Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Maggie Keane. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Maggie , thanks for joining us today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?
The man who first hired me to be a billboard painter became a mentor, friend and father figure for the time I worked for him. He had a very down to earth, simple, understandable way of explaining what I needed to know about mixing colors, matching colors, blending edges, working brushes, and anything else relevant to achieving a photo-realistic result in a timely manner on a large scale. Whenever I work on a painting or a mural, I hear the words he used a lot to encourage or influence me in getting the results I needed.
Maggie , 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?
I never really knew what specific thing I was going to end up doing as a career, I always thought I’d be doing several different things related to art. I did drawings, I did sculpture, I did paintings. Later on I began to realize that paint was going to be my medium of choice. I always liked to work in a large format, so I did lots of large canvases while in college. Portraits became a focus because that was something I would get requested to do by friends and family and became the first kind of art that people would pay me for. I was fascinated by the courtroom artists I was seeing on TV sketching trials such as Son of Sam, etc. I began testing myself to see how fast I could do a sketch of the room around me, the people in it, the items scattered throughout the room and the perspective of how everything related spatially. On top of those concerns, was the goal of achieving a likeness of the people involved. After gaining some experience, I began to work on capturing a mental picture that I could draw from in the event that things were moving fast in the courtroom and the subjects were coming and going or causing an uproar of some kind. After college, I was hired by a Tucson tv station to work as a court sketch artist. This is not a full time job, just an “as needed” kind of position. To this day, I can be found in Federal court if there’s a high profile case that the media needs to cover. Shortly after moving to Phoenix, I was hired by my billboard company boss Ray Plouffe and learned how to paint billboards. The years I spent painting billboards were invaluable to my career as a painter. Not only was it excellent practice, it became the blueprint for the methods I still use to construct a hyper-photo-realistic painting of any subject under the sun, but especially portraits. Faces are by far the biggest challenge, and each time I paint one, I am still challenged, and I still learn something new. Like a theater actor who gets butterflies every time they’re about to go on stage, there are always butterflies at the start of a portrait. Every time I start a painting, I work to outdo the last painting. When I finish a painting or a mural, the end result needs to make me happy. If it doesn’t, I work until it does. I’ve been called a perfectionist, and when it comes to what my goal is for every drawing or painting, the term fits. That is one thing I take pride in. If I am hired to paint a mural or commission, I want to give the client more than what they think they’re going to get and I want them to be as happy with the result as I am.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
While working as an artist, I have experienced being appreciated by peers and those above me in rank or management, and also resentment from people in these positions, There are very sensitive egos involved in the art business, and some painful but valuable lessons were learned as a result of trying to coexist peacefully in a given work environment. Many things can work against a person with low self esteem, and taking knocks now and then can both injure you and help you thicken your skin and prepare you better for the next time it happens, and it often does happen again. Getting fired is, of course, something everyone wishes to avoid, as it can wreak havoc with your self esteem. If you are fired because your work is sub-par, that would first be an ego blow, but it might also suggest you may need another line of work. If your work is good or better than someone else at your job and you get fired, you need to learn the real reason you lost your job may not be about you, rather it’s about them. I was the only female working as a billboard painter, and whatever miscommunications, misunderstandings or misinterpretations between the client, corporate office and the paint shop arose and resulted in a dissatisfactory painting, it was automatically assumed by the corporate office that I was the cause. My boss treated me like a professional and had my back, but the corporate office did not. This made going to work and deriving any enjoyment out of doing something which I loved very difficult and frustrating. My boss was an incredible painter, teacher and friend, but he was not cut out to own a business, so he allowed the corporate office to buy him out, which put them in charge of everything happening in the paint shop. The pressure on me increased, and after the new schedules were finalized, a man was given my hours, and my position was eliminated. I always knew that painting billboards was only going to be temporary, because technology was going to replace the painter one day and I needed to be ready for that. I learned that the quality of my work could threaten other people. I learned that mediocrity was rewarded as long as those in positions of power could remain feeling good about themselves. I also learned that this was not the work environment or mindset for me. I learned that getting fired was going to work out in my favor. It taught me to be my own boss and to never compromise my skills or talent just to appease someone else’s sensitive ego. This sort of thing continues in the art world, and I work to steer clear and keep painting to the best of my abilities because it always pays in the end.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When I was terminated from my billboard painting job, I went to work doing the exact same thing for another billboard company. However, technology was gaining ground and printed vinyl billboards were becoming affordable. When I left billboards altogether, I satisfied a craving for working with wood and restoring and building furniture. I wanted to learn about restoring mistreated antiques, the holy grail being the restoration of antique carousel horses. I absorbed everything I could about the right way to do this and now have the restoration of 2 carousels worth of horses in my rear view mirror. The first carousel was the LeGrande Carrousel in Lake Havasu City, where I worked on repainting the horses and the rounding boards. The second was the Encanto carousel in Encanto Park in Phoenix where I rebuilt the damaged wood and repainted the horses in addition to painting the rounding boards. This work was very rewarding, but my destiny lay in large scale painting. I went to work for TDI (Transportation Displays Inc) painting city buses, most notably the Phoenix Suns buses including the Charles Barkley bus, for which I won an award. Later I was hired by a small local circus to paint their trucks. This set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in meeting my future husband, and travelling the world as his assistant in his circus acts. During this time, the city of Phoenix was beginning to open up to outdoor murals in downtown areas, so I made some acquisitions of some visible walls and put my mark on them, their visibility leading to more and more work as a muralist. In the meantime, I still appear in Federal court to sketch the high profile cases.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @maggiekeanezart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maggie.keane.16
- Linkedin: Maggie Keane Artist at self
- Twitter: maggie1one
Image Credits
Jens Larson Jeffrey King