LLC, and she's buying my business from me for $1, but buying my business from me. It's not mine anymore. I have no say. It's her business. And I'm not going to have to worry about her. She's not that I was worried about her anyway. She's tough as nails. She used to take boxing with me, right? I like her already. She wanted to learn how to box, and I was like, "Why would you want to?" I've been fighting my whole life. I wrestle. I've done martial arts. I'm very interested in martial arts.

And so one day she came to me, she's like, "I want to try boxing." And I was like, "Why?" And she's like, "Well, I've been seeing it online. I've seen some girls boxing, and it looks interesting." I said, "You know, boxing is tough. It's a hard sport." And I said, I said, "You just, you just want to do it because you've been seeing it." And she said, well, she's like, "I think a girl should be able to defend herself." I said, "Okay, we'll go sign up." And I did it with her for almost a year. I'd been at boxing earlier in my life, but I did it with her. I took classes with her for about a year.

Laurie James: And how long did she keep doing that for?

Kevin Murphy: She stopped when COVID hit, and things just got busy on the other side. So she's never been back. We did it right up until COVID shut everything down.

Laurie James: So then, how many years was that, the duration?

Kevin Murphy: 18 months. Okay. For her, she's very good. Yeah.

Laurie James: But that's so empowering, too, for her growing up. I mean, I think it's important for us to do that for our kids, that self-defense, which, you know, I at times I did with my kids, but probably not enough. So going back to the art aspect and what your career has been, can you tell me, what does our society get wrong about art and creativity in your mind?

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, so I would say the first thing is that there's this idea that you're born with a talent, and so you can do it or you can't. And actually, Malcolm Gladwell, actually, he's a wonderful book called Outliers, where he talks about, you know, if you show up in kindergarten and you draw a little bit better than the other kids, you get more resources because you look gifted. And all it is is that when other kids are out playing tag, you're in your house drawing so you've developed better skills, right? It's not talent, it's effort, it's time served.

And because you get those extra bits of attention by the time you get to first grade, now the gap between you and the kids that didn't get that stuff, that are out playing tag while you're at home drawing with these additional resources, the gap starts to widen and widen and widen. And then, as people, we tend to gravitate, we have things that we like, but we tend to like things that we're good at and that we get celebrated for. And so a child who is being celebrated as the artist in their class or the artist in their school or the artist at home, tends to continue to lean into that, which means they're putting more and more time and energy, which makes them better. It's not talent, it's just doing the thing that they're doing.

Laurie James: Is there also an interest piece? I mean, there has to be an interest piece for them to want to, tell me if I'm wrong, be able to spend more time drawing or doing artistic things versus being out on the playground?

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, you know, we all have our own inclinations, and some of us are very creative. Some of us are not interested in creativity. Our brains don't work that way. They fire in a different direction. Some of us are born to be athletes. We have all of the tools. And again, you don't get anywhere if you don't put in the work. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard, right? And so it's like you can have all the gifts in the world, whatever they are, but if you don't commit the energy, you will go nowhere with them.

And so a kid that wakes up and looks around and they have nothing to do, and they pick up a pencil and a piece of paper because that's where their attention draws them, is going to become good at making art or music or dance. Some kids, they dance from the moment they can walk, and others don't. And it's like we have our natural things. I actually had a, I had a conversation one time. I did a portrait of George Takei. He's from the original Star Trek TV show. I had done a portrait of him, and I was talking to him, and I asked him, when did he realize that he wanted to become an actor? And he said, just, just the greatest thing, he said he was born an actor. He just didn't know until he was a little older that he could make a living at it. He was always an actor. He was always acting. He was always pretending, doing plays in front of his family, you know, things like that.

And so I think we're born with certain inclinations, and then it's a matter of if we are encouraged or discouraged from following them. Given the resources, like, you can have somebody who would love to dance, but there's no music to dance to. So how much dancing will they do, and how far will they progress? You know, if you if you have a natural inclination for music, but you don't have a musical instrument to play, what do you do with that? I mean, there are cases. You get people down in like the Dominican Republic is a great place. Some of the greatest baseball players in the United States come from there. One of the greatest pitchers that's ever lived came, I believe it was the Dominican Republic. His first baseball glove was a milk carton. He figured out a way to make it work. He pitched for the New York Yankees. I mean, I just an unstoppable pitcher. Just, I forget his, I'm drawing a blank on his name, but I'm not. I'm not a baseball guy, but, like, I know that. I know the guy was an absolute, just a giant.

But it's like he grew up in a place, baseball is a big thing, but they don't have baseball gloves. They just figure it out. Again, if you don't have a piano to play on, what do you play? All these, you can bang drums. You make drums out of anything that'll make a sound. Same with art. You can make drawings with dirt. The caves from the caveman days are filled with this stuff, right? It's like, how creative are you? How badly does this voice scream inside of you to come out? And then it's like, what do you do with it? Are you surrounded by people who encourage it?

Laurie James: Yeah, I think that is real key, too. As young children, you know, were, did your parents encourage you to play and be creative and nurture that side of you and give you that free time to just be and do what you desire to do?

Kevin Murphy: Yeah. And so the more energy we're able to put into the things that we naturally enjoy, the better we're going to be at them. You know, making art is about spending a lot of time quietly in your own head, calculating, a lot of thinking. People who are not comfortable being in their own head struggle with that. A lot of people, if you put them in a room, in a quiet room, for a day, they lose their mind. They'd be picking at the walls, and they wouldn't know what to do with themselves. Most people who are artists, you put them in a room by themselves like that, they could sit there and occupy themselves.

Laurie James: And just time passes, they're in the flow.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, and it's not that they wouldn't be bored, necessarily. But you know, I never have a problem sitting in traffic. I never have a problem sitting in a doctor's office, so the doctor's an hour behind, okay, like, I don't need my phone. I'm in my own head.

Laurie James: Well, you're not only in your own head, but you're in your body. I'm a somatic practitioner, and that's all about body. You're in your body, and your nervous system is regulated in that moment. And I'm guessing that being an artist and doing something that you really enjoy and have then built a career out of, you're doing it from a regulated state, and that's what I think a lot of creativity can give us.

Whether it's writing, because when I wrote my book, I mean, I would just get in the zone. I would get into this flow state. And if I was really in that state, which is not always easy to do, and I wasn't always there, but two or three hours could pass, and I'd be like, I'd look up the clock. I'm like, "Oh my God, where did the last couple hours go?" I'm guessing that when you are an artist, it's similar.

Kevin Murphy: Oh, absolutely. I have had times when I had my studio at home where I'd be painting. I'd get up in the morning, I'd go into the studio, I'd start painting, and at some point, one of my daughters would come in, and what they would do is they'd come into the studio and walk in between me and the painting, because I wouldn't hear them, "Daddy, Daddy, Daddy," right? And then I'd realize that they were there. And I'd be like, "What's up?" "Mommy wants to know what you want for dinner." "You want for dinner?" And I'd be like, "Dinner? Like, I think it's like 10 in the morning." "No, 6:30," like, in the evening. It's dinner should have been served already, right? But it's like, I've just been working and the time has just flown by.

But, yeah, like, art, like, with a lot of these things, they become meditative. I don't need to meditate. I just have to sit in front of an easel and paint, and I get the same thing. I calm down. Everything quiets around me. Everything falls away, and I'm at most at rest, most at peace. When I'm standing in front of an easel, even if I'm struggling to get a result, my heart rate doesn't change. I don't get frustrated. I just sit there in that space, and it's, it's, it's soothing. It's a very peaceful space for me and a lot of the adults that come into the school. That's they, they're interested in art, but they love the feel. They love the feel like, once they get into, once they know what they're doing, it's quiet time. The phone's not ringing because they've turned it off. They're left alone because everybody knows they're busy. You know, I can tell somebody I'm busy, but that doesn't stop, doesn't stop my phone from ringing. You know, people need things. And but most of the adults, when they come in here, they turn off their phone and they'll just pick up their messages on the way out the door. This is their time.

Laurie James: Well, we need that. I mean, in our society, we're rewarded for productivity. We're rewarded to get things done, and I'm guilty of that too. I mean, I was raising four kids, I was caring for elderly parents, I was trying to keep my household together and my marriage together, and I lived in that survival mode for a long time. And you know, it's really only in the last 10-ish years that I've really learned how to drop in to that space, different than you. You do it through art. I've done it through writing. I do it through nature. But those pockets of time are so important for us.

So if somebody's listening and maybe has had a dream or a desire to pick up their creative side of them, or to try something new, and maybe they want to try painting, what would you tell them to do?

Kevin Murphy: You know, we kind of got away from from, you know, the issues with getting into art. But so I would say one of the big problems that we run into is that art education is not handled like any other education, which doesn't make sense. If the process of learning something is X, you don't then find a particular thing and treat it as Y, right? So fundamentals are critical to the development of all skills, but in visual arts, fundamentals are summarily ignored, and that's across the board, everything from kindergarten all the way up through master's degrees in fine art. Most of the people teaching these things don't know anything about what they're doing, right?

It's kind of a weird system. If you're going to teach art, you would think, especially if you're teaching it in college, right? When people go to college for art, they are looking to develop a skill set that will enable them to make a living at art. The overwhelming majority, and I'm talking about well above 99% of art teachers, have never made a living at art. And I would say probably 90% of them have never made a penny at art.

Laurie James: But why is that, though? Is that because our society doesn't reward people that have that creative aspect, or what's your take on that?

Kevin Murphy: It's a lack of skill. It's a lack of skill. It sounds awful, but you think about it, if you saw a piece of art, it doesn't matter, if you saw a piece of art and it resonated with you, would you buy it? Across the board? Yeah. Everybody would say, if something, if I saw something, and it really, like, grabbed a hold of me, yeah, I would. It could be anything. It could be a brooch. It could be a necklace or a ring. You see something that's like, "Wow, that would be that ring fits my finger, that ring was made for me," this piece of art, I walked past it, and I I had to stop and go back, because there was something about it, right? If you are an artist producing, like, you will always get paid. And if you're producing stuff that doesn't do that, that can be walked past as if it were wallpaper, nobody will pay you for it.

And unfortunately, there's a lot of, overwhelming majority of art is done in ignorance, and it's not the fault of the artists.

Laurie James: What do you mean by that?

Kevin Murphy: So, like I said, fundamentals aren't taught. So imagine, so creating art is it's like a visual form of poetry. And so I kind of make the connection. Imagine if you spoke Cantonese. You didn't speak English. You spoke Cantonese, and you wanted to learn to write beautiful poetry in English, and your teacher started teaching you how to write poetry in English on the first day. Simple stuff. You don't even know the alphabet, you don't speak the language. What are you doing? But that's what's done in art. You show up in an art class and they're like, "Okay, here's a live human being. Draw them. Draw what you see." Yeah, but I don't, I don't know how to draw, and I don't know this myself. You know, I guess, as somebody who's not been trained, you don't even realize you don't know how to see. You have no idea how that process works.

Laurie James: Exactly. And like from somebody who draws stick figure people, which we couldn't be on more opposite ends, as I'm looking at this incredibly beautiful portrait that's behind you, I haven't been taught, even though my mother was this incredible artist, you know, she either didn't teach me, or I didn't express interest, or the combination of both.

Kevin Murphy: There's a very high likelihood she didn't know the foundations. So what happens is this, and this is part of the reason, like, even when you're dealing with professionals who are teaching, professional artists who are teaching, the overwhelming majority of them aren't good teachers either. And what it is is that they are trying to teach. They have 30 years of experience. They're trying to teach their experience. They are not even thinking about what holds the experience together. What is the experience built around? And what it is is that they weren't taught the fundamentals, but they have made sense of them, even if they can't quantify them, right?

So I'll tell you. So when, when I started teaching, I had been a professional painter for 15 years already. I've been paid, making good money, solid clientele. Never had to wait a table, just straight art. And when I started teaching, I was going to be different than these people. I was going to teach. I was going to make sense of it. I was going to get down to, and then I realized about six months in, I was like, everyone else, doing exactly the same thing, like, "How can you not see this? I got to explain something. It's like, how can you not see that this is warmer than that?" Like, I don't even know what that means.

And so what happened is I started looking at what I was doing, and I said, you know, like, I'm trying to teach my experience. And so I started trying to figure out what was the lowest common denominator, what, like, if I take a piece of knowledge that I have and break it into two pieces that's easier to teach? Well, could I take each one of those and break them into two, and so on and so on, to the point where I realized, like, all art is made up of two things, just two things. But if you don't know how to color and edges...

And so I'm going to give you an example. You see my ear against the background. It's one color against another color with an edge that connects it. So the colors are one thing, and then the edges that connect them. So I have a color here and a color here. This is a gradient. So it's a soft, faded edge where this is a hard edge. The entire world visually comes into us in that way.

And so using a little bit of an understanding of cognitive science, understanding how the brain processes the visual data that comes in and how it creates the images that we see, I've been able to get down to the real like cut down to the bone and get rid of all of the unnecessary information that muddies the waters, right? And so, so I say color and edges. Color and edges are visible in a painting like this, a realistic painting, but they are equally applied to an abstract. So I don't teach realism. I teach fundamentals, and if you take my education, you can paint with the same level of skill in an abstract way as you would in realism and anything in between. There's no limiting factor, right? And so...

Laurie James: Realism is so I can become an artist. Is that what you're saying?

Kevin Murphy: You could be an incredible painter if you want to be. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. We have a video. I'll say it now, but I'll say it again at the end. Evolve Artist.com/freebird. We have a landing page for your for your viewers. They can go there. There's a seven-minute video where I show how understanding, how to manage dark and light edges, and then a couple of little things, it's four little things. I think we can break down a very, very realistic three-dimensional painting with basically four applications. Stuff, you can't even imagine it was possible. And the painting that I'm showing is not a masterpiece. It's a balloon dog sculpture, but it's like, when people watch it, they're like, and the video is called "This or That."

And basically what it is is, what I'm explaining is, when you look at an image, the first thing you do is you ask yourself the question, "Is this thing that I'm looking at shadow or light?" This or that? Once we know that, within the shadows, is it a dark shadow or not so dark shadow? Again, this or that. So these are just A/B answers. We ask a question, and it's not, the answers are easy. The questions are the hard part. If you don't know what question to ask, it doesn't matter what the answer is.

The first question is, "Is this a shadow or a light?" Because that's what our brain is looking for. In the shadows, are they darker or are they lighter? In the lights, are they darker or lighter? So at each point, it's it's either this or that is an answer. How hard could a painting be if the answers are either A or B? You have a 50% chance if you guess, and if you have even a little bit of knowledge...

Laurie James: Hey, Free Birds. I wanted to take a quick pause in our conversation to share something I've created just for you. If you've been curious about nervous system regulation, but aren't sure where to start, I put together a Nervous System Regulation Starter Kit, a gentle, practical guide to help you begin feeling safer and more grounded in your body. Inside it, you'll find simple daily practices, easy to use worksheets to help you track your nervous system patterns, and three guided somatic practices you can return to again and again. These tools are designed to help you show, not just tell your nervous system that you're safe in the present moment. It's normally a $59 value, but I'm offering it for just $29 because I want this to be accessible for anyone ready to begin their healing journey. Head to the link in the show notes to grab yours and start feeling more regulated and connected today. Now let's get back to the episode.

Laurie James: That breaks it down so much easier. Because to me, when I look at a painting, I think it's so complicated, and there's so much happening in the photo. I love that explanation, and I love how simple you make it. And I'm going to go to the link because I want to figure this out.

Kevin Murphy: That seven-minute video will be eye-opening. The beginning stages of it, well, they're really easy. A five-year-old with a crayon could do them. And it's like, it's a little bit of understanding. And then all it needs is time to grow. You plant those seeds, spend the time in front of the easel, and you become extraordinary.

And we have, we have in the school, if you walk into the school, it looks like a museum. People think when they first walk into the school, the paintings on the walls are mine. I don't hang my work in the school. Everything on the walls in my school, and I again, it looks like a museum. Everything here is done by students under the age of 18. I don't put any adult paintings on the walls. And the point of it is these kids are coming to me. They're not already trained. They don't have 20 years of experience. They are children when they show up here, and by the time they graduate high school, again, even if you come in in 10th grade, two years later, they're producing at the level of a professional. This doesn't take that long, and they're coming in two and a half hours a week. It's they're literally coming in 100 hours in a year. It's the equivalent of two and a half work weeks for an average person.

Laurie James: Yeah, and that's not the 10,000 hours. You know, the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours.

Kevin Murphy: No, not even close. Well, you know, it's funny. I joke around about the Malcolm Gladwell thing all the time. With the 10,000 hours, I can debunk that in a heartbeat, like you think about, until I actually use that when I describe what we do here. I've cut away all of the unnecessary things. And so if you think, instead of saying, well, it's 10,000 hours to develop mastery, let's ruin that right away. A neurosurgeon and a guy who makes balloon animals develop mastery with a very different number of hours. The neurosurgeon might require 30,000 hours. And I would say like, let's assume that there are micro skills. Each micro skill takes one hour to develop mastery. But the neurosurgeon has 30,000 of them. The balloon animal guy has 150. So the balloon animal guy can develop mastery in 150 hours. We're using 151-hour increments to address those micro skills, where the neurosurgeon needs 30,000 hours for all of those.

So when you're learning something, if you can shave away everything that is not needed, you streamline the education process. Anything that's shaved away that diminishes the quality of the work is a no go. You can't shave away something critical, but if you can shave away things that you don't need, that just muddy the waters and take up time, a straight line is always going to be the straightest path, and you know, it's going to be the shortest path, getting from where you were to where you are to where you want to be. And so that's what we do here.

Laurie James: So I have a question for you, because this is something that I've always struggled with when it comes to painting or drawing, even when I was a kid, is that it's the depth perception, but it's also the, and I'm probably going to get this term wrong, so please correct me. It's the ratio. So, like, "I was as tall as the house," you know, so that, I don't know what the proper term is for that.

Kevin Murphy: It's proportion.

Laurie James: Proportion. Thank you. So how do you teach somebody that skill?

Kevin Murphy: So in the way that we take in visual information, the way we make sense of things, right? So if I asked you, if I put your hand in water and I asked you if it was hot or cold, you would tell me whether it was hot or cold based on how it interacts with your hand, based on your body temperature. If you were standing in room temperature, and I put your hand under 100-degree water, it doesn't burn. 128 is scalding. It's hot, but it's not bad. But if you were out making snowballs in your bare hands, and then I put your hands under 100-degree water, it would burn, right? And so things are relative.

So when we are teaching art, we don't teach how to draw first, which is a huge deviation from all traditional art. You have to learn to draw. You have to learn to draw. Learning to draw, most people think it's about the tool, the pencil, but actually it's about learning to see. We have a much better way, a much softer entry point into developing what I call active viewing.

So we walk through the world. We walk through the world, and from the moment we can open our eyes and see, we take in the world and never think about how that process works. Unless you work in cognitive science, you've never thought about it. There's a huge process there. So you can walk through the world and be blind to almost everything, only paying attention to the things that matter. When you are being trained as an artist, what you're being taught is how to see. Like, you can't imagine like relative to how you see the world, the way I see it, I can look across a room, not straight on at a wall, but from an angle, and 40 feet away, tell that a painting is one degree off square.

I've been doing this professionally for 30 years. No, but in my studio, I walk by and I'm like, "What the...?" I joke around. I'll take a level and it's, it's not straight. I'll take a level and the bubble is just a hair to the left, and it's like, "Ah." And it's like, it's, it's. The thing is that that is a developed skill, and it doesn't start by being able to see that. It starts by seeing something that's 12 degrees off. At 13, you see it, but at 12, you don't. And if you're long enough, eventually, you learn how to see 12, and then 11, and then 10, nine, eight, down to the point zero zero two.

You know, learning how to see the colors that that are in the world. Like, if, like most people, don't even know, you're outside and you look at a tree in daylight, the tree has two distinct colors. The top of the tree where sun is hitting it, the leaves are a yellow-green. The shadowed side isn't a darker version of that. It's a completely different string of colors. Stand outside and, like, when it's a blue, purplish green, if you just look at asphalt, the shadow is one completely different color. It's not like it's a darker version of the light. In the light, when the light hits that black asphalt, it becomes like a peachy, warmish gray. The shadows are like a purplish bluish gray. They're completely different. They actually no metric matches. None of them line up. But until you're taught to see it and spend time actively, it's like if you know it's there, then you start actively pursuing it, looking for it. That's how you develop skills.

And if you can see that, well, you can see that the person's this big compared to the house. So you wouldn't draw a giant person in a little house. You develop the skill of actively viewing, thinking through what you see, rather than just accepting it. That's a subconscious processing, right? So when we teach art, you have your conscious mind, which is the voice in your head, and then the subconscious mind, which is a massive data bank, and it's actually what's it's. That's what's telling you what to think. You don't hear it. It's pumping you full of information, and it's lazy. It's lazy because it's trying to reserve energy for when it's needed.

And so looking is not a place that we need to spend energy. And even thinking, most people don't know this, but reading and thinking, like thinking intently about something, burns more calories than walking. If you spend an hour deep in thought, you will burn more calories than if you walk for an hour.

Laurie James: Really? Yeah, I did not know that.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, but most of us, we don't do that. It's not casual reading. But if you are working on solving a problem, yeah, you burn calories.

Laurie James: Well, so is that also related to, like, when you're learning something new because you're working harder? Because I know, like, when I've gone through different trainings and I'm learning something new, I'm hungrier more often, and I'm like, "Wow, why am I so hungry? I've been sitting here all day." But because I'm thinking and processing and, okay.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, and so that's why, like, if you sit and you're working on stuff, it's very easy to. It's a natural thing. This kind of snack you're feeding the machine, the whole time you're going. You would think, well, I'm just sitting here. What am I doing? But your brain is burning, right? Your brain just doesn't, doesn't work on its own. It's powered. It's just like your muscles. And so, yeah, you burn quite a number of calories if you are actively in deep thought, solving problems and things like that.

But the idea of like, being able to draw again, we don't. We don't start with that. We do that much later on, once the soft skills are developed, then we tackle the things, right? So you can come in at level 10, right? Imagine trying to get into a building on the 10th floor from the ground. Well, that's drawing in art. That's where everyone starts. And most people, they hate it, and they drop out of it, and then they're just not talented enough to do the work. But if you start them, let them walk into the first floor and go up a flight of stairs and hang out and catch their breath, and then walk up another flight, eventually, the 10th floor is no problem.

Laurie James: And the entry level floor, the first floor, is really recognizing shadows and shadows and lights.

Kevin Murphy: That's it. That's all it is. If you can recognize the difference between a shadow and a light, that's the entry point into the building. The second floor is within the shadows. Can you recognize the ones that are really dark and the ones that aren't so dark? Again, very, very small piece. And then if you the third floor would be, can you recognize the lights that are very bright and not so bright? If you can do those, you can now create a compelling, now grayscale, thinking black and white, a compelling image that describes light and shadow moving across the subject, which is fundamental to the success of all art.

The next thing is figuring out if it's a sharp edge or a graded edge. And there's two questions, and it's a "this or that" answer to each one of those, and that that's more art based. But that's where education comes in. We all know what cast shadows are, right? And you stand, right? When I teach it in school, everybody's like, "I don't know what that is." We all know you stand out in the in the, you know, stand outside and the sun rises in the east, and you cast a shadow on the ground. That's a cast shadow. So in art, cast shadows are always sharp-edged, no matter where they are, what they look like. You paint them as sharp.

And then, so what we're doing is we're trying to figure out what's a cast shadow, what's a form shadow. Once you know what's cast and form, then the form shadows, which describe the shadow on the person or on the object, not the shadow that's cast.

Laurie James: Okay, so it's like your side of your face. One side of your face is darker, has a shadow, and the other side has a little more light. So that would be the form shadow.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah. So the shadow on my nose would describe the form of my nose, but then my nose casts a shadow on this side. And again, it's not that it's really easy, but if you understand what you're looking for, it just takes a little bit of time. These are not advanced things. They're really very simple. We've just never done them. We're not taught to do them. We just walk through the world, accepting the visual information that comes in and never thinking about it. But once you're taught to be thoughtful about it, doesn't take a very sharp mind. You don't have to be like 140 IQ to be able to manage. Just an average person can make sense of it, but it's like knowing what questions to ask. And so what I do is I teach you the questions. The answers are in front of you. They're in the information. They're in the object you're painting. But if you can do those two things, you can make a painting.

Three-dimensional depth is another one. All it is is a graded edge. Things that are close are sharp, and things that are far away have soft edges or gradients. And so, and it's funny, like something like that in the real world, when we look at something like that's very close, like me, and then the thing behind me, this is in focus as well. Our brain, just to kind of give you a little cognitive science on, so the reason that, if you have a painting and you have an object, and then one foot away, you have another object in the painting, and the the object that's one foot away. If you make it blurry, take it out of focus, it looks far away. It looks behind the other object is that what happens is when our eye, like a camera, has a focus lock, our brain knows and our eye has locked onto a thing.

And so the only place in our world where we can look at an object and be focused, locked on it, but it still be out of focus is, say, like a mountain range in the distance, something miles away. And what it is is that between us and that object, there is two miles of dust, and it refracts the light just a little bit, so the light doesn't come straight and it comes in from a couple of little micro angles. And so the image becomes a little blurred. And so our brain when it sees a painting with one object sharp and another one a little bit blurry, goes, "Oh, I know what that is. That means that thing is far away because I have a focus lock on it. It's still out of focus. And the only place I've ever seen that since I was born is when something's far away, it must be further away." And your brain immediately, your subconscious then tells your conscious mind that's further away, and once you see it like that, even touching the surface of the flat canvas, you will not be able to convince yourself that it's flat. It's crazy. Your subconscious mind won't let go.

Laurie James: Okay, I'm going to look at everything differently now.

Kevin Murphy: And these are simple ideas. The video that's on that, on that, that landing page for you guys, there's a seven-minute video that shows all of this in action, exactly how it works. It's incredible to watch, and you can see it. It's like, "I know this thing is flat." Tap your screen. You know it's flat, but your brain will tell you it's three-dimensional. It's the craziest thing.

And what we're doing is, when we make art, what we're doing is we're crafting an illusion. We're tricking the subconscious mind based on the way it processes data, to believe the illusion that we're crafting. And so you have to know what the brain is looking for. Now obviously, if you try to do that on your own, good luck. I've committed my life to it. And so what I've done is I've posed the questions, the right questions, in the right order. That now all you have to do is take them and apply them to something, and you can do it too. Now, of course, we start very simple and get more complex as we go. But everything is a baby step, and everything is built on top of what came before. But the idea is, come into the building at the ground floor, scaling the outside of the building. And traditional educations in art start with drawing, or they start with color, which is another one. Color is so advanced. When you first start out, you can't see color. You can't make sense of it. You can't make sense of proportions. But once you've worked with grayscale for a while, and you've learned to actively look for data, to be thoughtful about what you're seeing, by the time you get to color, you're like, "Oh yeah, I can do this." It's easy, but if you tried it at first, it would be impossible.

Laurie James: So you start out with black and white and grays, and then you advance to color.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah. So the way our program works is we have four blocks. The first block is fundamentals. It's every single fundamental. There's only four of them, every single fundamental in how to construct a painting. And so this will give you the impression of light and shadow, the impression of three-dimensional or the three-dimensional nature of each object, how to render in details, and then how to create depth. That's all that. That's all we see in the world. Now we do this in grayscale because it's simplified.

But once we know how to do that, block two is just the integration of color into those fundamentals. It's not an additional education, it's just how to match colors and then plug those colors into the same system of thinking. That's it. You can do that. You can paint, and you can paint at a pretty impressive level.

Laurie James: Okay, you're giving me hope, Kevin. I might become a painter, after all.

Kevin Murphy: I can promise you that if you, if you did this and you were conscientious, there's nothing you wouldn't be able to do with paint within a year's time. And it happens so fast. It happens so fast, and all you have to do is be, the key is to be patient with yourself while you work, and also to not have an expectation. Expectations destroy things. They destroy joy.

Laurie James: Well, wait, say that again. I like that. Expectations destroy joy.

Kevin Murphy: Right? And you think about it like you get in a car, you get angry at road rage, right? And so why? Well, because you thought it was going to take you 30 minutes to get where you're going, and it's now 40 minutes, and you're still not there. And you should, you have an expectation, and that expectation is not being met. Why do we yell at our kids? Everybody knows this, "Because I told you to do something and you didn't listen." And I expected that when I told you to do it, you would do it. And now I'm screaming. But if you didn't have an expectation and you told your kid to do something and just waited to see what happened and took it that way? Well, there'd be no reason to be screaming, because you wouldn't be annoyed. You would just be taking it as it comes in.

And it's not an easy thing to do, right? For me when I paint, I learned this lesson the hard way. I I do a painting, and though I can calculate how long it will take to do a painting on 100-hour painting, I can calculate within three hours of how long to the minute it will take to get it done. I mean, I've been doing this a long time. I've been a pro over 30 years, but I don't go into a painting thinking like that, because that is a kiss of death. I go into a painting and I say, "I haven't. I believe this is going to take me about X number of days." This is what I'm looking at, how I'm going to break the painting out over the next two weeks. I keep track of how many hours I spend each day, but I never worry about, "I should be able to paint five hours today, and this X amount should get done at the end of the painting." The painting informs me how long it took to do the painting.

And so the way that I learned that, I learned that lesson is I did a portrait of an actor. His name is Richard Herd. He passed away a couple of years ago, really, really nice guy. He's been in like, a million things. But anyway, so I did a portrait of him. In the portrait, it was him with his dog. And I was looking at it, and I was thinking, "This is gonna fly. I'm gonna blow through this painting." And as a businessman, I always paid attention to how much time I put into my work, because I needed to know what I was earning hourly. I always thought of it that way. I didn't want to know that I got a $3,000 or a $10,000 check. I wanted to know that I earned $70 an hour on this project. And so I always kept track.

But I'm looking at this thing and I'm thinking, "Wow. Wow, it's such a simple and straightforward piece. I'm going to knock this thing out in like 12 hours. I'm going to make about twice my normal fee hourly." And I was so excited about it. I jumped into the painting. And not 12 hours, 20 hours in, I realized the painting was so far beyond recoverable that I had to cut the canvas away and start over. And I was so focused on the amount that what I was going to be earning for, how fast I was going to do it, that at every turn, my mind was in the wrong place. The second canvas I destroyed as well, because now I was frustrated. I had an expectation and I wasn't meeting it. So now I'm like, $700 into two linens that I had to cut away and throw out, and I'm about 40 hours into what I thought was going to be a 12-hour painting. My my pay scale is now pennies compared to where I thought it was going to be.

I then stopped. I took a breath, and I was like, "Okay, we're gonna start this over." This is over a couple of weeks. I'm gonna start over, and I'm just gonna paint. The painting took me nine hours, not even the 12 that I expected. I just relaxed. And that was a very it was a hard-earned lesson to just, just do the work, be in the moment, and just don't worry. It's a very Zen thing, like just be in the moment. Don't worry about...

Laurie James: Yeah, and what does that do when we do that, what happens to our body? We relax, right? We relax. We live longer. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's a beautiful, beautiful summary, and I think it brings us full circle, especially as we were talking about being in the flow earlier. So as we do come to a close here, Kevin, is there a confession that you want to share with our listeners that we haven't discussed already, that you want to leave them with?

Kevin Murphy: Yeah, I've actually got something really funny, and it, it kind of feeds into some of the things we've been talking about. So I had a career. I was, I was a commercial illustrator for almost eight years. I have about 300 published works under my name, all top-tier organizations. I wasn't doing, like, you know, like, you know, garage magazine covers. I was doing, like, major publishing companies. I've got my covers on big, big projects,

Laurie James: Massive, National Geographic, Rolling Stone. Yeah.

Kevin Murphy: I did the first CD, the first video game for Viacom and MTV. I mean, I've been around, and I have a career as a portrait painter with about 300 commissioned portraits internationally. I am at the very top of that field, and I actually didn't know how to paint. I did not know how to paint through both of those careers. I fought my way through with the barest minimum of understanding. I didn't learn how to paint until I started teaching it.

One of the coolest things, I actually did a podcast recently, and I was asked a question, and I said, like, the greatest way to learn, somebody was asking me, like, "How do you how do you grow your knowledge?" And I said, "You want to get really good at something, teach somebody else." Share what you know, right? One thing is that you're taking what you know, and you're handing it off. It's a, you know, it's a, it's an annuity, and you're handing it to somebody. Like, you're enriching them with it, whatever it is.

But in the process of doing that, be conscientious, and in teaching them, like I have, I have a philosophy. If I have a student who is putting in an earnest effort, they cannot fail. I can fail them because it's not my job to give them what worked for everyone else and say, "Well, you should be able to make that work." My job as a teacher, that means that you come to me and you put in an earnest effort. It is my job to figure out how to say it so that it makes sense to you. That's my job.

And so I don't get frustrated with my students. I'm never exhausted by them. And so for me, when I started teaching, I had to reinvestigate what I was doing. I had learned to paint through sheer experience and a willingness to put in any number of hours it took to get a result. Now, painting is effortless to me. I understand that at a microscopic level, because I taught it. My students taught me how to paint. It's the craziest thing.

Laurie James: But it makes so much sense. It makes so much sense because when in my experience, based off of the courses and classes I've taken, it deepens your knowing. It deepens your knowledge when you can take what you have taught yourself and then turn around and teach it to somebody else.

Kevin Murphy: Well, if you assume the person that you've brought in to teach it to is doing their very best, and you take it to heart that you it's your job to figure out how to explain it, there will be many things you'll show them, and they'll do it and they'll do it wrong. And you'd be like, "That's not them. I didn't explain it well. How could I go back and explain that differently?" That's the growth. But my, after, after two very, very nice careers in the arts, it was my students who taught me how to paint, and I am 100 times the painter today as I was on the day I opened the school. And I was, I was not a middle-of-the-road illustrator or portrait painter, and it was just sheer tenacity that got me there. But once I, once I started teaching these students, they made it clear to me I didn't really understand. I didn't understand why it worked. And I've spent the last 15 years hammering away at that. How does this thing work? How does this work? How can I get, what I've tried to build is a frictionless education, meaning, like, falling out of the sky into the knowledge, not having to fight for it. You shouldn't have to fight to be able to learn these things. If you have to fight for them, the person teaching you isn't doing a good job.

Laurie James: I think that's a really great metaphor for life, though, too, right? If you have to fight for something so hard...

Kevin Murphy: You know it's hard to find somebody who has all the answers in life, but it's like if you find somebody who's wise, and they share with you in a way that you can understand the lessons that they've learned, wow, you bend the curve. You can you can sidestep if you're smart, right? Because you have to be smart enough to learn from their experiences, but they can share with you. And that's like, there's such value. I mean, this is why, in most cultures, that people who are older are revered, because they have been there and they've done it, and even if they didn't do it, they saw it. They have seen what goes on. And if you do that thing, they know that's not going to work out, and they can explain it to you. And if they take the time and are patient enough to explain it to you well enough, you don't have to experience the pain, because they've spared you by being able to show you. But then it's the person who's sharing and the person who's receiving. Are they both in the right place? And you know, there's, there's a, there's a huge dynamic in there. But, yeah, I mean, you know, the the value of having a guide. You couldn't overstate its value. If it's the right guide, you can trust them.

Laurie James: Absolutely. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge and all of this information. We'll have this in the show notes. But where can people find you? And where can people find this seven-minute video?

Kevin Murphy: Yeah. So EvolveArtist.com/freebird. Like I said, the video that I was talking about, there'll be other resources there, but that video will be there. You want to see how to break down a piece of art and create something pretty impressive. I said, it's not a masterpiece, but a masterpiece is the same thing, and it's all the same moving parts. If you understand the fundamentals, you can do anything with art. And so, but yeah, I mean, I invite everybody to go and check it out. Even if you're not interested in art, just to understand, like, if you see that, that's going to change what happens. You go into a museum and you're looking at art, or if you have people in your life who do art, it'll give you a greater appreciation for what goes into it, what makes it successful.

Laurie James: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for your time. I know you're a busy guy, and we appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing the video and staying connected with you.

Kevin Murphy: Yeah. Well, this has been a real pleasure. I had a wonderful time, and not really the conversation. I don't know what I was expecting, but this was a lot of fun. Thank you so much, Laurie.

Laurie James: Thank you. Those are the best conversations.

Laurie James: Thank you for listening to this episode of Confessions of a Free Bird. I'm grateful to be in your ears and hearts. If you're interested in becoming a Free Bird, I'd love to support you. Please check out my website at Laurieejames.com to learn how we can work together, or to sign up for my newsletter so you can receive tips on how to date and relationship differently and ultimately, find more freedom and joy in your life. If you found this podcast helpful, please follow or subscribe, rate and review, and share it with friends so they can find more freedom in their second or third act. Also, until next time, you.