Kevin Murphy / Artist Entrepreneur

Kevin Murphy went from barely graduating high school in the Bronx to painting the cover of a Rolling Stones album and building a global art education empire. 

Founder of Art Academy Schools and Evolve Artist, Kevin shares the raw, inspiring journey behind his evolution from construction worker to internationally recognized fine artist and educator. In this conversation, Kevin unpacks how tenacity, clarity, and brutal commitment created a career that changed his life—and now changes others. 

If you’re an artist (or a dreamer) wrestling with doubt, this one’s for you.

5 Key Takeaways

• Why grit beats talent every time
• How to go from broke to booked solid
• Why most art education fails creatives
• How to build an art business that scales
• The power of burning your plan B

Guest Bio:

Kevin Murphy is an internationally recognized artist, illustrator, and founder of Art Academy Schools and the online education platform Evolve Artist. Raised in a working-class family in the Bronx, Kevin left a stable union construction job to pursue art—a journey that led to high-profile commissions including the Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon album cover. Over the decades, Kevin has worked with top brands like Sega, LucasArts, and National Geographic and has since transitioned to mentoring the next generation of artists through a groundbreaking fundamentals-based curriculum taught in over 20 schools worldwide.

Link: https://lp.evolveartist.com/headsmack/

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Paul Povolni (05:33.12)
Hey, welcome to the Headsmack podcast. name is Paul Povolni and I'm excited to have another Misfit with me. I have Kevin Murphy and he is from the Bronx and he went from the Bronx to an internationally recognized artist and educator and founder of the Art Academy Schools and Evolve Artists Online Education. Kevin, how you doing, man?

Kevin Murphy (05:51.584)
I'm doing very well Paul. Thank you for having me.

Paul Povolni (05:54.72)
Hey, thanks for coming on. Looking forward to this conversation. I love talking to artists. I love talking to creatives. And so think it's going to be a fun conversation. So usually the way I like to start this, I'm very much into superheroes as you can see from behind me. And so very different background to yours with a beautiful painting in the background. Mine's like all teenager, teenage basement vibe. But I do like to hear origin stories. I like to kind of hear where people come from.

Kevin Murphy (06:12.59)
Yep.

Paul Povolni (06:21.374)
because it helps us understand a little better of where they're at now. So tell me a little bit about your origin story and you can go as far back as you feel would be relevant.

Kevin Murphy (06:29.358)
Sure, I try not to drag it on for too long. It was an interesting path. I grew up in the Bronx, in a pretty bad neighborhood. my parents insisted, I have three brothers, and they insisted that we be very busy so that we stayed out of trouble. And I wasn't interested in a lot of the sports that we had at the time, things like baseball. I didn't have interest in them. And so my parents got me into taking art classes. And I did that when I was young, maybe around 10 years old. I did it for a little while.

the person who ran the class recommended to my parents, told my parents I had a talent, which I've grown to not believe in, told my parents I had a talent and that my parents should encourage me to pursue art. And my parents didn't believe in doing things like that. They just let us, we had to be active, but we could choose what we wanted to do. And as long as we were doing things and staying out of trouble,

They didn't force us to do anything. And so for me, I dabbled in art for a little while and then it kind of fell off. And I barely graduated high school. I graduated, I had a 68 average, 65 being passing. And I'm not a stupid person. I was just bored and I just didn't like the format. And so I graduated and I got into construction. I worked construction for three and a half years in the city, working in skyscrapers.

Paul Povolni (07:40.033)
Right, right.

Kevin Murphy (07:52.746)
And I enjoyed the work. I have to understand, I grew up very poor. Within two years of starting construction, I was earning more money than my parents. And so my parents were very happy. Union job in the city, not a bad thing, you know? And so, but yeah, I grew up, my family, we lived below the poverty line my entire time growing up. And like I look back at it now, I've made more money in one day than my parents made in a year on doing art.

Paul Povolni (08:00.896)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (08:18.731)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (08:21.17)
It's pretty, it's like, it's a crazy thing to consider that. My parents, you know, they didn't go to college, either of them. My father drove a taxi and my mother worked as an aide in a local elementary school. And so, but it was important to them to be around for me and my brothers. And you know, the plan worked out. I mean, we didn't have much. And you know, when you're a kid and you don't have anything, you don't really know. You don't understand that you're poor.

Paul Povolni (08:47.84)
Right, right.

Kevin Murphy (08:49.238)
At some point around maybe seventh grade, I figured that out when I realized that we, I mean, I grew up in the Bronx, there's no rich people there. But when I realized that we had less than almost everybody else, like it started to sink in. But you know, my parents raised, I have three brothers, one is a PhD in computer science. He runs a department for a university. And I have two brothers with master's degrees. And I have a high school diploma. I'm the dumb one in the family.

Paul Povolni (09:00.268)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (09:15.787)
Ha ha ha.

Kevin Murphy (09:16.856)
But my parents encouraged us to do what we loved, be exceptional at it, and then find a way to monetize it. They would say to us all the time, you know, you're happy doing sanitation work, just be good at it, and you'll be fine. And so each of my brothers, we all followed whatever was of interest to us. Like I have a brother who's one year younger than me. He has a master's degree in business, and after September 11th, he joined the military.

Paul Povolni (09:29.13)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (09:44.11)
He just believed that, like, he didn't have any prospects for a wife or kids, and he decided that somebody had to go do this work. And he thought that, you know, a lot of the people that are in the military, they're not good representatives of, you know, the best of us. And it's not that they're bad people, they're sacrificing in big ways, but he was educated. And he thought he'd do five years as a grunt, and then he'd do officer's training, and in his fifth year, he was injured.

Paul Povolni (09:52.226)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (10:00.439)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (10:13.478)
and he shattered three vertebrae in his back and he wound up driving a desk for the next 10 years until they finally put him out on disability. But it's like, you my parents raised us to kind of follow our dreams, to work very, very hard and to, and then find a way to make a living at the thing we enjoyed. And so-

Paul Povolni (10:32.299)
Well, usually with, with somebody coming from that place is they don't see the arts as a legitimate pursuit. Like, you know, how are you going to make money drawing pictures? You know? And so were they of that mindset or were they even encouraging in that?

Kevin Murphy (10:46.578)
well, I went to work one day. I was working down in Battery Park in the city and I got out of the train at the World Trade Center and I was walking across and it's like 530 in the morning, bitter cold. was like, I don't know, it was like 12 degrees. It was so cold. And I got to the building and I was just, I like the work. I like the physical labor, but the early mornings and the brutal cold, I could do without them. And of course, know, anybody who's worked in construction understands.

like a 45 year old man is broken. Like by then, every guy coming into work, at 45 the guys look old and they're all popping pills for bad knees and bad backs and arthritis. And I just like, I decided I didn't really, I didn't want to take that path. And I knew that I could do something else, but I really didn't know what. And so I kept working. Then one day it was just bitter, bitter cold. And I just thought, I don't want to do this anymore. Like, you know, you go up to your locker and you grab your jeans, your work jeans.

And they have, know, the sweat from the day before has frozen and your clothes you're putting on are crunching because everything's frozen. It's like, why would you want to do this? Like if you don't have to. And like I said, I like the work, but I decided I wasn't going to do it anymore. And so I gave all of my tools away to one of the apprentices and I left. I went up to the locker, took all my, I burned the ships. I knew that if I held onto my tools,

Paul Povolni (11:56.769)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (12:06.752)
Wow, there's no coming back.

Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (12:13.768)
there would be a plan B in place. And so I decided I was done. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn't that. I did not want to wake up and go out in that cold at 5.30 in the morning in the dark ever again. so that was it. And I went and I stopped and I got breakfast at a local diner downtown and I thought about it. And I decided I wanted to do science fiction book covers. And that kind of came around because I graduated high school. I was borderline illiterate. I could barely read and

Paul Povolni (12:19.883)
Right.

Paul Povolni (12:37.312)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (12:42.754)
I'm not a lazy person. Like I tell people all the time, I cannot be outworked. I worked very, very hard, but I have to be interested in the thing I'm doing. I don't do everything, but what I do, I do at 100%. I do very well. I'm not afraid of work. And so I was borderline illiterate, but I was getting on the trains and there was no tech back then. So you sit there and at 5.30 in the morning, looking at all the sleeping homeless people. And that's all it was.

Paul Povolni (12:52.382)
Brian, Brian.

Paul Povolni (12:56.567)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (13:10.144)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (13:11.534)
And so I could barely read. In a regular mass market book, I could read about six pages an hour, 10 minutes to read a page. Like, it's insane. And so I asked a few friends of mine who were avid readers, like if they could recommend books that even at the speed that I read that I would be, they'd keep my attention. And they recommended some books to me and I read them. And they were great. It was rough getting through them, but the stories were great. And it was all science fiction stuff.

Paul Povolni (13:21.782)
Wow. Wow.

Kevin Murphy (13:40.302)
So I started reading books every day on my way to work. And then I took a speed reading course, which helped significantly. It wasn't a good one. And once I saw what that did, I gave it a little bit of time. And then I took a really good speed reading course. And I went from reading about six pages an hour to reading about 170 pages an hour. And in the three and a half years I did construction, I consumed about a thousand books. And on every topic you could possibly think of, know, and a lot of people think speed reading is skimming, it's not.

Paul Povolni (13:59.296)
Wow. Well.

Kevin Murphy (14:08.972)
You read every word, there's a system for it. But yeah, I read about thousand titles in that window of time, history books. mean, just, know, the more you read, the more you realize you don't know, the more things you become curious about. it's just like, for me, I wanted to know. And so by the time I had gotten out of construction, I'd read about a thousand books. I'd see maybe about 600 of them within the science fiction and fantasy genre. And I had fallen in love with the artwork.

Paul Povolni (14:11.584)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (14:37.186)
And so decided I was going to become an illustrator. I wanted to do book covers for that stuff. And I had no idea what the odds were because they were much closer to zero than to 1%. And had I known the odds, I might not have taken the leap, but you know, something to be said for ignorance. And so I just sat out on a path. I went to the School of Visual Arts for one semester. I was paying for it out of my own pocket and I realized it was a total waste of time.

Paul Povolni (14:45.469)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Paul Povolni (14:55.541)
Right, right.

Kevin Murphy (15:06.552)
And it was ranked number one in the country, maybe in the world at the time for illustration, but I realized I wasn't gonna get the education that I wanted there. So I went on my own, I painted for a while, maybe about eight months. And then I just couldn't seem to improve the work. I reached out to a very famous artist and asked him if I could come watch him work. And he was like, yeah. And so I went out to his house. He's only a year older than me. I went out to his house. This is actually his painting behind me. His name is Dorian Vallejo.

Paul Povolni (15:26.913)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (15:33.706)
Nice, it's beautiful.

Kevin Murphy (15:35.456)
Incredible, incredible painter. But I went out, he let me work at his studio one day, walked me through some things, and then I went out on my own, and within a year I was a working pro. I went from knowing nothing to my first job was for a major publishing company doing a book cover. And by the time, I had saved a lot of money when I worked construction.

Paul Povolni (15:37.6)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (15:57.536)
Wow. Now, how were you supporting yourself during that time?

Paul Povolni (16:04.395)
Okay.

Kevin Murphy (16:05.334)
My only real expense was getting back and forth from work. I wasn't squandering what I had. My parents had raised me to be thoughtful about money. We had so little, I didn't squander it. And so I had enough money to cover my college and to float myself for a couple of years. The only expense I really had was my youngest brother. Much like me, when he was in high school, he wrestled. And so because of that, he couldn't have a job. He was too busy wrestling. And so I basically...

covered all of his bills for him so that he could have a decent, yeah, decent experience while he was in high school. And so, but other than that, everything else I had really went into savings. And so when I started, when I started painting on my own, I had money. I could afford to buy equipment and buy brushes and paint. But I, like I said, within a year, I went from nothing to being a working professional. And it was, was pure tenacity. I just worked.

Paul Povolni (16:45.154)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (17:01.294)
I worked 15, 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I wasn't going out, I wasn't partying, I wasn't hanging out with my friends. I was just working. I was on a mission. And so I landed my first book cover. And as that book finished, Sega Genesis, the video game company, reached out to me about something. I did a project for them. And within about three or four months, I started to line up a queue of jobs. And I did that for the next eight years.

Paul Povolni (17:01.708)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (17:27.809)
Yeah.

Wow.

Kevin Murphy (17:30.51)
I was booked at one point, I was booked almost two years out and I had maybe about six and a half years and I decided I wanna get away from book covers a little bit, because though they were a lot of fun and that's why I got into the industry, they don't pay that much. And so like it's enough to make a living, but you're not gonna be, you're not building a nest egg for yourself through that industry. And so I started getting into more mainstream illustration and I did work with Lucas Arts,

Paul Povolni (17:44.674)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (17:51.572)
Right, right.

Kevin Murphy (17:59.786)
know, packaging for like toys and stuff like that for Jurassic Park, Star Wars. And eventually I did work for National Geographic and R.J. Reynolds, Camel Cigarettes. When they, they want, they lost that multi-billion dollar lawsuit because they were, you know, they had Joe Camel and they was selling cigarettes to children through cartoons and they had to do a more adult marketing campaign. I was involved in that new campaign.

Paul Povolni (18:17.442)
Hahaha.

Kevin Murphy (18:24.518)
And eventually I did a cover for the Rolling Stones. I did the Bridges to Babylon CD cover. And that was just, at that point, I could have really kind of picked and chosen what I wanted to do. And those are all really, really good paying jobs. They pay outlandish amounts. R.J. Reynolds obviously has a budget. They were like, I think they were like $20,000 for a weekend. Like you would get the job on Friday and it had to be delivered Monday. So you didn't sleep. But they were very well paid for it.

Paul Povolni (18:28.193)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:35.35)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (18:42.026)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (18:46.902)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:54.113)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (18:54.622)
And that was good for a little while. And again, obviously at some point you're like, you look at the money and you're like, I'm selling cigarettes, I don't wanna do this. And so I kind of backed away from jobs like that, but I got the Rolling Stones cover, I did that, it was a huge, huge thing. They hung an 80 foot banner for my painting off the Brooklyn Bridge when they announced the tour here in the US. Yeah, the size of an eight story building is crazy. You know what's funny? I was in court fighting a speeding ticket.

Paul Povolni (19:15.842)
Did you take your whole family to drive by it and check it out? Oh man. Oh man. So, so, you know, for, for artists that might be listening to this, um, how did, how did your style evolve? Did it evolve and how did it evolve? And did you find your own particular style or niche that you loved more than others?

Kevin Murphy (19:22.976)
Yeah, so I missed it. I missed it. Yeah. Yeah, crazy.

Kevin Murphy (19:44.014)
Well, because of what I was doing, I was working in realism, right? And even though I was painting fantasy, was painting dragons and explosions and spaceships, it's still painted in a realistic style, a believable style. And so the look of my work, and I tell people all the time that ask me about style, it happens naturally. You don't decide what you want as a style and then fight to create it. What you have is natural. You have an internal voice. You see the world a certain way.

Paul Povolni (19:48.29)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (20:13.228)
and your creativity, you're born with it. Like children are not born to be, they're not taught to be creative, they're born that way. And we kind of crush that under, know, that thing doesn't make sense if you're gonna draw a face that has to look like this. And it's like, eventually once you learn how to produce art, your natural voice will resurface. It takes time because you have to be confident in the fact, in your skills. You have to know that you can produce what you can envision.

You you start by producing what you can see. If you can't draw, you know, a ball and a cube sitting on a table with precision and match the colors that you see, how are you supposed to pull something that's in your mind, in your imagination, and bring it to life on a campus? And it starts by slowly building these very, very, almost like just one, like you think about each success is a sheet of paper, and you need stacks and stacks of like irrefutable proof that you can deliver.

not for other people, but for yourself, to then start to get bold about what you do, to start stretching the boundaries. I could do better. Like you'll look at a photograph and you'll say, like, I do a lot of portrait work and I'll have photographs, I'll photograph the subject, but the painting is so much nicer than the photographs because I'm not limited by the reality. I can take something and say, I know how to make this look even nicer. I can make something much more three-dimensional with paint than the photograph will give me because I understand how it works.

Paul Povolni (21:13.27)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (21:34.069)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (21:43.202)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (21:43.234)
And so I'm not limited. My creativity, the reference material, whether it's a photograph or something from direct observation or even something from my imagination, is just a point of departure. And then it's a matter of how well can I manage the materials to bring that thing to life. So style emerges, we're born with it. And I think every single person, their imagination is a little bit different. You can cultivate imagination. It's like anything else. If you immerse yourself in something,

Paul Povolni (21:59.927)
Right.

Kevin Murphy (22:12.394)
you see all of the things being done and all of those, all the, let's say you wanna do, you wanna do some interior design in your own home, but you're not an interior designer. You don't just go into a store and start looking at what's available, right? Not if you're smart. You get a whole bunch of magazines, you go online, and you see what professional interior designers do. And you look at the stuff and you're like, well, that's really cool. I would love to live in that room. Let's make some notes. And you do enough of that, you immerse yourself in it, eventually,

You're taking like, you may take ideas from a hundred people, but the final design is your own take on what they've done. Like all of them mixed together. And those ideas, even though they start from someone else's ideas, they are eventually wholly yours. That's really your own creativity taking over and saying, I liked what that person did, but I think that that black should have been a dark gray. I would have liked that more. Well, that's your personal feelings, your personal flavor that you add.

Paul Povolni (22:49.866)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (22:58.518)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (23:10.976)
And so with art, it's the same thing, just at some point, what inspires you, what you find beautiful will eventually take hold and push out the standards of the training that you were given. So if you learn how to paint realism, you could stretch out into just about anything from there, and you're just leaning on those technical skills.

Paul Povolni (23:36.386)
Right. So with your work, what do you feel might have stood out or gotten the attention of the Rolling Stones?

Kevin Murphy (23:45.614)
Well, you know, it's funny, it wasn't the quality of my work that got that lined up. So it's a funny story. I did a project through a very famous packager. His name is Stefan Sagmeister. Huge, huge name. Yeah. didn't know who he was and I did a project with him for Viacom and MTV. Viacom had just purchased MTV and you had like the, you know, the 58 year old guys at Viacom.

Paul Povolni (23:58.856)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (24:13.87)
and the 22 year old guys at MTV. And they decided that they were going to launch a video game branch out of the company. And they hadn't figured out exactly what the structure was gonna be yet. And so they had representatives from both companies involved in this. so I did, it was the first video game and Sagmeister brought it in and I wound up with the job. And the project came back to us like 23 times for...

rework. And what it was, was the 21 year olds liked one thing and they approved it. And then the 58 year olds didn't like it and they send it back. And it came back and forth and back and forth and back. Every three days it showed up at my house. And I never complained. It's just, that's the business. I got paid every time it came back, but, but still like it'll screw up your schedule, you know? And so for me, I was pretty quick. I was able to do the corrections pretty quickly and put it back out the door. Anyway, at about, we were about,

Paul Povolni (24:57.367)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (25:06.55)
Right, right.

Kevin Murphy (25:13.23)
maybe about two months out of this thing, keep coming back like this. And I finally reached out to Sag Marsh and I was like, hey, I need a little bit more than like a one day turnaround on these. I'm starting to mess up my schedule here. I need like a week if they're gonna keep sending it back. And he said to me, like, I was wondering when you were gonna say something. He's like, as long as you didn't say anything, I was just gonna let it keep going. But he's like, I'm gonna tell them we're taking one last round and that'll be it. So about a month later, the...

Paul Povolni (25:30.949)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (25:43.178)
Aerosmith's nine live CD wound up in Sagmeister Studio and he reached out to me about it I was supposed to do nine paintings for it. But it took them a really long time to settle on the project and by the time it had finally been given the green light, there wasn't enough time for somebody like me to do nine paintings. So what happened is they brought in three watercolor guys and split the paintings up and had it done like that. And right as that thing hit, the Rolling Stones piece came in.

Sagmeister knew this was going to be a tough job. It was going to be exhausting. You can imagine the Rolling Stones, what, 40 years of being told yes to everything, right? Nobody tells them no. And so he reached out to me and he was like, I'd like to have you on this project because I know that you're not going to be another problem. Whatever problems come, you're just going to get the work done.

Paul Povolni (26:23.074)
Yeah. Right, right. Right?

Kevin Murphy (26:40.686)
So that's actually how I wound up on that project. Now, I don't know, had that Viacom project not gone the way that it had, I might've still gotten called for the job, I don't know, but I know that he said to me, like, that was a huge factor that I was just easy to work with. I didn't complain when I should have been complaining. And he figured there is gonna be a lot to complain about with the wrong stones. So it was just the nature of dealing with big corporations. know, people get out of their way.

Paul Povolni (26:59.874)
Yeah.

Right.

Kevin Murphy (27:10.242)
They need something, they get it because nobody wants to turn that project away. so, yeah, and it was, I didn't think it was that stressful. I mean, he was dealing with them all the time. I just got the trickle down from him. But yeah, I mean, there were a couple of things that were challenging, but it was a great project. I mean, how many people get to say they've done a cover for the Rolling Stones? That's pretty cool. And yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:10.636)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:22.528)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:32.682)
Right, right. That is pretty awesome. So how do you approach a project like that creatively? You know, it is a Rolling Stones, right? It does come with a legacy of creativity and just, you know, world class acts. How do you approach a project like that and how do you come up with solutions for it?

Kevin Murphy (27:45.944)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (27:57.484)
Yeah, it's funny. So when Sagmeister called me about the project, it was around nine o'clock in the morning, I had just gotten up, and I had just started a publishing company with two friends. And we were going to our first convention, a big convention down in Atlanta that next weekend. And so when Sagmeister called me about the wrong stunts cover, I told him I couldn't take it. I turned it down. Yeah, that's the look.

Paul Povolni (28:23.756)
What? Wow.

Kevin Murphy (28:25.302)
I said, hey, know what, I would love to do this with you. I wasn't really a fan of the Rolling Stones. I I listened to some of their music, but I wasn't a fan. And it was just like, you know, I really, I have other obligations and I really couldn't put the time and energy into this. So I'm just gonna pass on it. And I went about my business. I cooked some breakfast for myself. I walked the dog. I came back up, I sat down and I thought,

Paul Povolni (28:33.398)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (28:52.558)
You're an idiot. I pick up the phone and I call him back and I'm like, hey, I know that project's already gone, but I figured I'd give you a call just in case. He goes, no, I was gonna give you a call back in about an hour and see if you'd come to your senses. Yeah, well, just, and the thing is I wanted a painting it, I wanted a painting it at this convention down in Atlanta. There were 70,000 people there and I'm sitting at a table working on a Rolling Stones cover. Now, mind you,

Paul Povolni (29:06.21)
The reality check of, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (29:20.91)
I hadn't had the contract in hand yet. I hadn't seen, they hadn't sent, I didn't see the contract. I got the project and left town. In the contract, it's like, you can't have anything public, you can't discuss it, you can't, it's like, oops, you know? So yeah, now, you know, and so, but I wanted doing the painting. took, we got nine days to do it. And I did it, half of it at a massive convention down in Georgia. It was pretty, a DragonCon, massive convention.

Paul Povolni (29:33.73)
I just did it in front of 70,000 people. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (29:47.348)
Yeah. Did those people know what you were painting? they, so then you told them.

Kevin Murphy (29:51.502)
I don't think they lost their Yeah, well, yeah, people like, well, I was a pretty well-known artist in that industry at the time. I was very well-known. And so I wouldn't say I was one of the top artists in the business, but everybody knew who I was. And so, I mean, I was doing about 20 book covers a year. So you walk into a bookstore, you could find 40 or 50 paintings of mine on the shelves at any time, you know, like a Barnes and Noble.

Paul Povolni (29:58.103)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (30:16.942)
And so, yeah, everybody knew who I was and the fact that I was doing a painting, know, very few of these artists, work, they don't paint at these conventions. And so I was actually working on a project, people coming over in droves, what are you working on? Oh, this is the new Rolling Stones cover. Go figure. guess, oh my God, I would have been in my room painting had I seen the contract, but I hadn't seen it yet. And so everything was such a rush.

Paul Povolni (30:30.718)
So, yeah.

Paul Povolni (30:38.08)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (30:42.764)
Like I got the call the next day I had the project in hand and it was due nine days later. It was a real rush. So like I didn't even have a chance to sign the contract. My agent signed it for me, but I hadn't seen it. didn't even think about it. so, but anyway, I mean, it's nothing to do about that. And it was back in 1987, but yeah, but anyway, so in the end, the painting went up being a very different painting. It originally started out with this like really complex background.

Paul Povolni (30:59.894)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (31:11.15)
But then the way that they did the packaging, they decided to go with something very simple and they put it, we had to switch the painting over to a desert scene in the background. But originally it was this beautiful like stained, it looked like a stained photograph, a junkyard of the ages with classic cars and marble columns that went on just forever. But it was too complex. So the painting that I did at the convention was not the, wound up not being the painting that was on the cover. So yeah.

Paul Povolni (31:36.858)
wow. So probably a lot of the people at the convention were like, he lied to us. He said he was doing a Rolling Stone cover.

Kevin Murphy (31:41.432)
Well, the lion, so the lion, is iconic in the image, that's the same, but everything else was changed. Yeah, yeah, so.

Paul Povolni (31:46.346)
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So where did the concept come from? Like, was that something that you were responsible for? Was that okay.

Kevin Murphy (31:54.838)
No, no, projects like this, this stuff is all dictated from upstream. know, so Stefan Sagmeister worked on it. He put together an entire package. He designed everything. Now the artwork wasn't specific. This is what you're gonna paint, but it was like, this is what we're looking for. And then I had to do some sketches for him. He picked the one he liked out of mine, dropped it into the final package that was approved. And so.

Paul Povolni (32:20.492)
So how does that inspiration work for you? Did you listen to music? you like, how does, as you started developing what you needed to develop and the vibe and the feel, how does that work for you?

Kevin Murphy (32:31.502)
Yeah, well, I I spent a little bit of time, a couple of my friends are huge Wrong Stones fans. So I spent a little bit of time kind of hanging out and listening to music and just kind of get into the flow of things. And like I said, it's not like, I mean, it's impossible to not know who they are. Like at my age, of course, I mean. But just spending some time, I watched some of their concerts, like clips of some of their concerts to see different things. And again, there's no internet back then. I was like, my friends had like VHS tapes.

Paul Povolni (32:45.377)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (33:00.398)
And so I just watching stuff to see like set designs, because I knew all of this stuff was being built and the stuff that I was working on had potential to be integrated into what they were doing. And so I just wanted to have some sense of it. I understood that the lion was meant to be iconic and it had started out, it was an Assyrian lion. It had a conical helm and a braided beard and it had wings. And eventually as the editors went to work on it, it lost everything except for the braided beard. Which is because as an icon, just as an

outline it wasn't recognizable for what it was and they decided the shape of the lion would be recognized as an icon. And so that's what we got. You these projects, you don't really have a say. You your opinions don't matter. Like they will tell you what they like and it doesn't matter if it makes sense, but they're the client. They know what they want for whatever the reasons they want them. And it's like, okay, well, I'm being paid to apply my skills on your ideas, right? That's it. I'll, you know,

Paul Povolni (33:41.943)
Right.

Kevin Murphy (33:59.308)
You basically, offer whatever insights you have when you're asked. That's all. And you just, and I think like that's a lot of things. It's so easy to have an opinion and be like, your opinion's not welcome here, but you don't think like that. I know a lot of artists that would have voiced their opinions and probably been pushed off the job. And it's like, for some projects, you're just a hired mercenary. You have a skill, they need it, they pay you for it.

Paul Povolni (34:03.434)
Right, right, yeah.

Paul Povolni (34:19.775)
Right.

Kevin Murphy (34:28.514)
They don't need the other parts of you. When I did book covers, I designed every cover from the ground up. I read the whole book, put together multiple sketches. The art directors said they liked this one or that one, and then I would go from there. It was almost entirely on me. But projects like the Star Wars stuff, when you're starting getting into those bigger things, you just, you have no say. The R.J. Reynolds stuff, I would show up on a Friday afternoon, they would be doing photo shoots.

they'd run the prints right there, hand them to me, and I just copied them. And I had to deliver a finished painting that looked like the photograph Monday morning. That was it. That was the job. All I was was a painter. I was not allowed to have any opinions, just paint. And so, and I said, get paid a lot more, but you have, it's not a creative outlet.

Paul Povolni (35:03.18)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (35:08.023)
my goodness, wow.

Paul Povolni (35:15.233)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (35:24.652)
And for me, I eventually got tired of that. Like after the Rolling Stones piece, I basically cleared my queue of everything I could, finished up what jobs were like the second or third book in a set, and stepped away from that. I took two years off. I had lost my interest in it, because I had gotten into it because I love the science fiction and fantasy stuff, but I wasn't making enough money in it. And so I decided that I moved into this stuff where I'd be paid a lot more, but I didn't really enjoy it.

Paul Povolni (35:38.946)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (35:53.792)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (35:53.9)
And so eventually, eventually I just got tired of all of it. And so I stepped away. I didn't pick up a paintbrush for two years. And then I was, I'm sure I was burned out. I was working like 15, 16 hour days and I'd take one day off in between projects and then jump on the next project. And so I took two years off.

Paul Povolni (36:01.185)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (36:07.713)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (36:13.92)
I think for a lot of young designers and artists, I think they sometimes have a hard time taking their personal feelings out of certain projects when they need to. And that's kind of what you were sharing is, you know, I know as a young designer for me, like everything for me was personal. Like I, here's my baby, you know, that I've created, love my baby. And then when somebody would come back,

Kevin Murphy (36:17.006)
Thanks.

Kevin Murphy (36:37.954)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (36:41.386)
with their opinion or with strategy or whatever, I'd get offended because it's like, you don't understand how beautiful this thing is that I just created for you. You know, how dare you criticize it.

Kevin Murphy (36:42.958)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (36:48.93)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're telling you your child, your baby has a face only its mother could love. And it's personal. How could you not take that personally?

Paul Povolni (36:55.906)
Right, right. Right, right. But I think that also comes with maturity is understanding when your personal subjective solution is needed and valuable and necessary and when strategy leads and how you feel about it doesn't matter, right?

Kevin Murphy (37:19.17)
Yeah, yeah. know, and part of it is just understanding people, right? That, you know, as an artist, I can have an ego about being a creative voice, but the person who's paying me can have an ego about the fact that they are paying me to get what they want. I don't want to bang heads with somebody like that. They don't need me the way that I need them, right? There are other artists. And for me, it was business. Like I viewed it as a business. These were all business dealings. And so,

Paul Povolni (37:40.993)
Right.

Kevin Murphy (37:48.886)
I tried very carefully. Where I could inject myself into it, I did because I liked the creative aspect of it. But I also recognized that there were projects and the people that I was dealing with where they didn't want, my opinions didn't matter. I didn't have a $25 million marketing team behind me telling me what the market wants. And so how could I possibly know? My opinion, my aesthetic? What do I know? And so I understood that. I understood that

Paul Povolni (38:07.541)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (38:13.442)
Hahaha

Kevin Murphy (38:17.118)
Not early on, I figured it out along the way. There were times that I overstepped because I didn't know any better. I didn't know any better. I didn't have anybody to guide me. And I have a very hard head and I have a lot of faith in myself. And so, yeah, I mean, I've overstepped a few times in my career and I've learned hard lessons from it. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:20.151)
Right.

Paul Povolni (38:24.258)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:28.662)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:39.062)
Yeah. And I think for a young artist or young designer, the sooner they can learn that, the better it is for their career is understanding, you know, when, when that is, when that push is necessary, when they need to fight for the creative and other times when they just need to do what needs to be done. And, you know, I know when I, when I led a team, when I worked in an agency and led a team of creatives, I would have to let them know when something was

Kevin Murphy (38:58.872)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:08.404)
a directive and when something was a discussion, because what would happen is we'd present concepts of whether they're marketing concepts or logos or, or, or designs and we'd put them on a wall and I would share my feedback on it. And sometimes they would take that as a directive and say, do exactly what Paul just said. And it was like, no, no, no, that was just a discussion. Like you take this and you make it your own and you kind of do your own thing. And I think for young designers and artists understanding

Kevin Murphy (39:11.032)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (39:36.374)
how to work in those circumstances when something is a discussion and when something is a directive, I think really makes a big difference with them succeeding in the area that they're at.

Kevin Murphy (39:46.542)
Well, I think one of the problems that artists run into is along the pathway you're getting your education, you're dealing with other artists. They're the ones teaching you. And artists, sadly, are notoriously bad at business. Because they don't think of what they do as business. They think of it as creative, and it's like, creative in your studio, but when you're interacting with the people who are hiring you, it's business. And you have to understand, like,

Paul Povolni (40:00.834)
You

Kevin Murphy (40:13.772)
You're not always going to be creative. You get to be creative. And look, you you have different circumstances. One way you get to be as creative as you want and the art directors just let you run because they're hiring you for what you do. And you're going to be the best at determining what you do. If they love what they see, the best thing for them to do is to stay out of your way and just let you do it. They get the cleanest version of you that way. Then you have art directors who they ask you to be creative, but then they will...

kind of reel you in based on the audience they know they have, but you have quite a bit of flexibility there. And those are conversations. They're not one direction. Those are conversations. You do a thing, they're like, well, could we get rid of this figure? It's a little bit crowded for what we're gonna be doing. you're like, well, that figure's really important. It's like, well, could we reduce the figure? And okay, good, we can now work with this. It's a conversation. And on the other end, it's, you don't know enough to have an opinion, just do what you're told. And generally,

Paul Povolni (41:02.903)
Right.

Paul Povolni (41:08.972)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (41:10.846)
Those, that last group pays a lump.

They're paying you, they know exactly what they want and they've hired you because you are what they want, but they don't want your thoughts, they want your skills. That's it. And as an artist, you can always say, you know what, I don't want to work on this project. I have ideas about this project and I think that there's a much better deliverable to be had and I'd rather not put my name on the thing you're going to make me paint.

Paul Povolni (41:14.754)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (41:21.451)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (41:40.822)
Yeah, yeah, right.

Kevin Murphy (41:41.036)
And so I'm gonna pass. appreciate the opportunity, but I can't work on this project and give you, I can't give you the best I have to offer because I don't believe in what we're about to do. And an artist can do that. And I think like as an art director, I would respect that. As long as it was done early and it didn't put me in a bad place as far as scheduling, like I could understand that. I want the best thing. And if you can't deliver that, well, okay, that's fine.

Paul Povolni (41:52.779)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (42:02.048)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (42:07.104)
Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (42:07.954)
That's maybe better than getting a painting that you know the person didn't have to harden. Because you can see that too.

Paul Povolni (42:12.042)
Right, right, Yeah. Now you had mentioned that you took a two year break, but before that you mentioned you also worked on some Star Wars stuff. What Star Wars stuff did you work on?

Kevin Murphy (42:21.422)
It was all like licensing things. I had done some puzzles, like paintings that were turned into puzzles. And with Jurassic Park I did like the boxes for toys, some of the trucks. I forget what movie came. It was sometime around 96, 97, whatever Jurassic Park movie. I think it was the second movie came out at that time. And yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the second one. And I was doing like packaging design, that type of stuff. Nothing too exciting. I wasn't working on the movie.

Paul Povolni (42:40.992)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (42:51.31)
But it was fun, like a lot of these things, was getting them, like I was getting a lot of these things. When you work on these types of projects, you usually get the materials before the movies even hit. No one's even seen the movies, and still you're getting like photo stills and reference material. Like I can't tell you over the years how many books I've read, great, great books that like people are waiting another year for it, and I've already read it in manuscript form, which is a really cool thing about working when you're doing these things and you're behind the scenes.

Paul Povolni (42:51.724)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:05.109)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:16.705)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (43:21.196)
And you have, course, know, you know, non-disclosure agreements. You can't share this stuff with anybody. You can't even tell people you're working on the project. And, but it's so cool. You get something so far in advance and it's like, it's really nice. It's really nice if you're interested in the stuff you're working on. yeah, that was all like licensing material. Like I said, toys and puzzles and game boxes and stuff like that.

Paul Povolni (43:28.512)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (43:38.22)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (43:46.058)
Yeah, yeah. Now with the, so tell me about the two year break. What happened during that time and then what resets you?

Kevin Murphy (43:52.406)
Yeah, well, think, I mean, I think I was just burned out. I basically, decided I wasn't gonna paint, illustration anymore. I finished up, I responsibly finished up all the work that I couldn't let go of. I had projects that were a year out, and I reached out to the people and I was like, look, I'm not gonna be able to do this project. I wanted to give you as much lead time as possible. Everything that was close that I knew that I would cause a problem if I bailed on, I did those jobs. But my heart really wasn't in it. I was done, I needed a break.

Paul Povolni (44:06.081)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (44:22.19)
And the truth is the Rolling Stones cover really was the thing that did that to me. I wound up, the painting came back to us and they gave us like 36 hours to renovate the entire painting. It was brutal. It was a brutal, brutal push. And it was just, was a last minute decision about some stuff. And it was because of the banner, that giant banner. They're gonna do this eight and a half story, you know, an 85 foot banner of the painting. The painting's only nine inches tall. There were little errant hairs from the brush, but at,

85 feet, they look like logs from trees. And so I had to go in and sand the painting down. And this is just logistical stuff. Like it had to be done. They decided on this banner at the last minute. And then it's like, the painting is problematic now. The painting had to be sanded down with like a 500 grit sandpaper to make it smooth as glass. And then I had to paint over every single mark exactly where it was because they had the slip case that had been designed around the image.

So I couldn't even just do the painting over. had to work over the original. it was, and we had basically 36 or 32 hours to get it done. It was a really hard push. And this happens. I mean, it's not like, you know, it's not like they were being obnoxious or difficult. It just, the timing was what it was. Things had to go to print and that banner was just a last minute decision. And so, but that really burned a hole in me. I was in,

Paul Povolni (45:17.878)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (45:40.469)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (45:43.382)
eight, seven, eight years of doing illustration. was the only project I was ever laid on. missed by three hours. But that three hours really hurt Sagmeister. So, yeah, but it was rough. It was rough. And after that, I was just, like, I was just, my heart wasn't in it. And I wasn't painting the things I wanted to paint. And when I was, I wasn't making enough money to do the things I wanted to do. Like, it's just, so, I just, I finally, cleared the deck and I took off two years.

Paul Povolni (45:49.366)
Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (46:11.564)
It wasn't my intention. I was gonna take off a week, do no work. And then I woke up one day. What happened is I took off a week and then one day I woke up, I had slept, I realized I had slept like 18 hours. And I go to the bathroom, I crawl back into bed and I slept for another 12. And when I woke up, I was like, that's not good. And then I'm thinking, like it occurs to me, it's been two years since I painted.

Paul Povolni (46:15.095)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (46:26.402)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (46:33.75)
That's when you know you're burnt out.

Kevin Murphy (46:41.026)
since two years since I had a job. I had been getting up and going to the gym and working out and doing things like that. So I'd catch a movie with a friend. So I was by myself, I was living by myself. So nobody realized like how, what a mess I was. I'd show up for things, but it's like I would show up. I slept until something happened, until I had to go out and go out, be gone for three hours, come home go right back to sleep. And so I imagine I was in some state of depression, but.

Paul Povolni (46:53.814)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (47:08.45)
Basically, when I realized I had slept almost 30 hours with a three minute break to go pee, I was like, that is not good. And so I got up and I went out and I was exhausted. It was hard. I was out for like an hour and I was tired. So I decided, I just started walking away from my house. I walked as far as I could until I was just falling off my feet. And I grabbed something to eat.

Paul Povolni (47:14.818)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (47:37.022)
like five miles away. And then I turned around and walked back and I started doing that every day as far as I could go, getting away from that bed. And I did that until like I was kind of normal again. And it didn't take very long. It was more a mental thing. But yeah, I it was bad. And then I started painting again after that. And I just started painting, like doing like large scale figure paintings. I'd always found interesting. I was painting them in book covers and I just thought,

not something compositionally, but just figures. So I did a bunch of those and eventually I started.

Paul Povolni (48:08.439)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:12.886)
Now did your style, I know the topic or the subject change, did your style change throughout all these years or did you feel it stayed the same?

Kevin Murphy (48:19.584)
Yeah, like with the illustration, only got my style, my style changed a little bit, but it was because I was learning how to paint. I actually didn't know how to paint when I was an illustrator. It's kind of funny. Like I had a pretty hardy career as an illustrator and I didn't know how to paint. Really didn't understand anything. I could get a result, which is actually not that strange. If you are willing to clock the hours and just take your time and do the work, it's not that hard.

if you have good clean reference to make decent paintings. But I didn't understand how anything worked. And because I was getting a result, it never occurred to me that I didn't know what I was doing. It's a funny thing. And that's most aspiring artists land there. And what happens is what they do is they are looking for, because they're like, I've got something going on here. So what I need is some more advanced skills like the pros use, and that'll make me better. And actually the truth is,

What they're missing are the underpinnings, the fundamentals that explain, well, why do you use a gradient? How does shadow and light work? What does color look like in the shadows and what does it look like in the light? These are simple things that if you understand them, they are in every decision you make in a painting. And most people, the overwhelming majority of people who make decent art, don't even know what the fundamentals are. If you ask them, you'd get a vacant stare.

they'd start rambling off things like perspective and drapes and human anatomy. And it's like, well, none of those things are in abstract art. So clearly they're not fundamentals of art, right? So the fundamentals apply to all genres. If it's not a fundamental in abstract art and in realism, it's not a fundamental. And so eventually, so I started doing portrait work. People started calling me about portraits, which was funny.

Paul Povolni (49:48.802)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:57.888)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (50:07.328)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (50:15.478)
I would say, would tell people, I'm not a portrait painter, but I'll take your job and I'll put it in the queue because, you know, after you've painted dragons and monsters and mundane portraits like you see in museums seem really boring. And so, like, I didn't think I would be interested in it, but I would take the job because it was good money and I like painting people. And I found that I just, really loved, the painting of it was fine, but I liked meeting people. These were people who I would never have crossed paths with them otherwise.

Paul Povolni (50:23.266)
you

Paul Povolni (50:28.855)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (50:45.946)
And I got to the point where I had a fairly affluent clientele. And these are people like, there's no universe outside of the fact that I was doing portraits where I would have ever crossed paths with them. And I've built some really wonderful relationships over the years with some of these people. They've been instrumental in opening my eyes to worlds that I didn't know existed. I mean, grew up in the Bronx. I was viewing the world through a coffee straw. I mean, you know, the,

Paul Povolni (51:11.564)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (51:15.502)
Ugly Americans, ugly Americans are educated. I was like, I mean, I didn't even, I didn't even, when I started making decent money and instead of moving out of the war zone, I just moved to a slightly better neighborhood in the war zone. Like, because I didn't know that I was, I didn't know that there was better out there. I didn't feel entitled to it. I didn't feel, like it just, it didn't occur to me. And so like going and working with some of these people and

Paul Povolni (51:29.398)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (51:43.416)
Like getting their stories, like most of these people, built their wealth. They worked very hard. They sacrificed things. They're not people who were born into it. I don't have one client that was born into the money that they made. And like to hear their stories and it's really, really, not just that it's cool, but it's eye-opening. Like how many people, the stories are almost all the same. Like they took a risk. People around them didn't believe that they were gonna be successful and they just dealt with it.

Paul Povolni (52:06.498)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (52:13.684)
and they just push through and it looked like things were gonna fail always. Looks like things are gonna collapse just before it breaks open for them. And it's like every single one of them, it was the same. No plan B. This was it. They staked everything they had on it. And so they couldn't let it fail. Didn't matter what it took, couldn't let it fail. And every one of them, that's the story pretty much across the board. And it's like, it opens your eyes. It opens your eyes to like,

Paul Povolni (52:38.166)
That's amazing.

Kevin Murphy (52:42.574)
Like you, mean, you hear stories like, even like Jeff Bezos, for all he has now, he was working in his garage when he started.

Paul Povolni (52:49.633)
Right?

Kevin Murphy (52:51.246)
Like, I mean, he took a risk, yeah. I he got some seed money from family, but they could have lost everything that they put into it. It could have been an abysmal failure, but he stuck with it. He believed in it he pushed and he pushed it. Look where he is. Like, if you have a millionth of his success, you're a millionaire, you know? you know, it's like, you know, it's like, and so, you know, maybe not a millionth, or a hundred thousandth, something like that, right? But, you know, it's like,

Paul Povolni (53:10.242)
Right, right.

Kevin Murphy (53:20.14)
these people, I started to understand more about how, like when you want something, like how you get there. And like I wouldn't have had my eyes opened up to these things if not for these interactions. And so that's enabled me to then take what I was doing. Like I eventually moved into, I opened my own school. And from there, and there's a bit of a story there, but I opened my own school.

Paul Povolni (53:33.92)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (53:48.396)
I had, actually, you what, you had asked me earlier and I kind of got around it. When I, going back to like when I first left construction and I decided I was gonna be an artist, I went home and I was still living at home with my parents. And I told my mother, she was like, you're home early today? And I was like, yeah, cool. She started crying when I told her I wanted to be an artist. She was like, you have a good paying job. What are you doing? And said, I'm gonna be an artist.

Paul Povolni (54:09.663)
the

Kevin Murphy (54:17.548)
I decided, she cried, she stood there crying. I was like, you know, and of course, you know, for me, like I'm feeling bad, but I'm like, thank you for the support. And over the year, over the year, while I was building up my skills, actually about a year and a half, I was building up these skills before I landed my first job. Literally every single person in my life, literally every person in my life, except for my older brother, came to me at some point and did me the service of telling me it's time to quit. This isn't gonna happen.

Paul Povolni (54:25.665)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (54:48.129)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (54:49.102)
100%, well, my oldest brother was the only person and they were all doing it from a place of love. Kevin, you're spinning your wheels here, it's been a year, it's not gotten you anything. Yeah, the work is really nice, but you should start looking at like what's next. None of them were mean, none of the, they weren't like trying to undermine me, but they were looking out for me.

Paul Povolni (54:55.65)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (55:14.668)
I was so focused on this and I was like, no, I'm gonna make it work. No, I'm gonna make it work. And actually my mother, at about that 18 month mark, my mother came to me one day and she told me, like, I had been living at home when I was working construction, I was putting money into the house, right? Cause I guess that we were very poor. So I was contributing to make it easier for my parents. And so my mother came to me and she was like, look, you need to go and get a real job. You need to.

Paul Povolni (55:42.946)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (55:43.983)
And she was like, if you don't get a real job and you're not contributing to the house, because I had stopped because I was running out of money from savings, she said, you're gonna have to move out. Now, this wasn't her throwing me out, it was her trying to get me to see reason. Like two days later, I got my first job. I got a phone call two days later and got my first job. was just, it was in that week.

Paul Povolni (55:59.969)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (56:04.128)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (56:08.13)
So what kept you going during that 18 months?

Kevin Murphy (56:11.764)
I was on a mission. I knew what I wanted to do. that was it. It was that simple. mean, obviously, and I was 21 years old, like I didn't have kids. I didn't have responsibilities. I could be reckless. But like I just, I knew what I wanted to do. And that was that. And I just...

it didn't occur to me that I could fail. Like I said, I was not gonna be outworked. That doesn't happen. I don't get outworked. And so I believed that as long as I put in 100 % effort, that I would eventually find my way to where I wanted to be. And yeah, I mean, that's basically how it broke down. And I said, like, even with all these people that I've met over the years who have staggering net worths, every one of them.

They'll tell you like, yeah, just before things opened up for me, was thinking about stopping because it just, things just a little grim. It looked grim, it looked like I had just squandered X amount of money and four years of my life and I was gonna have to start from scratch. I didn't even know where I was gonna start. And then I got a phone call as I was putting the gun in my mouth, the phone rang. And it, like, I can't tell you how many people I've heard that story from. And...

Paul Povolni (57:16.448)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:30.882)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (57:37.366)
You know, it's like I was no different. I had committed myself. I love this scene. There's a Batman movie with Bane. And I love this scene when they're talking about the little kid that climbs up out of this hole in the ground. It's like, how did the kid make the jump? The child did it without the rope. The rope means you can fail. It's a plan B. If you miss the jump, at least you don't die. You fall and the rope saves you from hitting the ground. You take the rope off, you have...

Paul Povolni (57:41.89)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:46.007)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Murphy (58:08.071)
zero options but to succeed. That's the attitude.

Paul Povolni (58:12.244)
Yeah, that's so good.

Kevin Murphy (58:13.686)
It's succeed or fail in a monumental fashion. And I will fight to not fail. And I think we're all like that. We are ingrained with the ability to do so much more than we think we're capable of when we have no choice. Like a joke around a psych, imagine you ran a marathon and you crossed 26 miles, you stumbled across the finish line. You can't breathe, your heart is pounding, your feet are aching. You have no gas in the tank.

and then a hundred yards off, lets a grizzly bear go. Suddenly you've got gas in the tank. You can run. You will run. You'll climb a tree. You'll get into a, you'll figure something out because you've still got gas in the tank, right? And I think that a lot of us, we're not forced to dig deep very often. We have such civilized world that we live in at this point in most places.

Paul Povolni (58:51.754)
Right, right, right.

Kevin Murphy (59:12.79)
And so we don't really know what we're capable, we don't know what we've inherited, the strength that's inside of each one of us. I mean, we're so powerful and we don't even realize it because we're never tested. We're never challenged to see what our limits are. And I think that...

Paul Povolni (59:26.54)
Right.

Paul Povolni (59:30.026)
Yeah. And for you, it was also selling all your tools, right? That moment that you were like, there's no going back.

Kevin Murphy (59:36.194)
I had made the decision in that moment. Yeah, and I think when you make the decision, right, it wasn't a maybe. I had decided that I was not going back. I hadn't decided on doing art, but I decided I wasn't going back to construction. And so there was no option. I closed that door. There was no option there in my mind. It wasn't like, well, you know, if it doesn't work out, I could go back. No. But again, I just, you know, I was raised with this idea that I could do anything I wanted to.

Paul Povolni (59:53.175)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:00:06.35)
I just had to be committed to it. And I was. And I wrestled when I was in high school and I learned the value of fighting for what you want and not surrendering. We surrender a thousand times a minute. We don't even realize it every time things get tough. It's not worth the effort. It's not worth the effort. And it's little things. But it's like, you know, something like this. I decided that there was no fight that I wasn't going to get in the trenches with.

Paul Povolni (01:00:09.377)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:00:35.008)
in order to get what I wanted. And again, very easy at 21 years old, I had very little in the way of responsibilities and I could only fall so far. I was a tough kid, like even if I want a homeless, even if my parents put me out on the street, which they wouldn't have, but the threat was made to kind of wake me up. But even had that happened, I would have been okay. And so it was easy back then, like having kids, then I would have...

Paul Povolni (01:00:44.268)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (01:00:54.176)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:01:04.503)
would have had to have been much more thoughtful. You don't get to be reckless when you have people that are dependent on you. So you, yeah. I was gonna say, so you have, if you want this and you're in your middle age, you have to be more calculating, but there's a path. There's a path. You know, you can do it. You'll be tired a lot, but there's a path, you know, and so.

Paul Povolni (01:01:07.223)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:01:11.104)
Right, right. And I think, go ahead.

Paul Povolni (01:01:21.75)
Right. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:01:27.99)
Yeah. Well, circling back to something you had shared too, about the people that you're working with now and doing the portraits and things like that is, and even your own story. I think that the difference between genius and average between great creativity and average creativity between success and failure is wrestling with the problem just a little longer. And I think that's for some people, they wrestle with a problem.

Kevin Murphy (01:01:37.294)
to you.

Kevin Murphy (01:01:45.152)
in creating a successful way.

Kevin Murphy (01:01:53.046)
Absolutely.

Paul Povolni (01:01:56.874)
and they give up at a certain point, but the people that are successful, the people that excel, the people that find better creative solutions, they just wrestle a little longer with that problem. And they're the ones that come up at the end with something amazing.

Kevin Murphy (01:02:03.47)
Thank you.

Kevin Murphy (01:02:12.994)
Yeah, I'll tell you, in the school here, one of the things I do with the students, a student will come to me and they'll tell me that a project they're working on is finished. And I don't look at the painting. I say, I don't want to see it. I want to ask you a question. If I put a million dollars on the table right now, and I said to you, you can have the million dollars if you hand me the painting and the painting is done, that it's perfect. You can have the million dollars, but if it's not, you get nothing.

Is the painting still done? And of course, every one of them goes, no. Now, that is what you just talked about. They knew it wasn't finished when they brought it to me, but it was good enough. Now, I then take it one step further. They'll go back and they'll make their changes. They'll come back to me and then I up the ante. So I just offered you, right, carrot. How about I offer you the stick? Imagine...

Paul Povolni (01:02:50.163)
Ha

Kevin Murphy (01:03:11.67)
If that painting, when you show it to me, if it's not done right, we take your left hand and cut it.

Paul Povolni (01:03:17.527)
you

Kevin Murphy (01:03:17.856)
Is the painting done? And of course the answer is nope. Why don't you go back and fix it now? And when they come back later on, they're not perfect, but they are much improved. Now, what I say to them at that point is, if you could have delivered this painting after being threatened, why couldn't you deliver it without the threat? Therein lies the door to greatness. How do you perform every task as if your life depends on it?

when you have no pressure to do so. You can figure out that. You can do anything. There is no boundary you can't get over. And like I've built my career on that thinking. Every painting I ever did, I treated it like it was the one that was going to define my career.

I do everything that way. I have an art program that is 15 years old. It is in its 18th iteration because I keep finding ways to make it better and I refuse to let it be less than it can be. I go back like my life depends on it and it's exhausting, but I go back like my life depends on it because the truth is my program in the hands of somebody who desperately is looking to become an artist, this is life and death for them. This is the pathway.

Paul Povolni (01:04:08.289)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:04:22.293)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:04:33.944)
for them to be able to have the career that changes their life the way art changed mine. I would be a construction worker probably. I probably would have found myself back in construction had I not succeeded in art. And I went from being dirt poor to living in one of the most affluent communities in the country. My children have every benefit I didn't. And I have been able to do that for my two daughters. They have an incredible life and

I don't have to, my younger daughter is taking over my school. I'm actually retiring at the end of August from the school. We still have the franchise schools, thank you, and we still have the online school. But from my brick and mortar school where I'm sitting right now, my 19 year old daughter who's in college is stepping into the tip of the spear of an empire. And she'll be running things from here. And I never have to worry about.

Paul Povolni (01:05:10.28)
Alright, congratulations.

Kevin Murphy (01:05:31.584)
She'll be retired probably by 32.

Paul Povolni (01:05:34.988)
Wow. Wow. So tell me.

Kevin Murphy (01:05:36.802)
Yeah, and I've been able as a dad, like any dad knows what that is. And my older daughter, she's got, there's all the things I've got set up for her, but to be able to secure their futures, to make sure there is no, there's no rock bottom for them. My daughters, they will be okay no matter what, forever. I sleep well at night knowing that. And art has done that for me. And so for me, what I'm building here in my program,

is the ability or it's the invitation for other people to have access to that. This is the education I wish I had when I was coming up because it would have made life so much easier. I have clawed my way here ignorant for so long, even while I built a career. And it's like, you the dumber you are, the less you know about something, the harder you have to work. And I, yeah, so I'm trying to kind of smooth the path for anybody who's willing to come in and do the work that wants to.

Paul Povolni (01:06:16.14)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:06:24.255)
Right.

Kevin Murphy (01:06:32.032)
wants to build something in the arts.

Paul Povolni (01:06:34.444)
So tell me a little bit more about your programs and your school. Who is it for and who is it not for?

Kevin Murphy (01:06:40.782)
So the program that we offer, so like the brick and mortar schools, we've got 23 of them. 21 are in the US and we've got one in Malaysia and one in Australia and Melbourne. But we've, well, that's your hometown? Yeah, so yeah, we've got one there. And so then we've got the online school, which is Evolve Artist. And basically it's a fundamental education. So what I was saying earlier, like most people, they kind of dabble little bit and they get some results that they're

Paul Povolni (01:06:51.318)
Hey, my hometown. Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:07:10.69)
You know, they're not ecstatic about them, but they're comfortable and they're happy. And so what they do is they are of the impression that because they're getting some results that they know what they're doing, right? like for me, the best way to equate this, anybody who's like, there's a great thing out there, right? They're saying like the average man believes he is 4,000 % better at fighting than he is. The average man who gets into, you know, who's gotten to fights growing up and know, everyone once in a while gets it.

has no idea what a professional fighter can do. No idea. A professional fighter, if you've been in a hundred street fights and you get into a fight with a professional fighter, you will hit nothing but air and they will tag you hard every punch they throw. They will tear you apart. I've studied martial arts in one form or another for 30 years. I I love this stuff. I wrestled when I was young. I studied Jiu-Jitsu for 13 years. I box, I did judo. Love this stuff.

Paul Povolni (01:07:42.956)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:08:10.21)
I mean, I've competed, a professional fighter would eat me alive. There'd be nothing I could do to a professional fighter. And I'm pretty good, I know what I'm doing. A person who's not been trained at all, but that doesn't mean they don't think they can fight, right? And it's the same in all things, but going back to art, the idea that you can make some things doesn't mean you know anything. Just paying attention and taking your time will give you a decent result. And so what we look to is,

Paul Povolni (01:08:14.475)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:08:36.95)
greater and greater, more advanced skills, a better color mixture for a skin tone or things like that. When the truth is, that's not what you need. You don't need somebody to tell you what colors to mix for skin. You need to understand how color works. What does it do? How do we make it function for us? The fundamentals are very simple, like fundamental. But if you understand fundamentals, they become, really empowering.

Paul Povolni (01:08:57.537)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:09:01.986)
because they affect every decision across the entire painting and across your entire career as you create. And so what we do is we have boiled the program, how you train art, down to fundamentals. And as far as I can see, there are no other schools. I know most of the pros who run schools, because you're not going to find an education in a place where you don't have a working professional teaching. Because if you're not a working professional, what are you teaching?

You're not teaching professional skills. You're clearly not capable of it yourself. So all the college educated artists that are not full-time working professional artists, they've got almost nothing to offer. More confusion than anything else. Then when you look at the professionals, you've got two groups. The ones who are so far removed from those core fundamentals, they can't understand why you can't just paint like them when they tell you what to do. And then the others who have made some sense of it and they're able to disseminate the information.

Paul Povolni (01:09:52.8)
Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:09:57.976)
but that last group is very small. It's almost like an Olympic skier, like, you know, talking to you about going down the hill really fast and then turning so you don't hit things. That's how you ski. Well, that doesn't help me. No, no, no, let me show you how it's done. When you watch the Olympic skier go down in this like, well, it doesn't look that hard. But it's, you know, it's like, it's so easy to forget what it's like as a pro. It's so easy to forget what it's like.

Paul Povolni (01:10:08.45)
Yeah, right.

Paul Povolni (01:10:17.538)
Right.

Kevin Murphy (01:10:23.48)
to be blind and not know what you're looking at and not be able to make sense of it, not be able to organize it. And so what we teach is those ground floor fundamentals or foundations that you will then build a tower of experience on top of. And I've worked very, very hard to create a program that is frictionless. So one of the problems that we've run into is people, they'll do some work and it'll get hard and they give up.

It's the nature of most people. But what if it never got hard? What if it was just time served? And so these 18 iterations have been me shaving away the jagged corners, trying to take something that's this big and cut it in half and give it to you in two pieces and break that down and give it that to you in two more pieces. And if the pills are small enough, you don't even know you're swallowing them. And that's really what I've tried to do in the program.

I can take a student from never having picked up a brush to producing museum grade work, like old master level work. have 15 and 16 year olds that are internationally recognized for the work they do, just incredible stuff, like jaw dropping work. It's hard to even describe how good they are. Like 15 year olds that produce the kind of work that 20 year veteran illustrators are producing.

Paul Povolni (01:11:34.379)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (01:11:46.702)
15 years old, they've been painting for three years. And clearly they're doing the work. All I can do is open the doors and show them. I can give them a nugget of information, but they've got to clock the time. And all that is, is if you really want to learn and you love art, it's just time served. And if you don't like it, if you don't like art, you're not really that into it.

Paul Povolni (01:11:50.018)
amazing.

Paul Povolni (01:11:59.564)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:12:07.02)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:12:10.902)
it's gonna be grueling because you don't like what you're doing. You don't wanna sit in front of the easel. You're gonna be sitting there thinking like, there's a movie coming on in an hour and I'd rather be there. And so if you really are interested in being exceptional at making art, this program opens up that door. And it's just time-series.

Paul Povolni (01:12:19.468)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:12:28.61)
Now is it for hobbyists or people who want to be professionals? And get paid for

Kevin Murphy (01:12:32.95)
If so, for both, right? The thing is, if you're gonna be a hobbyist, why produce bad work? Right? Why? Like I wasn't interested in being an Olympic wrestler, but I wrestled hard and I wanted to be good at it. Like everything I do, I'm like that. I cook, I love cooking, I love entertaining. And so I've learned to be a good cook because I don't wanna entertain and have people then leave my house and go to McDonald's on the way home because they're starving.

because they didn't want to eat the garbage I was serving. And so, you know, for anybody who, you know, that they would love to just be exceptional at this, why do a hobby at, you know, a mid-level when you have access for very little effort? Because it really is very little effort. If you just do, but this is one of the problems is people come in and they have preconceived ideas. And so they intermingle the ignorance, the stuff they figured out on their own that doesn't work. And they intermingle it with the education.

The trick to this is you have to let go of all the things you think you know and let what I teach you push those things out. Everything you need to know to be a working professional painter, I can teach and the program that we offer teaches. But why not be a hobbyist at that level? Why not produce jaw-dropping, incredible, mind-boggling artwork? Even if it's just for a hobby. Like if you want to paint and give paintings away to people, why give them mediocre paintings when you can give them like,

Paul Povolni (01:13:39.308)
Well, yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:13:48.759)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:13:55.575)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:14:02.295)
the kind of stuff that hangs in museums, even if you're just doing it for fun.

Paul Povolni (01:14:04.52)
Right. When they say that about even learning the guitar is if you learn, if you self taught on the guitar, you pick up bad habits that limit you in getting better. Like you'll hit a, you'll hit a wall, you'll hit a point where you can't get better because you've developed bad habits in doing stuff. And so it sounds like what you do is deconstruct even those hobbyists and those people that have come to you and feel they're professional and kind of starting back off at the fundamentals that will then make them limitless. Right.

Kevin Murphy (01:14:14.541)
Yes.

Kevin Murphy (01:14:25.123)
Yes.

Kevin Murphy (01:14:33.112)
Yes, and look, mean, have, people are funny. I mean, human beings, and I'm no different, not in art, but in other things, will argue for our deficiencies. We will defend them. We know they're there, but we will fight to maintain them. So I had a lady come in into the school a couple of weeks back. She brought her kids in, and she was saying how she has taken a number of art classes, and a couple of, she's name dropping the schools. And I was like, okay, like.

Paul Povolni (01:14:43.842)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:14:57.026)
And then she asked me about her taking class and could she skip over a bunch of the beginner stuff? You know, the beginner stuff is the fundamentals. Gotta lay the groundwork, right? And I said, well, no, not really. And she said, well, but I've been painting for years. And I said to her, if you knew the fundamentals, which is what we teach, you wouldn't be looking for a class. Because if you know the fundamentals, then all you need to do is earn the experience. You don't need other teachers showing you stuff. Fundamentals are fundamental.

Right? so, and she kind of pushed back against that. She was interested in taking her class, but she didn't want to have to start at the beginning. And so I explained to her, like, art is a language. It's a visual language. But imagine that you have a PhD in French, but you want to write poetry or a PhD in, you know, Chinese. You want to write poetry in English. You have to start with the alphabet. You can't write poetry. You have an alphabet, boring as it may be. And so,

Imagine like you, somebody teaches you the alphabet and they leave out five letters. That language becomes very clumsy. Those 26 fundamental letters that make up the entire language, five of them, even random ones, you take out like X, Z, Y, you'd be surprised how clumsy the language becomes even with the obscure letters. So what you might have been able to describe with all 26 letters in one sentence,

might take you three paragraphs to kind of circle around it to finally get to a place where the explanation is exactly what you want it to be. Now imagine if somebody forgot to teach you the vowels. The entire language collapses. It's still only 20 % of the fundamentals. The entire language collapses. You can't make a single word. So in art, the fundamentals are simple as four. That's it. Integrating them.

Keeping them organized in your head is the key. And process is how you do that. And that's what we teach. We teach how the fundamentals work, and then we give a process for managing them. But it's anyway, with this lady, she finally got, yeah, she got irritated with me. And I'm like, I don't know why you're getting irritated with me. Like, you know? And so, but she's explaining to me how she knows what she's doing. And I said, I said, look, you know, I'll make the point to you.

Kevin Murphy (01:17:18.264)
Do you know what a gradient is? A gradient is just a fade between two things. It's a soft edge. And I asked her, can you tell me what a gradient is used for? It's used for two things and two things only. And if you use it for anything else, it starts to immediately degrade the integrity of a painting. And if you don't use it in the place it's supposed to go, it immediately degrades the integrity of the painting. She couldn't tell me, that's day one stuff. I was like, you can't make paintings if you don't understand this. You're just...

painting what you see, that's not a skillset. Anyway, so she left. She actually signed her daughters up at one of the other schools where I don't teach.

Paul Povolni (01:17:58.53)
you

wow. So you mentioned that there are four fundamentals. What are those four fundamentals?

Kevin Murphy (01:18:05.304)
So there's value, how dark or light a thing is. And we start in grayscale because all fundamentals can be taught in grayscale. So we teach how dark and light, and we say dark and light, it's actually how shadow and light work. And this is built around cognitive science. Now that they're gaining such information about how the brain processes data, how the visual cortex works, they're really making sense of this. And so what we're doing when we make a piece of art is we're crafting an illusion.

giving the impression that something is three dimensional, that there's light and shadow moving across the subject, right? And so it's almost like the movie, Matrix, like there are rules to make the illusion real and everything in that painting has to live within the rules. You have to understand what the rules are. And if you understand, you become powerful. You become able to manage them. And so we start by breaking images down into what is in the shadow and what is in the light, not how dark or light they are. And so the way that an illusion holds is

What we wanna do is we wanna create something where your brain, when it takes the visual information in, doesn't question it. It's so crystal clear and obvious that it's like, yeah, that makes sense. And so shadows are always darker than lights. It doesn't matter what the reference material tells you. All shadows must be darker than all lights. Now, that doesn't actually happen in the real world. If you have a black object that's not shiny and you shine a light on it, the lit part of it's still very dark.

And then if you have a light object, white object that's very shiny, the shadows are gonna be quite luminous. But if you paint it that way, the subconscious mind can't make sense of a pattern. There are some things that are dark and some things that are lights, but I'm not seeing what's shadow and what's light. So if you make a painting where all shadows, all shadows, no matter what, are darker than all lights, that immediately changes how the subconscious mind is able to process that data, and that split second recognizes what's light and what's shadow.

It doesn't see it as dark and light, it sees it as light and shadow. And your brain uses shadows for certain things. Crystal clear, we know that it's used to discern certain things and make sense of the world. So we're utilizing that. The second thing is edges. There are two types of edges, sharp edges and graded edges. Sharp edges define all things as a starting point, and then gradients or fades, soft edges, are used entirely to explain

Kevin Murphy (01:20:25.806)
three dimensional volume in rounded objects. So people are like, can't, my paintings are flat. Well, a gradient is what's missing, properly placed. They also are contribute, they're not entirely responsible for, but they contribute to the impression of depth and distance, but nothing else. And if you put them in other places, when you look at the image, your brain can't see the pattern because there's randomly softened edges and things and those don't fit with the other ones. And so the key is to make clear sense of

what a gradient does and what it doesn't do. What lights and shadows look like having a clear defining edge. And then of course what we do is we teach the fundamentals, values and edges. And once we have all of that down, and of course there's architecture on the palette. How you set up a palette so you have a system in place. It's almost like assembly line. The power of the assembly line can't be overstated. And so we learn to paint, at least at the beginning when we're learning, through an assembly line.

Once those fundamentals are locked in, then you're free. Now you understand how it works. You don't need any of that structure. You can just create. But once we have the fundamentals learned in grayscale, we integrate color into it. It takes five hours to teach how to match color, and then students can paint in color at the same level they were painting in grayscale. From there, we then have another block where we teach how to move your stuff up to a hyper level of precision. And then from there, we just paint.

Paul Povolni (01:21:52.716)
Wow.

Kevin Murphy (01:21:52.952)
But it's broken down. It's not a complex thing. And we have tons of videos on this stuff. We have tons of videos on this. If you go onto YouTube and Evolve Artists YouTube page, tons of paintings of me, like where I'm doing paintings. You can see a lot of these things in action. And in fact, think for your audience, have something. I think it's evolveartist.com slash head smack. There'll be a thing there where they'll get access to a video where I actually show this in action.

I show all the steps in grayscale and how it applies. It's like a nine minute video, but it's pretty cool if you're already making art to see how an illusion is crafted. And you might find like you're doing some of those things where you didn't understand them, but that it makes sense and you can immediately apply it what you're already doing, right? Because it's not like you have to take a class. Sometimes the experience, all that's missing is the nugget of knowledge. And if you're given that nugget of knowledge, you've got enough experience, it's like,

Paul Povolni (01:22:23.252)
Awesome, well thank you.

Kevin Murphy (01:22:50.754)
That's the piece that was missing now that I see that I can make sense of it. And you can move forward with your work.

Paul Povolni (01:22:57.216)
Wow, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much, Kevin. And that link again is evolveartists.com forward slash head smack. Thank you for sharing what you've shared. Before we wrap up, I've got two final questions that I want to ask you. The first one kind of relates back to your story and the fact that you didn't have any support except for, you know, one person, your older brother. Was there a point where your mom finally said, you know what, you were right? It did, it is going to work.

Kevin Murphy (01:23:03.278)
Thank you.

Kevin Murphy (01:23:25.034)
You know, no, not really, not really. I've done a lot of, I didn't go to college, but I lecture in them all the time. So this is a number of years back, I had already, you know, I was done with my illustration career. I was doing portrait work. I make a very good living doing portraits. And I had opened the school, the school had been open for, my school had been open for a few years already. Financially, I was fine, was doing very well.

Paul Povolni (01:23:34.102)
Hahaha

Kevin Murphy (01:23:55.186)
and doing something I loved. Basically what my parents told me to do, what they taught me to do. Anyway, so I used to go and lecture at the university that my older brother works at. every few years they kind of cycle around and every department has the opportunity to bring in a professional from their field, give them a bachelor's degree, just give it to them. And then scholarships, a full scholarship and your one year to finish a master's degree in the school.

and then you teach for three years at the school as basically as payoff. And so my brother, we were at Thanksgiving dinner and my older brother brings this up. Hey, the guy asked, said, if you'd be interested, he would love to have you do this with them. And I said, I really wasn't interested. I didn't feel like driving, you know, an hour and a half to New York to go to the college a couple of nights a week. I was busy. I had a lot of things going on. I still had my kids were still pretty young.

I was just, my school was, I was still growing my school. I had a lot going on. So I said, you know, please tell him I said thank you, but I'm gonna have to pass. My mother had a fit. She was like, what are you thinking? You're gonna have a degree. You could have a degree and you can teach in a college. And I was like, I have my own school. I have two of them in fact. And I'm still doing portrait work. And yeah, I mean, it was like, I mean, this is even, this is only maybe,

Paul Povolni (01:25:11.04)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:25:18.51)
10 years ago. was, you know, and the funny thing about it, I finally quieted, I mean, at the time I was making more money than all three of my brothers combined. The three of them, like 21 years of advanced degrees. I was only working, I was only working about 20 hours a week and I was out earning all three of them together and doing something I love. Now my brothers all do work that they love. We all are in fields that we enjoy. But it's like,

Paul Povolni (01:25:19.968)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:25:31.916)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:25:45.28)
My mother said to me, like, well, what if this all goes away someday? And I'm like, like, I don't know what to say. Like, I don't know what to say. Like, everything can go away. And I said, like, you know, I have money put away. I will figure it out, but I don't expect that to happen. I'm actually quite diversified in the work that I'm doing. I'm using the same skillset, but I'm diversified. I have portrait work. I have my school. I'm looking now at franchises. I'm like online program. I've got a lot of things going on.

Paul Povolni (01:25:52.928)
Yeah, yeah, right.

Kevin Murphy (01:26:12.76)
And if one collapses, I've got the other three, right? So, but yeah, like even as early as 10 years ago, I mean, you my parents, my father recently passed, but my mother, she understands like, I am successful. I'm successful and financially I'm fine. But it took a very long time, very long time for her to get there. you know, and so I don't think, you know, she had this idea because she didn't go to college that that was something I needed.

It's not necessary for this. I've never had anybody ask me where I went to school other than a curiosity. They never ask me before they write me a $40,000 check for a portrait where I went to school to see whether or not I was qualified. They look at my work. I'm either qualified or I'm not. They want to buy the skill set that I have or not. Where I went to school is irrelevant. There lots of college-educated artists who have no painting skills whatsoever. In fact, I'd argue the overwhelming majority

Paul Povolni (01:26:41.58)
Right.

Paul Povolni (01:26:55.008)
Right. Right.

Kevin Murphy (01:27:10.528)
And there are a good number of people who are very serious professionals that didn't go to college. And so, this is one of those things like you can either make art or you can't. And if you can, people will pay you for it. And if you can't, it doesn't matter what your pedigree is. People won't buy garbage. They know garbage when they see it.

Paul Povolni (01:27:31.872)
Yeah, yeah. So final question. What's a head smack or a question that you wish I'd asked you?

Kevin Murphy (01:27:44.482)
I don't know, I mean, I think you really kind of cut to the chase on all of this.

I don't know. mean, think what we covered was actually really good. think the idea...

Like if I were listening to this podcast, like the thing that I would walk away with most is that idea of like the kid bringing the painting to me and me asking if I put a million dollars on the table. Like most of us never push ourselves like as if we were threatened. What could we do? What could I as a human being do? What am I capable of if pushed that far? And how do I access that focus? I don't care what it is you're doing.

You know, it doesn't matter. Like, I think, like for me, if I were gonna walk away with one powerful piece of something, that would be it. And anybody can apply that right now to something they have going on. You hear that voice in your head, okay, that's good. Yeah, but is it done? Is it done right? Have I met my potential in this thing? Even if it's just cooking a meal. Is it good enough? Like, there's a, I think it's the Army Rangers, they have a saying, good enough is never good enough.

Paul Povolni (01:28:46.998)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:29:00.002)
And I think it's the Army Rangers, the US Army Rangers. think that's their saying. But it's such a powerful idea. We're never threatened. We're never really challenged. And so whatever we deliver is enough. And just look, that could even go as far as like the relationship you have with your wife or your husband or your kids. Like, what am I doing? Am I just clocking in and kind of doing just enough? Or am I serious about this? Am I treating this with the level of care?

Paul Povolni (01:29:00.002)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:29:11.072)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:29:29.954)
that I should based on how important it is to me. It's a very powerful idea. And I think, again, when we start putting it in that context, like what could I do with this thing if a million dollars was on the table? And then after that, well, I know what I would do. I'd do a lot more. Now, what if my life were on the line? I'd do even a lot more. Well, why can't I find that energy every day in everything that I do? Because think about how-

Paul Povolni (01:29:53.282)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:30:00.11)
how powerful you would be and what, like how you would be perceived by the people around you delivering at that level, just as a matter of course. Wow, it's like, there's a guy, David Goggins, I don't know if you're familiar with him. He's an insane, insane human being. He's the epitome of that. He's a hundred percent everything he does. You know, I heard this great story, I'm sure everybody who knows who David Goggins is has heard this. He went to a marathon, it's a 24 hour race.

Paul Povolni (01:30:09.12)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:30:12.785)
yeah, yeah. my goodness.

Paul Povolni (01:30:18.816)
Right?

Kevin Murphy (01:30:29.326)
24 hour races tagged him, it's I think it's four or five guys on a team. And they run for 24 hours and the first person, well the last person running.

wins. And if you cross the finish line first, at the end of the 24 hours, you win, right? He showed up by himself and ran for 24 hours without taking a break. Meanwhile, all the other teams, you run one mile, you got four miles, your team is running one at a time, and then you get tagged back in. He ran the 24 hours by himself.

Paul Povolni (01:30:48.364)
Ha ha.

Paul Povolni (01:31:03.426)
Yeah, wow.

Kevin Murphy (01:31:04.556)
He's not superhuman. He's found a way to dig that deep. What could any of us do to save our own children? Wow, like what we're capable of. Well, where is that energy in the day-to-day stuff that we do? Why isn't it accessible? Man, like that's... Like even for me, I do a lot. I am embarrassed at the level at which I produce when I think about that as an idea. I could do so much more.

Paul Povolni (01:31:11.81)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:31:33.694)
I'm tired. It's not really that important. But I think like, yeah, like I said, mean, I think I had a great time talking to you. I don't know that there's something that I would have said was left out. I think this conversation was really, really tight. But if there was one thing to focus on, I think that's the coolest thing because if you can figure that out, you can impact your life right now, this moment. It's not tomorrow, it's not next week. It's just a switch in your head. That's all it is and you just gotta find it. So.

Paul Povolni (01:31:53.644)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:31:59.147)
Yeah.

Kevin Murphy (01:32:02.776)
But yeah, I think that's.

Paul Povolni (01:32:03.018)
Man, that was so good. I love it. That was such a great way to end this and a great way to wrap it up with a very powerful head smack that I think is so applicable to, like you said, every part of our lives. know, often I've said, you know, you don't go for it'll work, you go for it'll wow. And a lot of people stop at it'll work and they don't go to it'll wow. And so, man, Kevin, this has been so good. Once again, evolveartist.com forward slash.

Kevin Murphy (01:32:12.654)
Thank you.

Kevin Murphy (01:32:19.768)
you

Paul Povolni (01:32:32.226)
Headsmack. Be sure to check it out. Be sure to check out Kevin's work. Be sure to check out his schools, his programs. I think if you've got any kind of desire at all as an artist to create beautiful work, you definitely need to check out what he's doing, man. Kevin, thank you so much.

Kevin Murphy (01:32:51.384)
Paul, thank you, it's been great. I have had a really wonderful time. Thank you for having me. Okay, take care.