The Early Days of Your Career Looked Like Elementary School

Kimberly Brooks is a contemporary American artist and author. Kimberly integrates landscape, figuration and abstraction to address subjects of history, memory and identity. Her work has been exhibited and featured internationality.

Kimberly received her bachelor’s degree in literature from U.C. Berkeley, and was Valedictorian. She has taught art as a lecturer and adjunct faculty instructor, and was a featured speaker at TEDx Fullerton.

In this episode, I talk with Kimberly about her work as an artist, author, and editor. We talk about how she uses ConvertKit to reach and grow her audience. We talk about what people can learn from fine art, and apply it to their newsletters. We also cover the path to becoming a successful creator, and much more.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The secret to achieving your breakthrough moment
• A job most creators should charge for, but rarely do
• What you should be doing instead of blogging
• Should you be posting on Instagram?

Links & Resources

• Huffington Post
• ConvertKit
• Craft and Commerce
• Steve Jobs
• John Baldessari
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe
• Leonard Shlain
• Milton Glaser
• Macworld
• Walt Disney’s Imagineering
• Warner Music Group
• Seth Godin
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Arianna Huffington
• Huffington Post: Fine Art
• Later
• Anderson Ranch Arts Center
• Otis College of Art and Design

Kimberly Brooks’s Links

• Find Kimberly on Instagram
• Kimberly’s website
• Kimberly’s Ted Talk
• Huffington Post article, “The Gap Logo, New Coke and the Legendary Walter Landor”
• Kimberly’s book, The New Oil Painting

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kimberly:
The fundamental way to learn is, you imitate, assimilate, and then you can improvise with anything. You’re going to be thwarted in the beginning many times, and you can’t give up. You have to say, “Okay, well, I don’t care if it sucks. I don’t care if I’m going to fail. If I’m gonna fail, I’m gonna fail big. Let’s just go on.”

[00:00:29] Nathan:
In this episode I talk to Kimberly Brooks. She is a fine artist. So, painting, she has all of her art in galleries, that whole world, which is super fascinating to me. She also plays in the creative world. Newsletters, podcasts, and interviews.

She built the whole art editorial section of the Huffington Post. She built that to millions of readers. She’s done all kinds of things in the design community from the early days. So, we riff on that; Mad Men-style ad agencies in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Some great stuff.

Then she brings it all the way through to talking about what she does with ConvertKit. How she sets up her sequences, and everything else, and things that people can learn from fine art, and apply to their email newsletters and sequences.

So, it’s a fun episode. We have to do a part two, because we filled up all the time we had, and I think I only got through half my questions.

So, anyway, I’m going to get out of the way and dive in. So, here we go.

Kimberly, welcome to the show.

[00:01:37] Kimberly:
Thank you for having me, Nathan.

[00:01:39] Nathan:
There’s so many things I to talk about, because you come to the creator world from a different perspective than I do, though we both share a love for Photoshop.

[00:01:50] Kimberly:
Oh, yeah.

[00:01:51] Nathan:
We’ll start with where we met. It was at Craft and Commerce, some number of years ago.

I can’t even think. Three years ago? Four?

[00:02:01] Kimberly:
I think it was three years ago, and it was such a random whim. I don’t even know how I ended up finding it. I fell in rabbit hole. And then I came upon ConvertKit.

I was actively looking for a better way to send art show announcements. Because I’m a painter, I’m an artist.

I just felt after my previous experiences, I knew how important having a subscriber-based service was. I don’t want to get too nerdy, but I didn’t really like the competitor who shall remain unnamed. But, I found you guys, and I started getting the advertisement for the conference, and it was in Boise, Idaho.

And so I thought, I’ll just go. It was like a Ted conference for really creative nerdy people like me, but it was exactly what I was wanting. It was about marketing, which is really such a weird word because it’s really about sharing, and I loved the title.

I loved everything about it. I met some of the people that I’m really, really close with now. Then the next year it was canceled because of the pandemic, but it was amazing, and I met you, actually.

[00:03:28] Nathan:
And, and we had a really fun conversation. one thing that I want to talk about, for you is the intersection between fine art, right. And painting and that world. And then now you’re also in this world of being a writer and a creator in the sense, right. You you’ve been a writer and creative for a long time, but, but it’s, it’s like a different world of the selling things to your audience.

And. Earning money directly in that way. And so I want, like, I want to hear that as you like weave in and out of these two worlds and then just your experience there.

[00:04:02] Kimberly:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I, when I was in elementary school, we had a really competitive game of tetherball constantly going on on the playground. And it was just sort of that pole with a ball attached to a rope we would, people would line up and we would get it, and it was, see how many times, and it was just sort of like, it was very intense and I always felt like being an artist.

Being an art to me was it was the pole, you know? So like my pole is art is making art and everything about what I do. I write about it. I interview people about it. I interview other artists about their work. I make paintings 90% of the time in my studio. Like, it’s all about art, you know? So that’s like the beginning.

So I do see myself sashaying between different worlds. And I think everybody kind of does that. And then as the bicycle of technology was being built to use kind of lik...