I’m an artist who loves to facilitate creative processes. Opening up the magic for you, helping you see more clearly. I fell into it, learning to love the creative process even more than making stuff. I adore the magic in the room and the spark in your eye when you touch your creative spirit.
Creating images to help you communicate better
My company, VisualsSpeak came out of an experience in graduate school. I went to art school as an undergraduate, accidentally became a trainer and facilitator because I had a knack for it. Eventually I thought I should learn more about what I was doing. Early in graduate school I had a conversation with a professor about writing papers. I had never written a research paper, in art school we waxed poetic about how we felt about paintings. I wanted to do something more creative, build a website perhaps.
She said something shocking to me; “you have to understand the only acceptable output is to write a linear paper.” It was a moment of white hot anger, where I felt everything I knew was being cast aside as unimportant. I hated writing, linear is torture, and paper was to draw on. She may have sensed the intensity of my reaction since she quickly continued with: “it’s the only thing I know how to assess.”
In that comment, I saw a bridge. She wasn’t offering me things that worked for me because she didn’t know how. But I did know how. In that moment I became obsessed with creating tools to access information and communication beyond just words. I spent the next three years researching and testing how people intersected with images.
I started out laminating 10,000 photos from books and magazines. Organizing them, watching others reorganize them. Asking questions, watching how people used images to answer them. Unlocking what worked best to spark deeper insights and communication. When I understood what worked, I joined with my business partner Tom Tiernan to take over 20,000 photographs. We then continued testing until we had the 200 that are in our first product, the VisualsSpeak ImageSet.