We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kevin Avery a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kevin, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

This is a great question and I actually think about this quite often. I 100% wish I would have started my fine art photography business when I was much younger! Being a professional photographer, I can genuinely say that this is the first time in my career that I honestly love what I do for a living. I tinkered around for years with so many different odd jobs and “careers” and I never could find anything that really clicked. I grew up thinking that in order to live here in Southern California I would have to have a “normal” job that made a certain amount of money and I chased that idea for way too long. I wish I could say I had this big brave moment when I finally took the leap into the life of being an artist. However, I was kind of shoved into it by the global pandemic. The job I had prior to photography dried up pretty quickly in the early months of that nightmare, so I had no choice but to take some kind of risk. I went to my dad, who was retired at the time, and I told him we were going to buy a bunch of camera gear with money we didn’t have and start taking images in the water. Fortunately, he is just as crazy as I am and he was fully on board. We’ve been chasing this dream ever since by going as full speed as we can. It’s still hard not to look back on years wasted that I could have been creating though. Especially in my case, being a water photographer, 80% of my job is knowing where to be in the water and when to be there (or oftentimes where not to be) …and when I look back on all the time that I spent surfing over the years, I have been acquiring those skills since I was a little kid. If I could talk to my 20-year-old self, I would convince myself that there are a lot more paths to success than being tied to a desk and life really speeds up as you get older so it’s better to take the big crazy leaps when you are young.

Kevin, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an “in-water” fine art photographer based in Southern California. Essentially, I tread water, I shoot images, and then I dive under the incoming waves. I fell into this business about 5 years ago when I started taking images of the ocean and tried to sell them as a “side-hustle.” In 2021 I started doing art shows which gave me the opportunity to test my work in the market to see if I could really pursue this full time. After about 5 shows, my dad and I had enough feedback to know that we needed to make this our full-time career, and that we needed to pour every ounce of effort into it that we could. Since then, this has consumed my professional life and been my full-time job. We do about 25 art shows per year and we travel as far as we can in an effort to sell my work. When I am not selling my work, I am doing whatever I can to create new work and keep pushing the creative boundaries of taking images in the ocean. I think what sets us apart from other artists is that we don’t take ourselves too seriously and we’re always just trying to have fun. I know it sounds cliché, but at the end of the day, what I provide to my customers is never life and death. Rather my hope is that my work sparks joy and peace in people. I have found over the past few years that a lot of people have an obsession with waves as much as I do, and I try to make art that gives people a chance to showcase that. The thing I am most proud of is just that I built this business from the ground up with my dad, and after 5 years we’re still here, we’re still learning, and we’re still very grateful for everything that comes our way.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

What I’ve found thus far is that the art business can be a funny business. It seems like the universal “company line” on art is that it should be supported and fostered in the community. However, every time we turn around our work is being critiqued, juried, et cetera… So, I do feel like we are constantly fighting to get our work out there and in front of people consistently. So, I think the thing that people can do to support artists is just understand that by the time you see their work at a show or gallery, that is the final step of something that has SO MANY hours and dollars behind it. If a piece of art resonates with you, let the artist know! You have no idea how much that feedback means and how valuable that is to an artist during the times of the process that aren’t under the lights. We feel extremely fortunate for every collector that we meet, but we know art is not cheap, so we feel just as fortunate when people give us feedback and let us know how our work makes them feel. Support can come in many ways, and most of our shows take months of planning to put together, so the show itself is like gameday for us, and a reaction goes a lot further than most people would think!

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is when I meet someone that genuinely connects with my work. I always say that it’s really hard to have a bad day at the beach, so usually my work elicits good memories and stories from people. The people we’ve met and the tales that we have heard over the past few years are really cool and definitely one of the major perks of the job. The ocean has a crazy energy to it, and it has been fun at the hundred or so shows that we have done to see that people love it as much as we do. It’s just fun to see that something I created can bring someone joy and happiness.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kevinaveryphotography.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevinaveryphoto/

Image Credits

They are all mine so we are good to go!