John Morra: 0:00

The question is this, how are you going to find out where your little zone is? And you're not going to find it out unless you paint a lot, you're not going to you're going to be guessing. And so the only way to really work your way into that is just to work all the time.

Laura Arango Baier: 0:17

Welcome to the BoldBrush show, where we believe that fortune favors the bold rush. My name is Laura Baier, and I'm your host. For those of you who are new to the podcast, we are a podcast that covers art marketing techniques and all sorts of business tips specifically to help artists learn to better sell their work. We interview artists at all stages of their careers, as well as others who are in careers tied to the art world in order to hear their advice and insights. We're starting off season 12 with John Mora, a professional oil painter who specializes in still life. John shares how he initially undervalued still life painting until he discovered masters like Chardin, sparking his deep appreciation for the genre. He recounts his personal transformation at the Prado Museum in Madrid, realizing art's magical potential and reshaping his ambitions from science to painting through stories of art school and mentorship, John emphasizes the importance of learning foundational skills painting as much as he can and embracing both failure and experimentation. He also offers practical strategies to overcome creative blocks, such as inventing new genres, emulating past masters and working in supportive peer groups. John balances this with advice on navigating the art market, encouraging artists to find fulfillment in their work while also considering commercial realities. He concludes by urging artists to consistently finish their paintings, seek affordable living arrangements and remain open to both knowledge and experience in their lifelong artistic development. Welcome John to the BoldBrush show. How are you today?

John Morra: 1:47

As well as I can be happy as can be great.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:52

That's great to hear, and I'm so excited to have you, because your work is so fascinating. You are like one of the only people I've seen who is so deeply dedicated to still life in, Oh, thanks, thanks. Worse, and I mean it also in, like, the very deep tradition of still life, not just, oh yeah, you know, it's something that I like. It's more like, No, you were totally into the compositional aspects that are handed down through history, you know, like Chardin and all of these essentially amazing still life painters from history that I think are very under appreciated. So excited to have you.

John Morra: 2:28

Oh, thank you so much for saying that still life is. Still Life is really a strange activity, because when I was in for instance, when I was an undergraduate and when I was in graduate school, I never painted still life. I was under the I was under the impression that still life was simply there so that you could learn how to paint. And I remember going into classrooms and the teacher would set up on this giant table a still life, and it had everything in it from somebody, somebody's doll they had when they were, when they were five years old, some big, creepy looking doll, a bunch of cardboard boxes, some drapery, oh, and then there was always bananas. For some reason, I guess they wanted something yellow. And then there was some horrible, Rusty something or other. And then usually the ugliest flower of us is imaginable, like with all kinds of ugly twists and turns, you know, like kitsch colors and everything else. And then he just said, Okay, today we're going to paint a still life. And everybody says, Oh, all right, here we go. And so, you know, with that kind of activity, no wonder nobody would want to paint a still life ever again after, after seeing that kind of thing. So I had, I had no idea still life could be so rewarding and so fascinating, until I got out of graduate school, and the word came down to me that I really needed to work on color and design and drawing and everything else. And I thought, well, I can't afford models. What am I going to do? I'm poor. I'm poor. What am I going to do? Well, I guess, I guess I better paint still life. And I started poking around in books, and I saw, first of all, this intimidating and really, really daunting example of Dutch still life, you know, where you would have these ridiculously botanical specimen, like renderings of flowers, and then you would have, you know, these crazy blown glass doublets, you know, that were paired with real, not a nautilus shells. And you would look at this and say, Okay, this is absolutely insane. What am I going to do with this? I can't do that. And then I discovered Chardin, and I thought I knew about him, because, you know, you go through art history and you learn, yeah, here's this painting. And, yeah, okay, but, but when I was actually actively looking for examples of something that I. Could manage. I found these simple, elegant little compositions, and so off I went, just trying to make up setups and arrangements of things like he did. And much to my surprise, I was an instant convert. I suddenly thought, wow, this is this is really amazing. I had no idea this could be so satisfying. So that's kind of how the still life bug, that's how I got it. That's how I was infected. It was right after graduate school. Prior to that, I didn't I didn't do it because I thought it was sort of like, Oh yeah, you do that for beginners. And as I said, rightly so. The stuff the teachers wanted you to do was just pure exercise and had nothing to do with anything you wanted. It was just all right, here you go. You're my captive, you know, audience of painters today, and you have to do this. And no wonder, no we would want to do it ever again. So that's what happened.

Laura Arango Baier: 5:53

Amazing, yeah, I don't blame you. I also had the same experience in traditional, you know, at least in high school and my art classes, there was always a giant table with, I guess it was one of those situations where you don't know, the least ugly side of the still life table, right? Because it's all equally awful. It's almost like they just throw it all together to see if something happens, instead of, you know, actually, you know, teaching it in a more, I guess, traditional sense,

John Morra: 6:25

or a controlled sense. Do you remember the other feature I forgot to mention about the the terrifying art school still life setup was usually all the overhead lights were on to all the fluorescent lights, okay? And you look at this, and you think, what do I you know, what do I do here? And I didn't, by the way, back in the day when I first saw that kind of thing, I thought, Well, okay, this is what, this is what a still life is. And of course, there's, there's, you know, there's shadows cast shadows going this way and that way. And you look at it, and everything's flat and weird looking. Or there's highlights all over everything for no reason, because all the lights were on, and it's because nobody had bothered to look at how somebody might set up a still life in the past. No one had bothered. Yeah, and so you find that out real fast when you start looking at somebody like Chardin, where clearly there's one light source and there's, you know, controlled, probably, like he probably had some sort of niche that he was painting into. And so when you finally do get all that set up, then suddenly you realize, wow, I've got this little theater that I can orchestrate and manage and everything I put in. It looks pretty cool. So that then it suddenly gets exciting.

Laura Arango Baier: 7:38

Yes, definitely, definitely. And I actually want to, I want to bring you back also, because I also want to ask you, when did you begin to follow the path of the artist?

John Morra: 7:50

Oh, boy. Well, pretty much everyone you talk to that is an artist will say that when they were growing up, they were that Porsche love in the class that could always draw better than everyone else. So, yeah, so yes, I was that guy. Have to admit, one of the reasons it was really fun to do that is because you could, it was a way, you know, when you're young, you know, when you're real little, you have the smart kids, you have the athletic kids, and then there's always the kid that can make people laugh by making funny drawings, like caricatures of the teacher on the chalkboard or making cartoons that were controversial or semi obscene. And you would get attention, especially from the boys, you know. You would you would get, hey, he's pretty cool. He could make these weird ass pictures, you know? And so that's what I was doing. That's what I was doing. I never took it seriously. I just thought it was fun. And then, oh, what happened to me? It's very simple. What happened to me? I graduated from high school. I was drawing cartoons for the newspaper. And again, I thought, I thought art was basically just to make people laugh. I my parents and their wisdom sent me to Europe right after high school, and the first major museum I'd ever been to in my life, I'd been to the museum in San Diego growing up, where I grew up, but the first big museum that was famous that I visited was the Prado, and I went in, and I went in, and everything seemed to me like I was looking at Heaven or something. I just couldn't I couldn't believe how beautiful and how strange everything was. I remember funny little memories. There was a there was a painting, there was some sort of equestrian portrait by Rubens, and the horse had this big mane that looked like it was like a wavy perm or something, and it was just the most outrageous. Everything seems so crazy, and it was so different from anything I'd ever seen. And then, of course, we came to the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Bosch painting. Kenneth Clark has a quotation about that painting. He says, When you see that painting, you momentarily forget every painting you every other painting you saw that day at the Prado, but you also forget every painting you've ever seen in your life. And I remember looking at that thing, and I thought, art can be this way of taking people into another universe. You can, you can have this portal to this kind of funny reality. And even even even the realism looked like like it was strange. I mean, of course, Bosch is not realism, but the Velasquez paintings, everything about everything that I was looking at seemed like it was magic. And from that point on, I said, That's what I want to do. I really want to do this. Prior to that, I wanted to be a scientist, because I was fascinated by astronomy. I was fascinated by it. And what happens? What happened was I discovered that modern astronomers were not in a big, you know, observatory with the big juven Brass telescope, looking at the stars and discovering things. What I found out was they were looking at numbers all damn day long. You know, that's what they were doing. And and I realized, you know what, maybe I don't really want to be a scientist. What I want to be is a mad scientist. I want to be somebody who makes things. And so you other people sometimes refer to as alchemy, where you're you're taking stuff that exists and you're saying, you know, I want to transform it into something else. I want to figure out how to do that. And so when I saw the Prado, I thought, That's it. I never I don't want to be a scientist. I want to be an artist, because that's what these people are doing. They're taking, you know, inert earth colors and then making this universe out of it. And I thought, wow, that's it, and that's what I wanted to do. Wow.

Laura Arango Baier: 11:57

I think it's so great that the first, you know, museum, you wrote into the Prado, because it has so many beautiful works. Of course, the garden of Arth e delights is one of those where you see it and you just want to go back and see it again and again and again, because it's just it. It's the gift that keeps on giving. And I love that you mentioned that one is, you know, one of those paintings that I guess kind of opened you up, because it's a fantastic painting. And also the fact that, you know, it is, in itself, like a portal, like you said, that art really is like a portal, a magical portal, that we have, we forget as artists, and we take it for granted that we are creating this incredible piece of illusion on a flat surface, right? We're pulling people into this very physical story that transcends words. Because I, you know, I have this. I love the idea that, you know, words are a poor reflection or a poor attempt at understanding things. It's the best we got. But the top best, I would say, is images. And I totally agree with you in that, you know, you have this magic that happens where you take these pigments that are mixed with oil and turned into this thing in front of us that you know transcends reality.

John Morra: 13:17

Do you know what's funny? Do you know what's funny about all that? I've been at this for a while, and even to this day, I still have that feeling, even to this day, especially when I see something, and I'm constantly finding new paintings I spent, I spent quite a lot of time in Europe, and I love going to some funny, little minor Museum in some small town that isn't as famous as the big towns in France, for instance, and you go in and you see something, and it's, it's, of course, by an artist you've never heard of. And there it is, and you're still just blown out by it. You think, how this, this, this just keeps going. I just keep finding all these. It's like, it's like you're discovering a whole planet out there that you didn't know was there. And you just, when you find new paintings, new artists, it's just amazing,

Laura Arango Baier: 14:05

sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. It certainly does fit the idea that I've heard. Also, every person is a universe in itself, right? And I think that's the other really lovely thing about being an artist and just being a human is that oftentimes we worry about the idea of being unique and trying to find ourselves, when in reality, there's no real trying. You already are right, which actually brings me to ask you a little bit more about, you know, why still life and and how also did you end up deciding still life, because you mentioned to me, of course, that you didn't actually start with still life. You kind of know, went in that direction after self discovery, right?

John Morra: 14:51

Well, the two things happened. First of all, I went to the New York Academy in New York City. Oh, wait no. Back up. Back up. A little bit. My first degree was. In English literature, my first bachelor's. And when that was all over, I thought, well, now wait, where was I wanted to be an artist. Oh, yeah. And so I went back and got a second bachelor's in in Fine Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara and I did not make any paintings at the time. I only made etchings. That's all I made. Continuing what I said about Bosch, my early work looks like Bosch. I thought, yeah, I want to be the next Bosch. That's what I want to do. And so I was doing that for a while. Then I went to the then I thought, Okay, I got to go to the New York Academy, because those crazy maniacs in New York City have the top secret information about anatomy and all these things. And at the time, I found these books by Robert Beverly Hale, and I thought, oh, boy, if I can just learn all the origins and insertions of muscles, then the whole world will open up to me, and I'll be able to make any image I've ever dreamed of doing, you know? And so I went, and I took the New York Academy course, and I was so excited. And then something very strange happened when the when the two years were over, I discovered that I couldn't paint. I didn't, I didn't know how to do it. I could, I could draw an anatomical diagram, and I could do some other things, and I could do some perspective stuff. I could kind of paint a little bit, but not not in I couldn't paint. Let's just say that I couldn't really paint. And so I met Jacob Collins, and he said, you know, Boy, you really can't paint. And I said, Yeah, I know. And he said, Well, you know what you should do? You should do landscape painting, and you should do still life. And I said, okay, and I thought, Here I am again. And you know, I'm about to turn 30 years old, and I still don't know what the hell I'm doing. I guess I better get this remedial stuff out to learn how to paint. And so I did. I got out still life and landscape. I went up on the roof of my apartment in Brooklyn, and I painted my first landscape of the neighborhood. It took me about, I don't know, several weeks just to do it, because I had no idea what I was doing. But suddenly I saw colors I'd never seen before, painting outside, and then I went in and I started to paint still life, and I started to learn how to set up a picture. And I hadn't, I hadn't, done it. I hadn't done it. And suddenly, suddenly, composition became a really important thing for me, and that's when I was saying earlier. I discovered Chardin and other people that were very important, and also discovered a modern American painter named Walter merch, who showed me that it was possible to take things that weren't traditional still life, object like carburetors, and make them into something. And so I thought, wow, still life, you can do anything. And then I also started to formulate some funny little ideas about still life, because I remember I showed a I showed a painting that I had made of a basket of apples to my grandmother, and she looked at it, and she said, Is it, is it supposed to mean something, or is it just supposed to be something lovely to look at? And I said, Well, it's, it's, it's supposed to be something lovely to look at. And suddenly a light went on about still life in general, I suddenly understood that still life, as far as the genres or traditional painting go, was in many ways the most abstract and purest form of painting possible. And the reason for that was this, how many times had I shown people a landscape? And the first thing I would ask me, would would be, where is that? Or, Oh, that looks like Venice. I've been there before. Or I would show people a painting of a person, and they would say, Who is that? Or, why are they wearing a uniform? Or, Why is this person deprived of their clothes, they just get out of the bath, you know, they would start asking literary questions about the picture. But no one would ever look at a bath painting a basket apples and say, Oh, you put apples in the basket. No one would ever say that. And I thought, you know, in a certain sense, still life has this kind of purity to it where it's obvious that you're not supposed to ask those literary questions. You approach it the way you do music. You look at it and you say, even a person that doesn't understand art looks at it and says, colors, shapes and lines. And so in that sense, of course, of course. I mean, if you've got allegorical elements, if the still life is about the fall the Roman Empire, because you have things in it that are supposed to say that, then fine. But in general, and that's what's so amazing to me about Chardin, as you look at it and you think it isn't really about anything, it's about color and light. Right? It's about these things. It's about stillness. It's about things you can't even describe. And so in that sense, I was really drawn to it. And then I also started noticing that the Cubists, for instance, later on, one of the reasons I think they were drawn to the still life, especially the early analytical earlier analytical cubism was because nobody would look at it and say, Okay, what are these figures doing? You know, what's going on this landscape? Why? You know, where is this? None of those literary questions. Instead, it was obviously just about the shapes. It was purely formal. And that's something I loved about still life. Was it? It didn't have to be about anything. It could just be about the colors, or could just be about the light. So those are, those are two reasons I can Dave you. I can give you why to this day, I'm still loving it. The other reason, the other reason is what I was sort of referencing earlier. You can make up a world in still life, you can make up a universe. Still Life is like theater, and you're the director, and that's also why it's infuriating, because you're so much in the driver's seat you have to orchestrate the thing. So imagine you're a movie director or a theater director, and you sit down, and you have to start thinking, okay, behind these, you know, the scene that I'm having here, I need the right kind of backdrop, the right backdrop painting for my movie or for my theater production. Well, you have to provide that. You can't just say, okay, yeah, I don't care what's back there. Suddenly, that's very important too. It's very important what you put in the background, even if it's a simple flat color, or if it's a wall receiving light, everything matters, but And best of all, you're in charge. You're completely in charge. You want to move it over the objects over this way or that way you do it. You want to add more objects. You can sometimes you can start a picture without any preliminary drawing. You start making stuff, and you say, Okay, I need something over here. So rather than, rather than freaking out, saying, Yeah, but it's not up there, you know, you go into the life class and you're painting the model. And you know, the models arm is down like this. You can't suddenly say, Well, I'm going to make the model's arm like that was still life. You do just that. You go grab another object. Or sometimes I'll be making something, I'll say, You know what? I want a big color accent right here in the picture. So I'll put a bright red blob formally on my canvas as I'm developing it. And then I'll hunt around for an object to put there that's red, and I'll go and put it in space, and I'll say, okay, yeah, that's what I wanted. So yeah, there's this crazy, organic thing that can happen in still life. And there's a million like schemas or approaches or sort of like strategies. Well, I was just referring to one right there. Some of them you don't plan anything, and just you shoot first and ask questions later, and you say, oh gosh, it's doing this. I gotta take stuff out. And you start taking stuff out in your painting. You scrape it off, and you try something else. And then next thing you know, it's organically just turning into this thing. Then there's the other approach, where you set it up perfectly, and you, for instance, one of the one of the things I like about the site, size approach, when you're doing still life is what you see is really what you're going to get. You're supposed to orchestrate it, and that means all the little spaces between the things you got to keep fudging them and checking them and checking them, because you're going to be recording all those funny little shapes between the object exactly as they appear. And that drives some people crazy, because they want it to be freer and more open. But when you do it that way, you gain other stuff that's really great, too. That's completely other that you won't get if you think more openly. And so all of this just from some dumb objects on the table, all that, I mean, it's like the whole damn history of art can be thrown into your tabletop right there. So that's why it's exciting. That's also why it can be a bummer, is because sometimes you just want, you don't want to have to orchestrate so much, you just want to do something okay, and you just, you know, so for instance, you go outside to paint, you think, okay, I don't want to make a beer stat today. I just want to paint what's in front of my nose. And that's a relief. And you just do it okay. And still, life sometimes is hard, because of all the gazillion ways to set things up. You got to do something that feels right, and you have to, you got to do that. And that's where it can be. That's where it can be hard, but it's also worth liberating and fun there. So is that answer your why still life? And I mean, I could say more, but maybe we'll get to it. I don't know.

Laura Arango Baier: 24:57

Yeah, I think that definitely answers it. Um. And I totally, wholeheartedly agree with you about, you know, the versatility of still life that I think is very again, like I mentioned earlier, underappreciated. I think a lot of people just imagine, like, it's like a fruit bowl with, like, grapes and some apples and a banana, and then that's, that's it. But I remember when I was, you know, in academic school, my favorite thing to paint was still life and to compose them and to play around with new objects. I mean, the way that they taught

Unknown: 25:28

it, what teacher let you do this?

Laura Arango Baier: 25:30

Well, it was an angel Academy, except,

John Morra: 25:33

okay, well, they already know it. They know what a real still life is exactly.

Laura Arango Baier: 25:37

And then it was even more specific, because the instructor, amazing. Amazing instructor was very, great. He was the type of guy that, if you mix something, if you mix some paint, and it had a little bit of a different pigment in there, he knew he could see it. I don't know what sort of magical power he had in there, where he had this eagle eye, that he'd be like you didn't clean the Ultramarine Blue completely from your paintbrush. So you're gonna have to fix this thing over here. But it was, he was very strict. He was very strict with the composition style of the still life because he, of course, you know, to guide you into more narrative still life, you had to use objects that were cohesive. So if you had

John Morra: 26:22

thematically cohesive,

Laura Arango Baier: 26:24

yes, I oftentimes had a bunch of really cool looking objects, and I'd be so excited, just for, you know, my instructor to come up and be like, No, you'd say, what's this here for? Yeah, he's like, this. This doesn't make sense over here. And it, you know, at first, was kind of hard, because for me, it was, I was chasing textures as well, because I was one of the other things that was part of the curriculum. It was okay, you need an object that you need three objects that are different textures and different sizes and different values. So a large, darker object, a mid size, mid tone object and a light tone, smaller object, you can't and glass doesn't count as an object, and

John Morra: 27:05

because glass is just the background Exactly.

Laura Arango Baier: 27:09

So if you wanted to include glass, you could, but it doesn't count, it would just be an extra thing in there. So it created a very fascinating challenge, and I enjoyed it very much. So hearing you discuss it, it really makes me want to take because I still have, of course, my still life objects from that time. Makes me want to just pull them out and do whatever the heck I want. Because in the end, you know, you gain these skills of learning to compose and color and this and that, and then you can do whatever you want. I mean, the school is there to teach you the basics, and then you can break the rules. And actually brings me to your Mertz series, because I think it's Oh no, not that, but it's so cool, because I looked at them and I immediately thought, these look like cities. These, these are so architectural. And it just makes me wonder a little bit about, you know, the process for those because, of course, like you said, there are three, I guess, main ways to approach, which is the, you know, like you said, like you just go for it, or the semi organizational one, where it's like, well, play around with this. Or the totally fixed one. Do you find that with your merch series you had to choose only one of those processes? Or was

John Morra: 28:19

it very, oh gosh, no, really, really, not, really, not before we we get to merge. I just want to say one thing about what you were saying about thematic still life, it's a very good idea to get out if you're if you're stuck, and I tell people this all the time, if you're stuck, you know, what the heck do I paint? Don't paint. You know, a, a a a Smith and Wesson 45 a banana and a clove of garlic. Okay, unless you're unless you're trying to be an absurdist, okay, so one, one simple solution to the thematic problem is to always have a cookbook handy and just, just grab a recipe. Just grab a recipe. Okay, let's say you're you want to make a really good pasta sauce. So you've got what you've got, obviously, tomatoes, you've got peppers, you've got onions, you've got garlic, you've got the pot that you're going to use, you've got the knife for cutting it, and so all of that kind of thing is super, super useful as a you know, if you're ever stuck and wondering, What am I going to paint today, just get out the cookbook, I mean, and there you've got the whole thing, and then go to the grocery store, and then you've got it, you've got your setup, okay? And, you know, I that's that's doing things dramatically, is great. Here's where you have a little bit of a curve ball. There is because sometimes, in many paintings, clearly somebody like there's a Chardin painting, for instance, of a coffee pot, and in the foreground, he has what looks like some some leeks or sprouted onions. And I look at it, I think, well, what is. That doing with the coffee pot, and it's clearly a formal device that he's doing. So yes, you can, you can violate that. I mean, great painters have, but yeah, if you're stuck, yeah, do the thematic thing. Why not? Okay, Mertz merch, how did what the hell happened to me? Mertz goes like this. This is very, very important in your development as an artist, to paint everything. Okay, something I noticed right away about Jacob Collins that really impressed me is I went to his studio and he had this habit of painting everything. And I mean everything. I mean, he showed me this painting and said there was a full moon last night, so I painted the moon. Okay, here's a view of this. Here's a view of the interior of the studio. Here's, here's some Drapier that was thrown over in the corner, alright? And then there was a, there was a ridiculous painting about this big of his circular saw that he just bought that he was using to chop up wood either to make a model stand. I don't know what it was for. And he said, well, obviously I have to make, I have to paint the circular saw. And so he painted the circular saw. And on it went. And I had a friend who said that guy makes too many paintings, you know, like, what's he doing? And but what I gleaned from that was,

Unknown: 31:15

you, you

John Morra: 31:16

generate painting ideas by making painting after painting, after painting, especially if you're so so what you do is you get a whole bunch of cheap ass panels, you know, and you, you get them all ready to go with gesso, and you just paint anything. I mean, you do a self portrait in an hour, then you paint your room, then you paint the front of your building, then, then you paint a still life, and you just, you just fire away. Then you paint a landscape. And you do just one right after another. So what happened to me was I somebody had given me a box of these radio tubes. You remember radio tubes that went inside old radios, and I was just playing around with them. And I thought, hey, I guess I'll make a painting of these. And so I threw them on the table and I painted, oh, look at those highlights. Oh, that's pretty cool. You know, the glass surfaces and the copper little thingy dinghies. And then I thought, you know, what? What if I used a super, super low eye level so I couldn't see any tabletop, and I just stood the radio tubes up, and I looked at it, and I was, you know, kind of looking through this viewer and thinking, you know, that's kind of cool. Reminds me of a skyline. So I painted, I painted that. And then later on, I looked at it, and I said, What would happen if I just painted it as I saw it? And then I thought, you know, what would happen if I made that background kind of gradated from top to bottom, like a sky. And then suddenly I realized I was making kind of a weird little landscape, and the whole thing was turning into something else. And then I remembered Walter murch's paintings and how he would paint machine parts. And I thought, you know, those are clearly still life. But then I thought, what if I could take what merch was doing with machines, and I could kind of smash the whole thing together with landscape with this zero eye level tabletop thing where it looks like you're looking at when you look at Manhattan skyline from a great distance, you don't see any of the perspective in the buildings. You don't see tops of buildings sloping down like this, because you're so far away, the vanishing points get so far away, and so you don't see any perspective. And so all you see are these, you know, series of rectangles and shapes the skyline. I thought, you know, what if I started doing that with junk and machine parts and everything else. And that's how the whole series got going. Was, was from, first of all, the impulse of, let's paint everything. Let's just do it. And so I painted the radio tubes and it that that gave rise to the little cityscape one somewhere. I have a photograph of this. It'll be, it'll be in a slide form, which is why I don't have it on my website, because I still haven't taken all my old slides. Remember slides? Oh my gosh. You know, it's like saying, remember, you know, I had a horse and buggy or something, and so sort of the slide is out there somewhere, of that painting, which I believe sold at John Pence gallery in it. So I was really excited about I thought, You know what, I'm going to do this and, and I remembered Kurt spitters was a Dadaist artist. He used to make these collages, and I remember that he called the collages Metz Mertz paintings, or something like that. And said, Okay, I'm going to call these paintings Mertz paintings. And that's how I got the name. And then I looked up the artist after the fact, and I realized that he he didn't say Mertz. He said Metz, m, e, t, z, when I thought, well, that's okay. Now I've got my own little name brand, copyright, series name. And so the Mert series became this whole series. And I just keep doing one right after another, and I keep making small ones. I just set up a new one. Let me show you right now. Here's, this is a little sketch I made. You know, pictures worth 1000 words. Okay, there it is. You can see it. Is this one has some elements in it that I made from previous Mertz paintings. The difference is this, this insane looking screw thing right here is actually in the interior of a old antique juicer, which this thing actually goes inside, this thing which is further away down the table. And I took it apart, and I thought, yeah, I guess I'll make these into my you know, they it almost has like a Coney Island, feel like an amusement park ride, Carney thing or something. And so the sketch here, the sketch here, is the start. And as I was making this sketch, I kept noticing, all right, I like this. I don't like that. And I see, I thought, I knew. I thought I had to take, okay, now paint it. And I thought, no, wait a minute, I'm going to keep designing it. Now that I made the sketch, I'm going to, you know, for instance, there's, there's the space over here. I don't like, I want more sky up here. That's the importance of painting your way into a picture, as opposed to, okay, I've set it up, and now I'm going to draw the hell out of it and get everything in the right place, and then I'm going to paint it. That's not a wrong approach. But if you want to find stuff as you go, which I think is a another way that I find more satisfying, you got to, you got to make, kind of make a mess, and then sort of tweak it. And the better way to tweak it is to tweak it at this level and not at a big, giant scope. We said, Oh no. Now I spent all this time making this giant canvas, and, you know, I'm committed to it. And if I move this over now, it's going to throw the whole thing up. No, no, don't do that. Do that here, and then, and then really, really get going here. And then even that, when you get to the big one, you're probably going to change it anyway, because when it's big, when it's big, something that looked okay this size, you blow it up, and you realize it's taking on this whole new force that I couldn't see before. And now I gotta respond to that too. And so these are some of the lessons I've learned making the Mertz paintings, which is a whole, like, like, weird little education about just painting itself. And so why still life Mertz? That's one reason right there. Going into Mertz has really, really taught me a lot about art.

Laura Arango Baier: 37:20

Yeah, there you go. No, yeah, totally. Because, I think, and this, this brings back the point you made earlier as well, that still life really does encompass so many different aspects of painting in one and just looking at, of course, your Mertz paintings, it's architectural. It's like painting a cityscape or even a landscape, right? It's, it's the it's a similar thing. And then if you think of it further, it's like a portrait, because if you, you know, pair human down to its parts, you know, it's technically an object. Of course, there's life in it, and that adds complexity to it, but there's also a lot of life in objects as well. Gosh, yeah, discover

John Morra: 38:04

that, you discover that. And everybody that paints still life, they start saying the same things, you know. You set up some pairs, you know. And here's a bottle. And next thing you know, the bottle becomes the commandant or the the sovereign, and the pairs become subjects that are scuttling around at its feet, you know? And one of them is paying honor, and one of them is turning its back and leaving, and one of them is showing its butt, okay, in defiance. And you're thinking, I'm just being absurd. But you you get into a painting, and all of a sudden all this stuff, funny stuff, starts happening, and you start seeing it and just And it's funny, and you can't, you can't ignore it, and you're not going to see it at first, but you're going to see when you get in. That's what happens.

Laura Arango Baier: 38:51

Yeah, and it's so funny because I did jot this down when you were talking about also the process of making still life, right? Whether it's perfecting the composition before you start, or working on it as you go, or just going for it. I think what's funny about the process, it's very much a microcosm of a macrocosm, sometimes where you have, of course, the process of making the painting. But then, of course, it becomes a dialog with the painting. And then within the painting, there's a dialog happening with each object, like you just said, and it becomes, I don't know if it's some sort of hallucination that happens to every artist, where the longer they're in front of this painting, the more they start talking to themselves and the painting. Does that make sense?

John Morra: 39:35

Yeah, that can also that can also mean when you've been on a project for a long time. A real long time. What's a long time? Some people think working for on a painting for a week is a long time. I think working on a painting for six months is you're approaching long time. And by the way, you can get tunnel vision and really screw yourself up. All right, there's a famous story of Titian. I. Starting paintings and then turning them against the wall so he didn't see them for a while. And then when you flip them back around again and said, Oh my god, now I see what's wrong with it. Okay, that's a very good idea. Which is, which is why, if you can help it, having something going on the side is really a good idea just to break up your tunnel vision. Easier said than done, because when you're really excited about something, you get out of bed in the morning, you want to go jump in and, you know, solve these problems. Taking a break from it can be really good, because then you'll, you'll, you know, it's the same way. That's the same way you check your design in a mirror. You see it with fresh eyes. Beware of the mirror, though, because anything looks weird in the mirror at first and so, yeah. I mean, if you're looking in the mirror to see if the figures forearm is way too long or way too short, or the nose is too long, yeah, you'll see it. But watch out using that on your composition, because that can that can really introduce all kinds of serious doubts. Yeah, be careful with that. It can it can really show some things, but don't overdo it. Or else you can just say, you'll never get anywhere. You'll never make a painting. You look in the mirror and you say, Oh no, it's all wrong. Oh, it's a disaster. And then you just give up. That's why I sometimes call it the mirror of shame, you know, because it, it shows you your mistakes, but it also makes you feel like, you know, I'm an imposter. I'm a terrible designer. It can do that too. So watch out. What those damn mirrors. Be careful.

Laura Arango Baier: 41:32

Yeah, just staring too long. It's, you know, it's one of those. If you look into the void, the void looks back type of situation, if you're, you know, too long in front of your painting or too long with the mirror, because that also happened to me very much when I was in academic school, and I, you know, would it just when you're working for too many hours on too little sleep and not enough food? As a student, because money's tight, it starts getting to so it is good to have that space away from your work. Like you said, it's so important. Yeah. And then that brings up something else that I believe we chatted about a bit last time, about boredom, because I think it's interesting that at some point and this happened, I feel like this is very common, another rite of passage for many artists is you're working at a painting that you love, and then you might hit, hit a block where you're just suddenly bored, either bored by that specific painting, or just bored by painting in general. How have you found, oh, like, have you found a way to get over that, or have you found a remedy for that in your experience?

John Morra: 42:43

Well before I before I sound overly spontaneous, I might let you know that I have, in fact, compiled a list of strategies for anti boredom, fixers, fixer uppers. So my first one, my first one would be this, invent a genre of your own. Okay, I did that with the Mertz paintings, okay, invent your own genre. And that could mean something like here. Here, I'll provide you one that I was thinking about doing, a whole genre of still life with infinitely deep spaces behind them, of rooms. In other words, an interior. Do you know, for instance, the Dutch tradition of church interiors? Yeah, okay. What if? What if you painted interiors with one object in the foreground, with the interiors in the background having something to do with the object as well? Okay, so you're painting, you're painting Madison Square Garden in the foreground. You have a boxing glove or whatever, okay, where you could do a thematic thing, where you you relate objects, and instead of having a still life background that is normally the shallow space, what if you did really, really deep space? I was just thinking about that the other day. Why do we always have this funny distance of things, not very far, you know, why do we always have it close space, you know, in a still life, you know, shallow space, they call it all right? So invent Okay, here's another thing. Here's another strategy. Rip off the past shamelessly, if you're stuck, if you're stuck. I love the genre of Spanish still life. And so I said to myself one day, you know what? One of the most important still life for me developmentally, was growing up in San Diego, and I saw this, er, archetypal, super, Uber still life by Juan Sanchez Catan, which was a very, very early painting in the history of the still life genre. It was made at about the time carvaggio made his famous fruit on the ledge. You know the think we've got three attributed Caravaggio still life and one of them is doubtful. Okay, the cotton was made at about that time. I don't believe there's ever any way possible this Spanish monk could have been away. What Caravaggio was doing, but he made this amazing picture. And so what I did was I thought, Okay, I'm going to make cotton paintings. I'm going to make the the ledge, you know, the niche in the wall, and I'm going to just do that, and I'm going to hang my own objects. And it went from that to looking at another painter from the 18th century, a painter named Melendez, who sometimes is called the Spanish Chardin, but his paintings are not Chardin at all. They're distinctively Spanish. They're sometimes a terrible jumble, and they're claustrophobic. But I thought, Okay, I'm gonna do that too. I'm gonna make my own Melendez paintings. I'm going to just do it. And I had a blast doing it. And I haven't done one in a while. In fact, the last one I did I hated and I just said, I Okay, I need to take a break from this. But I really had fun doing it. So yeah, rip off the past. If so, for instance, if you love Dutch art, steal their compositional designs and just supply your own motifs, your own objects, okay, but still steal their designs. Sometimes you can take a painting by an old master and just trace the size of the objects relative to the format, and then stuff your objects into that same size shape. To get an idea of how objects relate to the size and the spaces around the object, you can really get a lot out of that. You can also do what I call range stealing. Like if you're looking at a picture that's a really dark picture, and you say, Ooh, I'd like to make a dark, moody picture. You get a reproduction of it, put acetate on top of it, and mix up the colors that you can see through the acetate and kind of like match them and say, oh, okay, here's how light is, lights are and here's how light is darks are. I'm going to take that range and stick it into my painting. Okay, that's another thing you can do. I mean, so, just so that was point number two. That got a lot of points here. Yeah, rip off the pass thing. Number three, another, boredom buster. I think I got this from oh gosh. I'm embarrassed to say this. I read one of those. I read one of those self help books a while ago because I felt like I was being a slacker. I read Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, or one of the and, and in the book, there was a chapter. I don't remember anything from the book except, you know, get your ass in gear. But one of the things that I do remember was this chapter. I think they called it sharpening the saw okay. And all that means is work on your technique. So I'm always looking around for things like, how could I get better? So, you know, like I thought, I can't draw I can't draw a head out of my imagination very well. So I know what I'll do. I'll learn how to draw Loomis heads. So I got the all the Loomis books, and I started studying that. And pretty soon I developed this whole way. I'm getting pretty good at Loomis heads. I'm getting pretty good. And recently, I was watching videos by Patrick okra sinski, and he was asked, What made you a better painter? He said, Well, that's easy. And he shows this stack, and it went up to the sky of what he called Master studies. And so I used to do these, but I didn't do enough of them. So I started doing them again recently, because I thought I want to be more like Patrick oak or sinski. So I thought, I'm going to start making master studies really fast. And so this is a painting by Johannes list that I just started. I have a music stand, and I put the book on the stand, and then I get this, you know. Again, you have all these panels ready to go, you know, and then you just fire away and make the here's another one. This is by a Venetian painter, a biazetta, who makes these wonderful drawings. And I really had fun doing this. The drawings all over the place, but I don't care, the colors are pretty good, and that's the goal. And so also, you get, you get used to the idea of painting fast. This is a beautiful design. I mean, Leighton is such a wonderful designer. And so, you know, you say you love Leighton's design, you're going to learn Leighton's design by painting it, and you're going to say, ah, that's how he did that. So I start seeing this sweep down here versus this sweep over here, and the sweep of the back related to this, and this funny dark in the light, and dark against light here, and you start noticing all this stuff, and you're just swinging away, and you're having fun, and you're not worried about details. So that's, that's an example of sharpening the saw. Okay, what else do I got here? I got, I got several pages of this. Oh, yeah, paint outside, for crying out loud. Okay, get out of your stupid monastery and go outside and don't worry about making a Hudson River School. You know, don't worry about that. Just paint the damn tree on your street. Just do that. Okay? And enjoy it and have fun with it. Learn to paint fast. Okay, that, that's a whole other topic. Yeah, okay. Here's another thing you can do, paint an abstract painting. Get Get out your, get out your, your 11 by 14. And get out. Okay, I'm going to use, I'm going to use black, yellow ochre and venetian red or something, which is already a gigantic palette right there. And I'm just going to see what happens with colors. I'm going to see what happens when I drag lights on top of darks. I'm going to see what happens when I drag darks on top of lights. I'm going to see what happens if I smash things together in a way that looks like, like crap, and then I could make something out of that crap? Okay? And so try that. That's another great one. Here's another thing you can do, work in a series. Okay, I'm going to do a series of pictures, you know, and I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do a still life series, and it's going to be about breakfast. So let's see, what do I have for breakfast? Okay, I have cereal sometimes, okay, well, I'm going to make a cereal painting. Okay, I have baking an egg sometime, or I'm making a bacon egg, okay, a bagel sometime. I got a bagels. Okay, suddenly you got 10 pictures right in front of you, okay, that you can push through and you can and suddenly you're starting to get all these ideas are starting to blow up in your head, you know, like, maybe some mornings I don't, you know, I don't do any of that, and I have this, and so suddenly you're bringing all this other ideas in. Okay, here's another one. It's kind of related to that. If you're bored, plan an exhibition. Okay, I'm going to have a show, damn it, and it's going to be in January, and it's going to be at my house, and I'm inviting all the neighbors, and I'm going to have a show, and I'm going to have 12 pictures, and they're all going to be in frames, and they're all going to be done, and they're all coming over, and they're all going to look okay. So if you're not in a gallery, have one in your house and say, I and so by the way, there ain't nothing like a deadline. Okay? You put that on your calendar and say, I'm doing a show and it's got to be done by then you can even, you can even have fun with it and say, I'm allowing myself two weeks per picture and I'm doing it. Okay, that's not boring. That's fun and it's exciting. It's exhausting. Okay, here's another thing you can do, very, very important. You just got out of school and you're freaking out. You're wondering, who the hell am I anyway? Well, one thing you can do is you can get with five other friends, okay? And it can be just people in the area. It doesn't have to be five people from your school. In fact, maybe it's best that they're not from your school, okay, get with five other artists and you make a group, okay? You've heard of book you know, book groups or book clubs or whatever, right? So I did this right after graduate school again. This was Jacob Collins, Rick poloko. Another friend of mine got this nutty idea called the paint group. And you say, you get five friends together, and you take turns giving the assignment. So you say, Okay, this, this, this assignment. And it would be things like paint a still life that has a metal object, a organic object, and a, I can't remember that one, paint, the paint, paint a self portrait, okay, very general ones. And then somebody would introduce this idea, like this. One guy invented this, this assignment, and he said, paint nature tamed. And we all said, What the hell is that nature tamed? We don't know. But he said, I'm not going to tell you, just go do it. Just go do it. And so we would show up. And it's really funny, because you you get five different ideas of what that phrase meant. You know, what does nature tamed me? I don't know. Okay. And so we did this. We did this paint, a paint, make a painting based on an old master composition. We said, All right, you know. And so we have these assignments. The person who gave the assignment hosted the evening and provided the meal, and then you brought out the paintings, and you sat down, and you just went through one by one. And it got really snarky and really embarrassing at times. But, boy, we did this for years, and we had a big show at the end of our paintings, and we looked forward to it. Every month. It became like we'd be on the phone, well, wait, do you see what I'm doing? Ah, you know, like we'd be like joking back and forth. Well, mine's going to kick your paintings ass, you know. No, it's not. And so we would do this, we would do this. And, boy, that was anything but boring. That was great fun. Okay, what else do I have here? Oh, yeah, here's something you can do. Paint still. Paint a still life of things that are truly ridiculous or that make you laugh. Okay, I set up this still life once of I love pugs, the dogs, and they're the most ridiculous dogs already. And so I have all these little, like pug figurines. There's one that's on a spring that bounces around. There's one that, you know, looks like some squishy plush toy. I just put them all in a row and made a horizontal painting of the pugs, you know. And so doing, doing like, in other words, do a funny still life, for crying out loud, find, find it. Find, find something you think is funny, and just do it. Okay. Okay, here's another thing you can do, make up a painting from your imagination. I did this recently. And by the way, this goes into the other thing that I was going to give for advice, be willing to make. Something that's cringe. Okay, be willing to make something where you're completely out of your league and you just feel like an absolute idiot, and do it okay, and you're going to grow as a result. And you want to get out of bed in the morning because it's funny, because you'll think, how am I going to fix this problem? I made a Bible picture. I made a Bible illustration picture. I can't believe, I can't believe I did it. I'm going to put it on my website in case you want to see it, because I it's something that I don't do. It's something that I looked at later. I thought, God, this is so damn cheesy and it's so embarrassing, but I thought, I'm glad I did it. I gained something special from doing this. Okay, that's another boredom killer. Okay. Oh, finally, if you're, if you're really the last two are kind of silly, clean up your damn studio. Okay, organize it. Organize your stupid stretcher bars that you've been, you know, wanting to figure out how to catalog them, Okay, put your stuff in order, you know, just do that. That's always satisfying. And then finally, the last one was really, really important, just do nothing. Okay, there's a songwriter that I really admired named Richard Thompson, and he said it's hard to tell my wife sometime when I'm staring out the window doing nothing, bored, that I'm actually working. Okay, like, Don't bother me. I'm working. And she's, what are you doing? You're looking out, you're doing nothing, you're being idle. Sometimes you got to do that. Go for a walk, take a hike, do whatever. Okay, there's, there's some essays somewhere right now that's kind of making the rounds about the importance of boredom and how it's important for, I don't know, for neurotransmitters or something like that. I don't know boredom. Boredom is a response to being overloaded, and you got to just accept it. It's boredom, you know, sometimes boring, you just got to do it. Okay. I think that's the end of my list. Bravo. You can edit that if you want.

Laura Arango Baier: 56:53

Oh, no, that was, that was, we're keeping all of that. If you've been enjoying the podcast and also want to be able to ask our guests live questions, then you might want to join our monthly BoldBrush live webinars, where our guest artists discuss marketing tips, share inspiring stories and answer your burning questions in real time. Whether you're a seasoned painter or just starting your creative journey, this is your chance to connect, learn and spark new ideas, and whether you're stuck on a canvas or building your creative business, this is where breakthroughs happen. Don't miss out. Ignite your passion and transform your art practice by joining us. Our next BoldBrush Live Webinar is coming up on the ninth of October, with our special guests Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon. You can find the sign up link in the show notes at BoldBrush, we inspire artists to inspire the world, because creating art creates magic, and the world is currently in desperate need of magic. BoldBrush provides artists with free art, marketing, creativity and business ideas and information. This show is an example. We also offer written resources, articles and a free monthly art contest open to all visual artists. We believe that fortune favors the BoldBrush and if you believe that too, sign up completely free at BoldBrush show.com that's BoldBrush show.com. The BoldBrush Show is sponsored by Faso. Now more than ever, it's crucial to have a website when you're an artist, especially if you want to be a professional in your career, thankfully, with our special link, faso.com, forward slash podcast, you can make that come true and also get over 50% off your first year on your artist website. Yes, that's basically the price of 12 lattes in one year, which I think is a really great deal, considering that you get sleek and beautiful website templates that are also mobile friendly e commerce, print on demand in certain countries, as well as access to our marketing center that has our brand new art marketing calendar. And the art marketing calendar is something that you won't get with our competitor. The Art marketing calendar gives you day by day, step by step, guides on what you should be doing today right now, in order to get your artwork out there and seen by the right eyes so that you can make more sales this year. So if you want to change your life and actually meet your sales goal this year, then start now by going to our special link, faso.com, forward slash podcast. That's F, A, S, o.com, forward slash podcast, because I think there's value in every single little activity that you recommend, because, truly, I think, you know, there you just got to try a bunch of stuff, you know, like, there's a, there's value in, you know, it's one of the like, even just for sharpening your mind, right? One of the things that came to mind when you mentioned, you know, master copies or trying abstract, for example, which is totally different, is I find that I also have that when I read a book that is totally different from the type of genre that I normally read, it could be fiction, it could be nonfiction, it could be a poem, right? Like. Just exposing your brain to a different thing that is unexpected can oftentimes lead to the craziest breakthroughs. Sure, in painting, even even learning a new language, can completely alter the way that you see things, because, I mean,

John Morra: 1:00:21

it really changed right now. I'm trying to do that right now. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It's really, yeah, really struggling, yeah, yeah. It's good for you. Oh gosh, it's a derby. It is. But take a break from it. Don't, don't burn yourself to a crisp.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:00:36

Oh, no. I mean, the brain has a limit, yeah. I mean, the best thing you do is, I think somewhere, you know, the some researcher, mentioned that your attention span peaks at like, 45 minutes, like, that's like the limit for if you're trying to learn something, and you should take breaks after that and then go back into it in pieces, Because your brain, of course, goes through processes where it takes in this information, and it kind of has to organize it. And you need that, like you said, you need the boredom. You need the space to just stare at your ceiling. That's one of my favorite things to do, is I just stare at my ceiling in quiet and feeling it's the most boring ceiling in the world. That's why it's perfect.

John Morra: 1:01:25

Are you imagining faces in the plaster or something?

Laura Arango Baier: 1:01:28

That's, yeah. I mean, that's one thing that happens by accident. It's kind of like staring at a tree trunk. And so until you start seeing faces and people, oh yeah, little creatures. But yeah, that that just, it's so I feel like I get all my best ideas when, when I have that space to breathe.

John Morra: 1:01:48

I got, I'm sorry, I got to add to that. Yeah, everything you said, just that is very true. There's something else I have to add. You mentioned 45 minutes. I use timers for all kinds of things. I have no German heritage or Swiss heritage, but I love timers. I love them, and the reason I like them is because it's just a way of going forward in a subject like so for instance, I'm practicing the guitar and I'm doing something that isn't my favorite thing in the world, which is playing scales. I'll set a timer, and I'll say, Okay, I'm really going to, I'm going to do this for 15 minutes straight, and I'm not going to do anything else. I'm not going to stop and start playing a song, or I'm just doing this. Okay, oh, of course. When I'm exercising, I always use a timer. I always do that. So when I'm painting, I used to multitask a lot more when I was younger and and friskier, and I can't do that anymore. I can't do it. And I used to be able to play all kinds of music. I used to sometimes listen to podcasts while I was painting. I would do all this. I can't do it anymore. So what I do now is I say, I'm going to, I'm going to, I set a timer for a half hour, and I will sometimes have innocuous, less demanding music playing in the background, for instance, somebody like Haydn, but not Bartok. For instance, okay, some classical music that isn't as in your face, okay? Or so I'll play I'll play Haydn, but not Stravinsky or whatever. And for a half hour, I'm going to absolutely only focus here, and I'm not going to let my wine, want mine wander. And the half hour goes up, and then I'll get up and walk around for five minutes. I'll sometimes take a walk outside, come back, do another half hour. And it's really fun, because you can actually keep a little I use post it notes where I just every hour I'll just make a mark. And then at the end of the day, it's very, very funny to find out how much time you actually spend at the easel. And in a given work day, people think, yeah, I was, I was at the studio 10 hours. And then you look at your little post it note with your hour marks on. You realize I only spent five hours easel time. The rest of the time I was either eating lunch, you know, getting up and getting something refrigerator, answering a phone call, whatever. So it's really fun to actually see what your hours that go in. It's fun to see. And it also means that you can build up your stamina and say, You know what, if I put in a day of six really good easel hours of nothing but concentration. That's a real accomplishment, if you can do that. I mean, that's a lot. And I think the most I've ever been able to do is eight actual hours of easel time over over a long day, over a long day. That ends up being a 12 hour day sometimes. So eight actual hours, if you can do that, wow, you know, but you have to build up to

Laura Arango Baier: 1:04:47

it, yes, yes. And it's interesting, because you just reminded me of the whole 10,000 hours.

Unknown: 1:04:53

Oh, right. Oh yeah, yeah. So

Laura Arango Baier: 1:04:55

fascinating. Because if you if you consider it. Like, yeah, okay, 10,000 hours, sure. But there's been some speculation that, I mean, it's 10,000 focused hours, right? It isn't just willy nilly throwing stuff around. Imagine someone saying, I've played the piano for 10,000 hours, and they still sound like a beginner. And it's because it's not intentional hours. It's just, oh,

John Morra: 1:05:25

hours, yeah. Hours are not always just hours, okay,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:05:29

yeah, there's, yeah, there's a, there's a bit of a benefit, like, because you're what you're saying, really, to me, translates to quality over quantity, and eventually you will have quantity of quality, which is important, and I think it a lot of people miss, miss that point. Sometimes, not saying you of course, missed that point, I'm saying some people do because they hear the 10,000 hours thing, which became this very popular thing. And I'm like, No, it's not right there. It's intentional hours, and I think that's really important. And also slowing down, I think, is something else like, just like speeding up is important and giving yourself a time limit, slowing down sometimes helps too.

John Morra: 1:06:10

Oh sure, well, that again, again, that you have to feel all of that out. Because, I mean, what, what some people think of, is slowing down, for me, is still going way too fast, okay, and so, so, but the question is this, how are you going to find out where your little zone is? And you're not going to find it out unless you paint a lot. You're not going to, you're, you're going to be guessing. And so the only way to really work your way into that is just to work all the time. Yeah, that's, that's all you can do, I mean, and you're going to find out what your limits are and where you start doping off and not paying attention. And that means, okay, I need to work up to that half hour of actual quality time. I need to work up to it, you know, maybe initially all you're going to manage is 10 minutes. And for a lot of people that, I mean, some people really get antsy after 10 minutes of real focus, they get really they get really fidgety. And I would say, You know what? Then you need to work with that. Work with it, and then develop it, sure.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:09

And that also brings to mind the what we were discussing way at the beginning, about knowing yourself

John Morra: 1:07:16

and oh no, not that. Oh no,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:20

oh no, because part of that right? It's knowing. How do I function? What are my energy levels? Do I have enough energy today to dedicate to this very complicated part of this painting, or is this more of a day where I focus on this other part of this other painting? Because I'm not, I'm not feeling like I could, or should I push myself? Because you never know i It's one of those things where sometimes I trick myself into doing a thing where I'll be like, I'll just work on it for five minutes, I'll put a timer for five minutes, and then suddenly I'm there for four hours. So it's, of course I do.

John Morra: 1:08:00

Oh, man, I thought I was the only one.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:08:02

No, I love timers. Okay,

John Morra: 1:08:05

okay, all right. Well, that boy, I'm so happy to hear it. Yeah, I really like that. You meant, you mentioned something about self discovery, or self awareness, or, you know, or some people say, Who the hell am I? Again, I this is, this is, I guess, if there's a theme today, it would be, it would be this, you paint yourself into that. Okay, I remember talking with somebody recently. Was actually a famous musician, Richard Thompson, and he was talking to me about his watercolor painting and, and he said to me, you know, I'm worried because I don't feel like I have a style yet. And I say, Well, the most important thing you can do is not try to have a style. I think that's, I mean, you can certainly, you can certainly begin with looking, you know, looking through an art history book is a good idea. And, and, you know, I like this. I don't like that. I like this. I don't like that. And that's that's helpful, but even there, you got to be careful. Okay? Because, number one, your your ideas about what you like are going to change anyway. And there's things that you can admire to the stars that you don't like at all. All right, I don't like Michelangelo. I don't get out the books and say, oh my gosh, I have to look at this today. I don't like him, but whether I like him or not, there's no way you can ignore him because he's sort of like Shakespeare. You just simply have to know about him, and you have to study him and everything else. And so your Likes are important and your taste is important, but don't, don't treat that like it's a monolith that can't be changed. Because I would, I would submit this. You don't really know who you are. You don't you need to find that. And you find it by making art. You find. By doing stuff, okay, I'm not talking about, I didn't mean to say that. To say, you know, I I don't know what I think is true or beautiful or something. Well, maybe, maybe I do mean that. Okay, just, let's limit this. Let's limit this to art for the moment. Okay, let's just limit it to that you don't know who you are as an artist until you until you work, you're just not going to know you might you might be closer, you know, to what you think you are than somebody else who doesn't have a clue. And you might end up kind of returning to the thing that I always wanted as a child was this, you might find yourself circling around back to that in the end, but you can't begin there, because you just don't know. And as a result, you've got to be open. You've got to be open to finding it and not really being sure, and not drawing lines in the sand all the time. So for instance, I thought I was going to be Hieronymus Bosch. I really thought that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be Hieronymus Bosch. And then I discovered the importance and beauty of painting from observation and being truthful about what you see. And Bosch isn't about observing things in front of his nose. He's not about that at all. So when you're painting, when you're outside painting a landscape. When you're outside painting plain air, the most amazing thing about it is that you can be anonymous. You're you're allowing the motif to tell you what it is. You're not going out there saying, I'm going to impose my my Bierstadt vision, on this vision, this view of my neighborhood, if you do that and just stay home and make your make your beer stat, you know? Fine, that's I'm not against beer stat, but I'm saying the great thing about painting from life and forgetting about yourself is you're letting the motif change you by observing it carefully and by by saying, You know what, I'm coming to this with the attitude that there's stuff in that motif out there that I've never seen before, that I never will see again, because today the weather is this, and tomorrow it's going to be this. And so you go outside, so you're painting, you're painting a sketch of your friend, and you say, You know what, I really like. I really like Athena's nose, you know, I really like, I really like, you know, I really like poly colitis, you know, lips, or something like that. And you start painting your friend, and they look at the painting and they say, What's this? I don't this doesn't look like me. And so suddenly you realize, one day, oh, you know what, I should paint that person's nose and that person's lips and and right there you're letting the motif change. You is what's happening, and that's so important. It's so important to be open and to not say, Well, you know, I'm already established, and I'm going to impose my my stick out there on the world. Your stick is super important. But what should inform that thing? What should inform your vision? What should inform it? I would say the best thing you can do is to learn, to observe carefully, if you learn that and so there's, there's two lamps that, I would say, illuminate the artist's life, the light, the lamp of knowledge and the lamp of experience. Okay, so knowledge would mean I'm going to study art history, I'm going to look at what other painters have made, and I'm going to try to boot off that and say, what, how do I fit into this big narrative we've made here in the West, which is really just a tiny little window of of time. So that's the first lamp would be knowledge, and that could include anatomy and perspective and all that other craziness, but then experience is the other lamp, and that's I'm not bringing anything to this. I'm letting that stuff out there, tell me. So you put those two together and you can grow all right, if you just have one and not the other. We've all seen people that are really good at inventing things, but their work looks formulaic. And then we've all seen people that are really good at observing, but they can't make anything that's all they can do is observe. We've all seen this. And so how do you balance that? I don't know. I don't know. You're not going to know. The only way you're going to know is if you try both those two things, knowledge and experience. Yes, what Coleridge sometimes maybe what he called the Songs Of Innocence and Songs Of Experience. No way. That's not colors. That's Blake for Coleridge. It was primary and secondary imagining. I'll forget all that. Yeah, but yeah, knowledge and experience. There you go.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:14:36

Yeah, yes, yes. And it's so cool, because that also really reminds me of one of my very top favorite quotes that Alan Watts ever said, which is, the self can only be known through the other I love it, and I also love specifically because he gives the example of the tip of your finger. Mm. Um, he says, You can't touch the tip of your finger with the same tip of your finger. That's what it's like trying to know yourself. You have to use something else. And I think using art, like you said, using experience and knowledge and all of these tools, even asking a friend to critique your work, or seeing, trying to see your work from an objective manner. Those are all those iterations of that that I think is so fascinating, yeah, sure, sure.

John Morra: 1:15:31

So, so over and over and over again, you do find people that only paint what they see and look, if that like, if that becomes the main force for you, I would say great, I mean, but I think the best observers are also knowledgeable. And the best knowledgeable people, the best inventors of worlds, the best fabricators of whole universes, are also great observers. And so these two things inform each other. They just do it happens that way over and over and over again. So So I there's there's again. I love Kenneth Clark. And one thing he said, one thing that really, really made me jump, because it spooked me a little bit. He said, There's only a handful of great artists in the history of Western art that made great art out of out of visual observation alone. There's only a handful. And the only example he gives is Vermeer. That's the only example. And then, of course, you study Vermeer, and you realize this clearly, this cannot be simply observed. It feels the intervals and the distances feel too calculated and perfect. Do you think you know when you when you observe life, you just get your magic viewer and look around at things. Every once in a while, you'll land on something that really does feel Vermeer like and it's perfectly organized. But more often than not, you get things that just look like crap. They don't look good. They don't look good. So, so even Vermeer is not pure, pure observation. Vermeer is also orchestrated, you know, but, but, yeah, so, so again, sense Impressionism. A lot of people have bought into the idea that that great art all you need is observation. That's all you need. You don't need anything else that can be the main part of your art. But usually that has to be paired with some other stuff too. Usually, like, how do you organize a picture? How did Monet set up his pictures? If you're a big observer, you know, you look at somebody like Monet, the best Monet is everything's perfectly placed. They're perfect. They're amazing. They're not they're not random. Like, I just turned myself over here and did this snapshot. No, they're organized. They're organized. Even, even the simplest ones, everything is just so, yeah. So there you go,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:17:51

yeah, absolutely, like, like, you said, observation is a starting point, and then you gotta, you gotta just stuff up, or just play. I think that's another thing that a lot of people because this really brings me to one thing that I really wanted to bring up, which is, I think the mistake that I see happening a lot is also people perceive their work with the eyes of only selling, right? They'll perceive it through the eyes of, can I make something that I like, that I know will sell? And I think often that is a very painful perspective to have, because you're I feel like in a lot of cases, it sets you up for failure or for a crash out, which is not fun. As an artist,

John Morra: 1:18:45

killing two birds, something I love that will also sell,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:18:49

yes, and if you're not careful, right, in the sense that if you arbitrarily pick something that you think, Well, I kind of like that, and I think it'll sell. It just, it's not, I think a lot of people, when they look into I want to find my voice as an artist, they're simultaneously thinking, how can I bend my will and my ideas so that it fits into the market without realizing that oftentimes, as long as you paint something that you love. Yes, being aware of the market is important, but it shouldn't be one of the determining factors, necessarily, from the beginning because of that, like how you said, you know, at first you thought you would be the next Hieronymus Bosch, right? And it's so important to give yourself that you know, space and time to experiment and to explore and to play and then build from there. Because I think if you're putting the market first in terms of finding your voice, I think it can be a recipe for disaster. Later down the line, it can be not saying. It will be saying. It can

John Morra: 1:19:59

be this is making. Me laugh, because, yeah, everybody, I mean, everybody I know that has had shows and has, you know, been in galleries and all that stuff, all of this stuff comes into the front of your imagination. Wait, imagination. And what do I mean, you're, you've got all your pictures in the, you know, set up on the floor after you've made all them, and you say, Okay, this is my favorite one. But I know everybody's going to want this, these over here, you know, and so, so you start to freak out about that. Enter a concept, I think it was Patty watwood And I came up with this expression of being a tomato paintings. You know, tomato paintings. You have to make tomato paintings. Now, a tomato painting is a painting of tomatoes, all right, but, but it should. How do I say this? A tomato painting has to satisfy some criteria, not not just one thing. In other words, it's not merely a painting of tomatoes. A tomato painting is a painting that satisfies you and a broad audience. Okay, it cannot simply be. I make this because people buy it and I hate it. If you do that, you're setting yourself up for some real problems. Okay, you will, you will find yourself in a soul destroying grind if you do that now, by the way, maybe in in times of war or something, when you have to do that because there isn't anything else, maybe that's okay. Maybe there was a time when, you know, hey, I make this one picture over and over again, and, you know, I put my kid through college with it, and find that that's I can understand there. There is a time for that. But if you're, if you're not living in that moment of, you know, wartime or something, finding something that kills two birds, that does not embarrass you and not make you feel like you're being either a whore or a sellout or whatever. If you can do that, if you can do that, and know that people like them, like so, for instance, I've made a lot of paintings of tomatoes or or recipe paintings. I've made a lot of those. And sometimes I'm making and thinking, Oh no, not this again. And then, and then I get into the painting a little more say, You know what? I'm pretty happy here. I'm enjoying this. And suddenly I killed those two birds. I've satisfied myself. I'm challenged enough, and I've made this thing that somebody will definitely like, okay, so you got to be careful, because there's, there's an old story about Thomas Kincaid that I heard from someone who knew him when and Kincaid actually said this, and this is not on the record books, but it was to this other person that I know, and I'm not going to give his name, but he knew Kincaid, and Kincaid said, you know, all I gotta make is one of these cheese ball pictures of, you know, the cottages with the lights on the snow. I just gotta make one of those a month, and then I'll be free to do my real work. Okay, well, we all know what happened, you know, you get handed enough money, and a lot of people would not be able to resist that. And what happened was, he turned, you know, the thing that he was making, that he was embarrassed of. Well, he became that. So, yeah, you got to watch out. You got to be careful of that. So, yeah, be Be careful. Be careful about money. But on this at the same time, boy, I guess if this, if there are some advice that I could give to artists, you know, like something that's really important, what that's that's all I've been doing, what am I? Okay, so here's, here's one more thing about that, about about commerce, and about your relationship to you as an artist. There's two extremes. The first extreme is, I got to make things that sell. Okay? So I'm going to make the cottages in the snow with the light coming out, yeah? Because people like that, all right? And so you do that, and you think, Oh, what am I doing? Okay? And so that's one extreme, where you're doing something you think is really horrible, and you do it anyway, because it's making money. Then the other extreme is this, you know, screw all of you, you idiots out there. I am, you know, this incredible character that has this private vision, and I never care if anyone ever buys it, because, and I don't care you're never going to understand it anyway, because I am such a rare genius and and the hell with all of you, okay, that's the other extreme, from what I understand. When Melville wrote Moby Dick, he had the idea in mind to make something that would be popular, but he also wanted to make it his best, all right? And it was very interesting, because you have to start asking a question, would we have Moby Dick? If Melville had never considered his audience, we would not, all right. And you think, and we think, Oh, Melby dick, it's this beautiful, pure art thing and everything else. And you think, no. In fact, I think we have records of this. Where I think he's talking with Hawthorne or somebody or something about that. By the way, if anybody does any research on this, and nobody can find it, then the principle remains, anyway, okay, he wanted to make something that was also accessible, and as a result it, I think it brought out the best in him. It did. And so you see the same thing in music. You see this all the time, where somebody says, the hell with all of you, I'm going to make imagery in my song that's totally private. And then somebody else says, Yeah, but you know that one love song you wrote was pretty good, and a lot of people liked it, and go, Oh, that thing, all that stupid old song, yeah, that's sappy, and it's not really me. And you say, Yeah, but wait a minute, but lots of people really were moved by now, well, all right, I'll make something that's somewhere in between. And next thing you know, you're making a tomato song. Okay? And, and the weird thing is, thinking about others can pull something out of you that you wouldn't get otherwise, if you just had all the time to make your own weird ass, thing that you wanted to make on your own with never having to worry about selling the market. See, this is the invisible hand of the market, reaching in, and this is becoming an atom esque economics theory, the invisible hand. You got to be careful with that, because you cannot let the market be the main thing. But you cannot sneer at it either. There's something there for you that you need to consider

Laura Arango Baier: 1:26:33

totally, totally Yes. And I think also to add to that experience, like you said, experience, and just, you know, I think a lot of young artists, or artists who are very early in their career want so desperately, and I totally get it, because I've been in those shoes and write a passage for all of us to realize when you're trying to jump into the pool too quickly. And I think giving yourself that time to experiment, figure it out, and then find, as you go, that tomato painting is probably the way to go. It's very, yeah, it's very rare for someone to just from the get go, just be very, very successful. Happens, but it's not, you know, the rule, it's not what normally happens.

John Morra: 1:27:22

But remember the curse, the other curse, of the tomato painting that, oh, my goodness, let's say you get into a gallery and you're really flattered because they looked at you like you want to show your pictures with us, you know. And then you get in to go, oh, and then you have a show, and you sell this one picture, you know, over and over and over again. And then you say, oh, man, I just saw my bank account. Make this jump, you know, now I can buy the expensive peanut butter instead of the cheap one. And you go, wow, this is great. I guess I better make more of those pictures. And you do, and then you're pretty cool with it. And then, you know, down the road, you say, you know, okay, now, where was I? Oh yeah, I wanted to make this as well. And suddenly the gallery can start making faces at you, like, you know, you should probably make hay while the sun shines, while the sun shines, you should probably strike while the amble is hot. We've got a list of people that that wants your paintings of you fill in the blank for

Laura Arango Baier: 1:28:24

me, sunsets.

John Morra: 1:28:27

Yes, Dave, it your sunset paintings everybody wants when you go, okay, all right, all right. And next thing you know, you can, you have to figure out a way to manage that. But that's one of the problems with an early success. And again, the analogy and music is very clear. Somebody, somebody comes out with a hit song, and then their neck, and then they go to their concert, you know, two years later, and they say, alright, this is a song for my new album. And everybody says, oh, no, you know, come on, man, I want to hear. I want to hear. I want to hold your hand again. I don't want to hear this weird, you know, thing you're doing with sitars, like all this weird, new stuff you Beatles want to do, okay? I want to hear. I want to hold your hand, you know, come on, man, that's what we want. And you say, well, well, what do I do now? And so that. So that's where the myth developed that you got to be true to yourself. You have to figure out both. I don't know. I don't know how in the world you're going to do that. I know how anybody's going to do it. You're but you're it's something everybody's going to have to figure out. You have to, okay, I mean, that's how, that's how you'll end up, is you're going to have to figure out how to balance that,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:29:40

definitely, definitely. And actually, I did want to ask you what that what it was like for you when, when you made the jump into becoming a full time artist. What was that like?

John Morra: 1:29:50

Oh, something, okay, something super important. There you need to find cheap rent. Okay, I'm not going to tell you about what brushes to use or what paint. Is forget all of that. You need to live in a place where you can work. So I would avoid New York City if you're just getting going. I would, I would okay. I mean, there was a point where there were neighborhoods in New York City where you could, I mean, I really, I really scored. I mean, I got an apartment on the Upper West Side at 106 in Amsterdam, with with I was sharing an apartment with a friend, and I was paying around 350 a month. Okay, it was rent stabilized, and so I stayed there for a long time. I stayed there for a long time. I don't think I would have become an artist if I hadn't had that. Okay, because I looked at everybody else that had their own apartment. They were paying 1500 a month back then. Yeah, today, everybody will start laughing at 1500 okay, but back then, and I realized they have to have a full time job to keep this payment of this rent, you know, going. They're not getting as much work done. You know, they're not. And so I graduated from New York Academy. I met Jacob Collins. I realized I can't paint. I got to learn how to paint. And so I started hanging out with Jacob, and he showed me how all these things start happening. I went to an employment agency, and it was so funny. I took a typing test, you know, thinking, Well, I got to do something, you know? I got to, I got to have a job, you know, so I can support my painting habit. And I'm taking a typing test, you know, how many words per minute? And I'm doing all this. And I went downstairs to this place called Coffee House, I think it's called or the coffee shop at 14th Street. And there were these two kind of statuesque, bombshell women there. And, you know, I'm looking at them thinking, Boy, they're really pretty. And so I decided to talk to them, and I said, Hey, you know, I just took a typing desk. And they said, No, what do you do? I said, I want to be an artist. And they said, Oh, very interesting. Maybe you should do what we do, you know, we're flight attendants, you know. And we can, we can work when we want, and we can travel all over the place. And I thought, maybe I should be a flight attendants, you know, or maybe I should do that. And I went home thinking, Man, I don't even know how this is going to be possible. And a friend of mine called me the next day, Dave mauler. He was also in the paint group with me, great, great painter, my dear friend, Dave. And Dave said, Hey, there's this mural factory downtown, and they're making these big murals for this company called Express, where they do all these old master copies, and they're doing it for these stores for decorations. Do you want a job? And I said, yeah, yeah. So off I went. And so for the next four years, my main income was painting murals. And it was not my own work, but I was using a paintbrush, and I learned how to paint fast. And I learned how to mix up big, big ass piles of paint, you know, for covering a lot of square footage. And I also learned some, you know, horrific techniques, like, here's how to paint a rose real quick. And these just dumb, kind of, like formulas that at the time I really hated then later on, I there was something to it that was good. So, yeah, you've got to get cheap rent. And if you can try to work in your field in some way, I don't know what that is now, because nobody's, nobody's painting murals to the same degree, you know. And if, and if you want to get into that, if you want to paint scenic painting, for instance, for theater, that's a whole giant discipline in of itself, and if you take that job, you may never be able to make your own art. So you've got to live in a place that's affordable. You have to New York City became an art center of the world because, as a former teacher told me, when I was a you know, I had a loft in downtown in the in the early 70s, and I worked two days a week as a bike messenger, and I had my own loft, and I could work on my art. And that's why people came to New York, or there were these big spaces. And, yeah, there was a lot of artists and everybody, but that's one of the main reasons the big art movements of New York City would have never happened if the rents were high. There's no way. I mean, did you think you were going to get real estate advice for this? You know, but it really, it really is important. You have to carve that out. And that means, that means secondary and tertiary. And what would that be? Tertiary quadrilateral cities in the United States, or whatever it is. Go there, go there, and pay low rent, and then, you know, send your workout on on Faso website, and then, and then, maybe, maybe from there, you can ship your paintings to a gallery in a big, fancy city somewhere, or whatever. But, but don't say I'm going to go to New York and be an artist, because you're to be a bohemian there, you gotta have a full time career and something else to pay the rent. So, you know, good luck with that.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:34:50

Absolutely, I think I Yes. Mean, you have to live below your means, especially today, as an artist like, yeah, I. Lived in New York, it was really expensive. Would I live there still? If it weren't expensive? Maybe just because how you said, you know, it's a hub. It's a really great place for lots of artists, lots of stuff going on, but it shouldn't come at the price of time. And in my opinion, time is the greatest currency that we have. It's limited. And if you want to paint and you want to make time for painting, you gotta make sacrifices on other sides. You know, like you said, go to a smaller town. Maybe it's a little out of the way. But hey, if you could take a train or a cheap flight into New York City, that works, right? Because thankfully, you know, we have the internet. We have, like you said, you know, Faso, where you just can put your your work on there, and then there's social media, where you can put your work on there, and you can sell stuff even without a gallery these days, um, but if someone wants a traditional gallery model, then you gotta work, work around it, right? You have to bend things around your needs as best as you can in the strange times that we are in.

Unknown: 1:36:09

But yeah, yeah, we are in strange times. Yeah, strange times. Yes. We've always been.

John Morra: 1:36:15

We've always been in strange times. But these strange times may be stranger for painters than they were in 1930 when my Irish or Italian grandparents, they had landscape paintings in their house. They were working class people. They bought paintings, okay, not for a lot of money, but they bought paintings. Okay. Now you go to very, very fancy homes, you know, young people that have, you know, hit it big, and whatever business they're in, and you see a lot of screens, and you see some photographs and no books and no art, all right? And I'm not, I hate the, you know, when I was young age. I mean, I hate that, but I can't I mean, some of it's true, our culture is changing. It is. And art and paintings are not as big, you know, the decor item as they used to be. They're just not for your average person. They are for fancy people still, but you know for your average person that they aren't. We should change all that, you know, but 111, way of changing all that is giving people something of a schooling in some sort of way, schooling, education, getting people to appreciate, once again, the importance and need for making things by hand craftsmanship. You know, I made this, you know, even if it's something as simple as this is my recipe that I came up with, and I did not get this from a book people that know no cooking, they appreciate that they do. And so in the same way, I feel like visually, our culture needs a reintroduction to what it means to make things by hand, what it means to play real instruments, what it means to build things yourself instead of buying, you know, a cabinet at Home Depot, making your own cabinet all that stuff. And we might see a, you know, I'm hoping we're going to see a big backlash against everything being instant and easy and being made by factories. I think I'm hoping we can see that. Well, of course, obviously, duh.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:38:21

Yes, yeah. I think it's one of those things. And then I wanted to ask you two more questions, actually. One is, what final advice would you give to someone who wants to make a living as an artist?

John Morra: 1:38:36

Oh, let's see. Well, I before I say, artist, how about painter? I guess because or I don't, I don't understand sculpture at all, so I'll just say painters. Oh, make a lot of paintings and finish every one of them. Okay, in other words, in other words, understand that what you're making is a product that needs to be understood as a commodity to be purchased, and that's why I said finish every one now. But by finished I mean I look at paintings by dega, or, as they say here, dega, I look at them and they look like they're hardly just started sometimes, but they're finished, they're satisfying. So that's what I mean. I don't mean by finished lots of tiny detail painted with small brushes. I mean fully realized, is what I mean. Okay, so do that, and in other words, in other words, know what that means to you, as far as fully realized and you make a lot of the stuff. That means you are consistently able to produce, as opposed to, you know, I got lucky here and this one came out, but these eight, eight over here, I just kind of abandoned. You have to be able to say, you know, okay, I'm making this kind of thing. Do you have? You have to be. Need to go into production. You have to, right? I mean, a painter that I really admire, Walter Murch, basically, his output was 12 paintings a year, and they were very worked on and very, very realized. And you know, maybe you could start off with 24 pictures a year and then pare it down with time. I think what happens with time is you end up making fewer pictures and you just make them better, or something like that. You know, you end up making six a year or something because you know they're harder to do, or maybe your your standards are higher, or something like that. Yeah, but initially, initially being able to bust out a lot of pictures and sell them is a tremendous shot in the arm. When you sell stuff, when you sell stuff, it's incredibly affirming. And you feel like, you know, not just I can make a living, but I remember, I remember a long time ago I made a painting of a of a lake in San Diego. The lake is called Lake Murray, and there was a big, giant metal water tower across the water that would reflect on the water. And my brother, looking at this painting, said, in a big brother sort of way That's so stupid. Why did you put that stupid water tower in there? Why didn't you make it a pretty natural looking scene? And I said, but I like the water tower. And he said, Alright, yeah. Well, no one's going to want that. So at the show, someone came up to me and said, I've been walking around that lake for so long, and I love that water tower reflecting on the water, and they bought the painting, and it's like my whole world just came into focus. And I thought somebody understands me. Like it was an amazing feeling. I thought, wow, somebody gets it, I mean. And I thought, I thought, you know, my brother was right, and I was just being an idiot, okay? And somebody got what I saw, and I thought, Man, that's fantastic. So that is what I think can really, really get you going, is when, when, when you can make a lot of stuff and somebody else gets it, and you don't have this giant price tag on it, especially initially, but somebody, somebody coughs up$1,000 and suddenly you say, wow, they could have bought a lot of groceries with that. And it just, it just, it's a shot in the arm. It feels great. You know, it's really a good thing. I hate, I hate to sound so commerce minded, but I can't help that. I mean, it's just, it's just what it's part of the deal. It just is okay.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:42:45

It is. Yes, it is, unless someone out there who's listening is already ridiculously wealthy, that's awesome. This is stuff that we need to consider, and that's why the podcast exists. And actually, speaking of commerce, I believe you told me about an upcoming sale that you're doing. Do you mind telling us a bit about that?

John Morra: 1:43:03

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, that okay, the sale, the sale, it's my annual studio show that I do every first, first Saturday of every December. And oh gosh, you know, I'm actually forgetting how it started. But I think I went through my painting racks and I just thought, let's get rid of all this crap, you know. And so I said, Well, let's have a party, I know, and we'll, you know, we'll serve, we'll serve cava, you know, not expensive champagne. Let's, let's just, and let's invite all the neighbors. Let's do all this, and let's just have really modest prices. We basically sold everything. And we thought, Oh, that was fun. So the following year, we said, well, let's do that again. And so I think we're, I don't know, 15 years into this now, I think so we have it every December. It's becoming kind of a big event in the area. And now everybody you know writes me in advance. When's that? You know? When is it? When is it? We want to go. We want to bring our friends. It's a wonderful thing to do every year. It's become my main show of the year, and it's been, it's been fantastic. Here's some of the dangers that come with this. Pretty soon it turns into a party, and everybody just wants to show up and eat and talk. Okay, so that can't that can happen. I haven't been in galleries for a while, because in 2014 my gallery closed, Eleanor Ettinger Gallery, and I think it was 2014 in Manhattan, it closed. And what I thought was, at that point, well, now we have the internet. I'll guess I'll just start selling by word of mouth. I've been doing that ever since. I've been in group shows. I've been, you know, in all kinds of things. I'm going to be in a group show this coming March at Spencer town Academy, and here in upstate New York, with with, I think four other artists. I think it is, maybe it's more that will be on my website. I'll be promoting it there when that, when that happens, but, yeah, that's a that's. Yes. I mean, that's what's on the calendar. I This is going to sound like a commercial for Faso, but I can't help it. They have all these marketing things that they offer, and I haven't done any of it yet. And I think probably I'm not alone in that. I think most people that have a Faso website have looked at all this stuff and thought, all right, I really got to do it, and then you just haven't gotten around to it. Well, I'm in that category. I haven't really used the stuff. But this year, I swore this year I'm going to take November. Instead of making a gazillion little pictures in time for the December show, I'm instead going to focus on marketing. I've already got too many paintings here as it is. So I thought, you know, this November, I'm going to try out actual Faso stuff to see what happens. So I'll

Laura Arango Baier: 1:45:44

get back to you. Yes, yes. Get back to me on that,

John Morra: 1:45:49

you know, or nothing happened. Yeah. I'll let you know.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:45:51

Yeah, yeah. Just remember to go into the marketing section, where they have all the really good marketing, the marketing stuff, where you get real.

John Morra: 1:46:01

Tell me, Laura, is it most artists that use Faso services report success?

Laura Arango Baier: 1:46:08

Actually? Yeah. I mean, as long as you follow the advice that they give, yes, it's one of those things. We can only do so much on our end. It takes a lot of effort on the artist's end as well to put those, put those things into action. But yes, you got to get back to me on that. Yeah. And then speaking of your Faso site, what's your website?

John Morra: 1:46:32

John mora painting.com,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:46:36

perfect, awesome. And then I will also be including all of your links in the show notes, including your social media, in case anyone listening or watching wants to go check out your awesome stuff. I know that you're not super active on social media, but hey, it's

John Morra: 1:46:49

Oh, okay. Look, look, I don't mean I made a funny face, I know, but I just need to learn how to do it. I I want to take advantage of that. I've been listening for a long time about people that have figured out how to use it and how it can be very helpful. I haven't had any success with it yet, not really, except, you know, more people who can come to the party and drink all of our wine. I don't know if it's trying. I don't know if it's translated into the sales at all. I don't know. One of the things that Clint, I guess his name is on Faso, keeps hammering, is it? Email is king. And so I need, I need to try more of that. I social media. Some people can get it to work. I haven't. I've probably done it wrong. So, yeah, I'll try again. All right. All right, I'll try again, I promise.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:47:44

Yeah. Just think of social media as a way to get people on your newsletter list so people who actually care. Oh, okay,

Unknown: 1:47:49

all right, okay, exactly

Laura Arango Baier: 1:47:51

yes, but yeah. And then I guess yeah, I'll still, I'll include all of your links in the show notes, like I said, and then yeah, this was such a great conversation. I feel like every time I chat with you, it's always, there's always something that I'm going to be thinking about from the conversation for the next three months.

Unknown: 1:48:16

Good heavens, yes, because

Laura Arango Baier: 1:48:20

it's great conversation. So thank you so much, John. I don't think

John Morra: 1:48:23

I always have this effect, but, but thank you very much,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:48:27

of course, thanks. It's always fun to talk art, yeah,

John Morra: 1:48:31

well, it was a, it was a real privilege. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, especially, I mean, I don't think I've ever done anything like this before, so this was really fun. Thank you. Can't say thank you. Thank you. Of course, you're welcome. Thank.