Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Andy Hann. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Andy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we talk about all of your success, let’s start with a story of failure. Can you open up about a time when you’ve failed?

I had enjoyed a prosperous 40 year career in advertising in the television and film industries. Doing all national work,
winning numerous awards, with clients like HBO, CBS, ABC, National Geographic, ESPN, Sony Studios, blah blah blah…

While turning the corner to the last phase of my career, an old friend convinced me to move to NYC to work with him at a large television network as Creative Director (a company that shall remain nameless) with promises that i could chill, help support him, and ride out my career. All while I focused on photography on the side, which is what I was most interested in. Well that situation turned out to be horrible. Long hours, weekends, and horrible people above and below. So, as I had done before in my career with no problems, I quit cold turkey and left. Boom.
This time however, that plan did not work so well. 1. I was now 60 years old and not realistic about my age. 2. The LA writer’s strike happened right after I quit. 3. It was at the exact time when older white men were really looked down upon in the hiring departments 4. While it had been on a downward slide for years, the bottom finally dropped out of the TV industry. Like REALLY dropped out. 5. I had just left a great job, and really nice people at SONY studios in LA.

So there I was. 60 years, and could not find a job. For over a year.

I spent that time focusing on my photography skills, setting up a studio, and teaching myself product and portrait work. I was starting to have some successes. But just as I felt like I was getting some tail winds….

I had a stroke

Limited use of my left side. Had to use a walker to get around. Trouble speaking. Limited stamina, etc….

“Well crap!”

I spent a number of months riding that out, and to my surprise I improved within about 4 months.
And just as I was starting to get optimistic again – it was determined that I needed to rush into open heart surgery and a quadruple bypass. The stroke scared the snot out of me, but the surgery recovery was harder than anything I could ever have imagined. Not something I would wish on my worst enemy. And there I was, with another 6 months over recovery ahead of me.

My wife is a trained horticulturist, and much of the time during recovery, as a thank you to her tireless caring for me, I watched gardening shows with her on TV. After a while I slowly started feeling good enough to spend short periods in my photo studio practicing, and since I was not well enough to go out, or invite anyone in, I started shooting flowers and plants. Being inspired by all the shows I had watched with my wife. And I got hooked. I started to LOVE botanical subject matter and began using all the same product photography techniques that I had learned before.
My wife was just bring home common flowers from the supermarket and I tried to make them look as best I could.

I slowly started feeling better and better, and kept at the botanical studies, day after day, as my stamina allowed.
Eventually I had enough work to convert my entire website over to botanical subject matter, and I made the big decision that, right or wrong, I was now going to focus on that, and that alone. So I started sending the work around, first to friends, then to galleries, then to interior decorators. And somewhat to my surprise, I started getting pretty positive feedback. Enough encouragement to keep me going and push me to work ever harder. (I would have stopped had I not gotten much feedback)

Well all that outreach lead to the friend of a friend who kindly hooked me up with a wholesale fine art publisher in the bay area who ended up licensing 48 of my images to other retailers around the country. I am also selling work around the country to collectors, interior decorators, and having some nibbles from a national hotel chain.

I have a long way to go of course, both physically and monetarily, but I am now happy as can be and having a blast. I do not miss the advertising industry one bit, and I now consider all the health problems I encountered as a gift to help me get focused on an entirely new and unexpected direction in my life. A direction I would have NEVER turned to without the numerous problems I had faced. Without, essentially, being forced to.

I credit my faith and my wife for seeing me through the toughest of times – to find a whole new life and career on the other side.

Andy, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

In the 3rd grade we took a field trip to the LA County Art Museum. My parents had organized the trip for a bunch of youth from our church. Well they had miscalculated the entry costs and we did not have enough money to all get in. So my mother and I had to sit outside the museum in the courtyard and wait for the others. I was of course quite miffed.

We sat there there on the bench and I starred the whole time at one outdoor pop art sculpture. Big, bright, and colorful. From a German artist whose name I lost track of. But something clicked in me as I starred at that piece. I knew that is what I had to do. (art!) So we got back home to our apartment complex, and I rushed out to the big dumpsters in the ally and tried to find parts to make my own modern art sculpture.

I of course only made a mess and got in trouble, but I was hooked for life. An “artist” was who I was.

With the help of a charismatic junior high art teacher, I was lead to pursue a career in commercial art.
This was followed up with great art teachers in high school, who inspired me and lead me to the art school OTIS School of Design in Los Angeles.

That lead to one of my college instructors offering me a position at her company which did branding and on-air promotion for the television industry. With HBO and CBS as their main clients. The television industry was white hot right then with a long list of new cable channels about to explode. Each ready to drop some serious money into their branding and promotion. We were all living large all through the 90s

Until it all feel apart.

With the advent of 911, the dot com bubble pop, a rocky economy, the ’08 market crash, and the rise of streaming services, the writer’s strike, and the introduction of AI… the television industry has been doomed for a decade now. It was only a matter of how long could it hang on.

But none of that interests me much now, and is probably not that interesting to anyone else either.
I have always paid more attention to “tomorrow” than “yesterday”.
I was actually diagnosed with an acute “Anticipatory Anxiety Disordered”. (Which I take medication for)
It means I spend all my time worrying about what might happen tomorrow.

I have tried to use that to motivate me to always be prepared, to anticipate problems before they happen, stay one step ahead of the competition, and perhaps most importantly, to anticipate design trends and styles.

(and all of that probably lead to my stroke, but we can discuss that some other time)

But that does lead me to what I would like to talk about, and that is where I am headed:

Inspired by Rothko paintings, I have been exploring the use of minimalist botanical photography that draws the viewer in to another world via their imagination – and become more than just art hanging on a wall, but large scale – to transform a whole space. Not always attainable of course, but when all the criteria is met, the results can be pretty interesting.

“LESS IS MORE” – is the mantra that my early design mentors always grilled into me. While I accepted the teaching, in my youth, I did not yet appreciate the power or the gift of that principle.

But I do now.

I recently found this quote; “More was never the answer. The answer, it turned out, was always less”

All my career I was jealous of the popular, white hot designers following the latest trends, which it seemed, were always exploring areas that were the antithesis of LESS IS MORE. I tried, over and over for decades, to always add more. More layers. More filters. More textures. More words. But it never satisfied me. And I always felt the failure.

Now, years later, much of the work of those who I admired so much… looks silly.

Turns out my early mentors were right:
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.

I have always been a fan of post-modernism, but it was a movement that always seemed to shun nature – championing industry, technology, and “progress” instead. I distinctly remember hearing and feeling that nature references were “old-fashioned”, “kitsch”, and “boring”. I even fight those feelings to this day. But in hindsight, it now feels like that prejudice just accelerated a shorter shelf-life for that aesthetic.

Nature, it seems, is an idea that’s hard to beat.

I said all that to declare that I feel like the time is right to fill public spaces with touches of nature. Real nature is of course always best, but not always possible or affordable. So I am trying to offer strongly curated, minimal leaning, beautiful nature studies that can work in almost any setting, with any style of architecture, and any budget. Botanical subject matter is not anything I would have EVER guessed I would be involved with but I am now convinced the timing is right and I am 100% obsessed. with it.

No politics, issues, underlying symbolism, or trendy styles. Nature is timeless, soothing to the soul, and we need it in our public spaces!

My life mantras these days is these two quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret, is patience.”

“The earth laughs in flowers”

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

As I look back over my career, and reflect on the most pivotal moments and turning points, I cannot help but notice that they all were just dropped unexpectedly in my lap. By friends.

No matter how hard I tried, how much I networked, it was always the friends who unexpectedly came through for me. Sometimes when I was in a pinch, and other times when I least expected it.

And two important notes about that I think are:

1. These were not shallow acquaintances I had just met at a industry mixer. They were real friends that I had developed longterm relationships with. People I had also helped in the past. People I had mentored, praised, and just hung out with. Not expecting anything in return. Those are the ones that changed my life for the better.

2. One my be tempted to view this as; “well, I have no say in my future then?”… “these things all just happened out of your control?”… “what kind of plan is that?” I would respond that “my control” came about through my decision to be a good friend to others. To be kind, generous, and helpful to others. I can only now see this in hindsight, but I would suggest that is choosing these habits that will ensure a fruitful career and help in times of trouble.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

As a stated above, you just can’t beat real friendships. But I have also been using LinkedIn a lot lately. A little to my surprise, it has proven to be a pretty effective networking tool. I have found it easy to focus on my target audience and not waste time with those outside my target.

Personally, I feel like Instagram and Facebook eats too time. It takes too much effort to wade through the clutter and nonsense.

I have no doubt there are some resources even more helpful than LinkedIn but I am still finding them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hannpr.com/
• Instagram: @andyhann01
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyhann/