Studio Note #29: Nobody Starts at the End.
Personal collection, featuring works by Mark Ryden, Margaret Meehan, Zachary Rossman and Cody Hudson.
Today I had a meeting with a new member of 4BR.
The first thing we talked about was art.
He told me he'd always wanted to start collecting, but every piece he really connected with seemed to cost thousands of dollars. He wasn't sure where he was supposed to begin.
I smiled because I remembered feeling exactly the same way.
I opened our first gallery space in my mid-twenties with a mountain of student debt. At the time, I couldn't afford most of the original artwork hanging on my own walls. Even with a 50% gallery discount, many of the pieces were simply out of reach. Every dollar we made, went right back into the business.
That never sat well with me, so I did something about it.
I wanted everyone who walked through our doors to feel like they could become an art collector. That's why we made sure every exhibition included affordable prints. You didn't need thousands of dollars to start. You just needed one piece that meant something to you.
As we talked, he mentioned visiting homes where every wall was covered in incredible artwork.
I told him he was looking at the end of someone else's story.
Nobody starts at the end.
When I filled my first house with art, almost everything on the walls was a print. Over time, most of those prints became original works. Others stayed because I loved them. The collection didn't appear all at once. It grew one piece at a time over many years.
I think we do this to ourselves in business more than we realize.
We compare our first client to someone else's waiting list.
Our first employee to their team of fifty.
Our first website to the company that's been refining theirs for a decade.
We look at someone's finished collection or successful business and convince ourselves we'll never get there.
But they didn't get there overnight either.
Nobody starts at the end.
They just took that first step, and kept on going.