Welcome to the fifteenth episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative field. Listen below to learn more or keep scrolling to read about Robert Bean and how he builds visual vocabularies into his art!

When he was eight, Robert Bean realized that it was possible to get paid to draw.

Growing up in North Little Rock, he’d bike to Kroger’s, buy a bunch of comics, and sit around with his friends, reading through the stacks. He’d been drawing for years already, and then he started drawing the comics, too. “I can’t remember ever not drawing, even when I was like 3, 4,” Bean shared. “I was drawing then, but comics were what finally gave it a focus. I was probably about 8 or 9 when I discovered comics. I had that light bulb go off of, ‘Someone is getting paid to make this.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, this is a job. You can do this as a job.’ And from that day forward, I was like, ‘Well, this is what I wanted to do.’ Now it changed from just being strictly a comic book illustrator to being an artist on a lot of different levels as I grew older. But that idea of, ‘Oh, I can draw pictures and someone will pay me money for this. This can be my job.’ Yeah. That was all due to comics.”

As a teenager, he started selling some work.

Then he hit a snag.

After high school, Bean went to the University of Tennessee to study graphic design. He enjoyed the work but hadn’t found the support he needed and his GPA struggled. He spent a few years at Hendrix College in Conway, then worked some odd jobs and moved around. When he knew what he wanted, he finished his Fine Art degree, with a drawing emphasis, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). “At that point, I knew what I wanted out of the experience, which made it so much better,” Bean said. “I could go in, and I could go to a professor and say, ‘I’m struggling with this. How can I get better at this? What do I need to do?’ I had very specific questions I could ask, and they were really great at helping me solve those problems. … And at that point, it was all kind of falling into place. Yes, I have an art degree, I just took a very long time, and a roundabout way of getting it.”

 

“Bulletproof Part 1: Heart of Silence”, Charcoal on Paper, 90″ x 36″ (Courtesy of Robert Bean)

And UALR is where he met Diane Harper, a fellow Little Rock artist featured on the podcast who often collaborates with Bean. “It was one of those things where we got to know each other through classes and became friends,” Bean explained. “When we both graduated, we hit that — and we were both older students and we still hit that — ‘Oh, there’s no more [seeing] all these people every week. We’re out in the cold.’ We just decided, let’s stay in touch and let’s get together every other week and have lunch. And it just started with lunches. And that grew into inviting some other artists. I think that was one of the first things we ended up doing together.”

The group grew and continues to meet every Thursday for coffee. While Bean and Harper moved onto other projects, they’ve kept their original plans of grabbing lunch and collaborating on projects. “We started saying, ‘Let’s put a show on together. Or do this together,’” Bean shared. “Then we started to collaborate on shows, and that’s where it’s fun. I love working with her, and I think we both have not only the creative side, we both work hard at the marketing and business side, too. So when you find that artist that is on both those levels with you, that’s the one you’re like, ‘Ok, we got to keep working together and come up with all sorts of cool projects to do.’”

Bean had some understanding about marketing and business due to his parents’ careers, and he brought that to his exhibition experience. “I think I’m a little bit lucky in my upbringing when it comes to that because I had a father who started his own business and my mother was the executive director of a large nonprofit,” Bean said. “And I would work part-time for them occasionally. I basically was around that. … Because of that, I picked up a lot of things that some people might not. But it is kind of an understanding of, there’s a business side to it. Even though I had all that, I also spent years–any time I could find a book on the business of art, any time I could find a book about business practices of art, I read it and I would do my best to absorb it. And then I also did something a few years ago that also really helped and I highly recommend this to any artist: start doing your own shows. When you have to do everything that the gallery does, it makes you appreciate what the gallery does so much more.”

“Bulletproof Part 2: Heart of Bronze”, Charcoal on Paper, 90″ x 36″ (Courtesy of Robert Bean)

His show experience included working with Harper on her project at Mugs Cafe, a show that featured local artists. Then Bean took it over. He worked on other shows as well. “Working with other artists and hanging shows every other month and marketing those shows and doing all the stuff that goes into it, and how do I sell this work–what I learned from that experience is invaluable,” Bean explained. “And I think sometimes it’s easier if it’s not your work. If you’re trying to sell the work of another artist, you can talk them up. You can see them from a different vantage point. … If you ever have a chance, try to sell someone else’s. Put a show on for another artist and see what it’s like to go around and shake all of those hands and talk about someone else’s work. How do you speak about it? How do you close the sale? How do you go in and say, ‘Oh, that phrase that person just said, that means they’re actually really interested in this.’”

Bean’s experience in the art world grew, but becoming a full-time artist took a little bit of time. “As far as consistent income, it took a little while,” Bean shared. “If you’re a creative person, you also have to be creative with your time.”

Bean found himself stuck between needing a job that didn’t involve his craft, wanting to spend time with friends, and still being able to practice his art. “I have to practice, I have to draw, I have to create,” Bean said. “At the same time, I don’t want my life to be nothing but, I go to work, and then I come home and go to work. … I got creative and I said, ‘Well, what would happen if my friends were going out to dinner, or we’re going out to grab a beer or something–what happens I just take a sketchbook with me?’ And so I started drawing on site. I started going out with friends and I would take a sketchbook and I would sketch while we were out. I do that all the time now.”

“Bulletproof Part 3: A Heart Distinct”, Charcoal on Paper, 90″ x 36″ (Courtesy of Robert Bean)

Bean turned the idea into a class at the Arkansas Arts Center, Urban Sketchbook, where he also serves as the Painting & Drawing Department Chair of the Museum School. “I encourage my students, if you’re sitting around in the doctor’s office, take a sketchbook,” Bean advised. “Draw in the waiting room. If you’re sitting at the DMV, draw while you’re sitting there. Waiting for your car to get fixed, sketch. You can find the time to sketch. You can find the time to keep those drawing skills alive because we have a lot more dead time in our days than we realize. It’s the idea of developing those kinds of disciplines that eventually roll around into making money. Because as soon as you start to create enough, as soon as you start to draw enough, you build a body of work. Once you build that body of work, then you can show it. It took me ten years of figuring things out. I do look back at that period in my twenties and go, what if I had that mentor when I was 21 years old that would come in and say, ‘You’ve got to do this and this and this’? Maybe I would have started to make money earlier, but I was in my late twenties before I started making money somewhat consistently with my work.”

Income still arrives in chunks sometimes. But Bean continues to practice. He also experiments with various forms of storytelling, first trying out an ambiguous style, then building a narrative format, or, more recently, dipping into using images to add depth. “I’m doing a lot of layers and depth, and putting all these different symbols in,” Robert shared. “I might put something like a fox in the image because of the symbolism of the fox. Or I really got into using the language of flowers, which is kind of a throwback to the Victorian era. Flowers will have this symbolic meaning to them. And I started putting all those little things into my drawings in an effort to get people who might actually know. It adds this level of meaning and depth. I like the idea of a visual vocabulary of reading a painting. That’s what’s driving me right now.”

And for his goals moving forward, he wants to continue to experiment. Bean explained his art style will always revolve around that graphic influence he encountered from comic books and graphic novels, but he wants to do bigger projects. “I want to do some large stuff,” Bean shared. “What happens if I do a drawing that’s like 15 feet long and 15 feet high? And where can I show that? Those kinds of things. I want to get to make these large works and getting my stuff in print. It sounds weird, but I’m kind of going in extremes. I either want to draw really, really big or I want to draw these really, really small things that are going to get in print.”

“Personal Spaces, 258 sq ft installation at Arkansas Arts Center, Acrylic on wall” (Courtesy of Robert Bean)

And he has no plans to stop curating exhibitions. But he’s also worked with over 120 artists over the past five years, sometimes managing as many as 18 shows a year across three locations. “The whole, just doing an exhibition thing, I kinda feel like I’ve got it,” Bean explained. “I don’t feel like there’s a whole lot there in terms of learning. The learning curve has flattened for me in terms of exhibitions. I mean, there’s always something to learn, but it’s not that like, ‘Oh, we should have done this.’ It’s more of little tweaks here and there for that.”

His advice for others includes not losing sight of the craft. “Art always comes first,” Bean said. “And that’s something I try really hard to teach is–no matter what you’re trying to do as a professional artist with professional practices, you have to have this core circle, that everything else orbits around, that is the art. If you’re not making enough art, nothing else matters. All those other things don’t matter. You have to have something to sell, you have to have something to exhibit, so if you’re not making it, it doesn’t matter. And I know this happened to me a couple of times as I was learning those skills. I would lose sight of being in the studio because I was getting so involved in, ‘Oh, I’m learning how to put a show up. Oh, I’m learning how to do this.’ And I would lose sight of actually making my own work. And you have to say, ‘Ok, no. Priority is making art first. I have to have so many hours in the studio making work and then I’ll figure out what to do with it.’ But there was no straight path to this.”

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Find Bean’s work at Gallery 26 in Little Rock, on Instagram, on Facebook (personal or art page), and at his website. And of course, there is MUCH, much more in the episode not covered in this article. Take a listen below: