Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Gallagher.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I always wanted to be a journalist and a writer and considered art a hobby. I was an only child and my parents traveled a lot and to help keep me occupied during the long airplane and car trips, they got me sketchbooks to draw in. I was a doodler, drawing in the margins of notebook paper to the detriment of teachers and professors who thought I wasn’t paying attention, which is probably true, though I tried to explain that it helped me stay focused. While I enjoyed drawing, however, I was never that serious about it, only taking a handful of art classes growing up, and ironically, many of them were life drawing and teachers told me that nothing I made was realistic. Of course, as I got older, my artwork took a backseat as I focused on journalism. During college, I was an editor for the student newspaper as well as drawing a weekly cartoon strip. During graduate school continuing my journalism studies, I again had a weekly cartoon in the student newspaper. But being a journalist was my main focus. I worked for a variety of publications around Los Angeles and local academic institutions writing for their internal and alumni publications, along with brief stints for papers in Hong Kong, Australia, and Ireland, but it quickly became apparent the world was journalism was shrinking and I soon found myself jobless. This was during the Great Recession and finding work was near impossible, but I did manage to land employment here and there, working odd jobs and freelance gigs. Nothing substantial until I landed a role working with graduate students in the school of social work at USC. It was tedious work and I passed the time doodling and painting. I managed to land a few art shows and displayed my artwork, which used skateboard decks as canvases. While I didn’t consider myself a professional artist, I sold most of my skateboard decks and considered switching careers. I didn’t make the full shift until I quit one job, got fired from another, and failed out of school trying to earn a degree in economics (failed is a nice way to put it, I flamed out like a bird that flew into electrical lines). All this occurred as my wife and I had a toddler and another child on the way. I persevered through all the failures with lots of support and, as luck would have it, I was contacted by both USC and an old childhood friend. The USC gig was to provide the illustrations for a workbook. The childhood friend asked me to create branding for a bike shop she was opening. Both these gigs changed my life and I haven’t looked back (though there are several times I question all of reality, but that’s part of the routine of being a creative). On top of pivoting to art, my family and I also relocated across the country for my wife to take a wonderful job with the library system here in Charleston, and the move has been a great benefit to all of us personally and professionally. I have made some amazing connections with people who’ve hired me to provide them design work and artwork for their businesses, and they continue to be among my biggest supporters and I enjoy being a part of their success and look forward to further collaborations. After seven years of being a freelance artist, I continue to provide work for my original clients, but I’ve expanded my list, creating such things as branding, logo design, random artwork, children’s book illustrations, as well as working on my own stuff. While there have been missteps and failures, I draw every day and push my abilities and it’s been amazing to watch my art evolve as well as my fanbase grow and I have my wife and children and parents and friends supporting and cheering me on through the frustration and self-doubt and success.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Pivoting to another career I never considered more than a hobby was frustrating and time-consuming, but it was necessary and exciting to change course professionally, and I did all this at a sprint. I essentially had to relearn art in a matter of weeks because of deadlines. It was both humbling and somewhat smooth because I had the time to devote to rebuilding my skillset along with growing the baseline abilities using Photoshop and other Adobe programs. However, everything else was an uphill climb since Illustrator and digital art were unknown to me and there was a lot of trial and error and failure. It required a lot of reading and rereading books and articles and watching and rewatching YouTube videos. There are times when looking at a blank page you know you have to fill with something someone is willing to pay for is daunting and makes you question why you even bother because what you create will never live up to expectation you have in your head and you struggle to even start, but you have to since you’re financially dependent on delivering a product that satisfies the client (and yourself). The two big takeaways I’ve garnered from this experiment is one, people typically don’t know what they want, they know what they don’t want, and it’s up to you to guide them to their artistic nirvana, and two, if you start off pretending you have confidence in your art and abilities, eventually that confidence becomes real, you just have to survive all the self-doubt and fears of failure in between. The road is never smooth, you just get better tires.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My art attempts to be a combination of my three passions: Puns, Cats, and Pop Culture, the latter being movies, retro fonts, comic books, cartoons, and TV shows. I may have forgotten much of what I learned in school, but the space has been filled with an encyclopedia’s worth of cultural references. Much of my art is the merging of staples, like SpongeBob Squarepants mashed with Dazed and Confused, or King of the Hill in the style of Edward Gorey, or silly puns from putting together Home Depot and Repo Man to make Home Repo Man. Throw in a play on words or two and some cats and you’ve got my entire career so far. What I’m most proud of is taking the ideas that clients have and turning them into artwork they are proud to share with their own clients, much like I’ve done for both Whitney Bullock at The Charleston Cat Groomer and Toni Castro with Coastal Cat Care. I’m always amused with my own creations but when I’m able to delight others with what I can do, that brings me much happiness.
Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
I’ve never had a mentor. For a time, I was meeting with local artists and writer in the children’s book community but with other obligations and the pandemic, it’s been hard to commit to the meetups and I’ve shifted away to focus on other things, though I haven’t entirely closed the door on writing and illustrating books for kids. I do recommend looking for art groups just to interact with other people since creativity is often a solitary endeavor and the occasional human interaction is always a plus, especially with a group who knows the reality you’re struggling in. The critiques and advice I’ve gotten in these groups have always been positive. In fact, while I’ve not experienced the mentoring relationship, there have been a lot of people who give me advice, which I stitch together like a Frankenstein monster and jolt alive with electricity in order to make all of it work for me. As for networking, social media for all its faults has been a wonderful tool for artists and I’ve connected with other creators and fans, and clients all over the world because of Instagram and Facebook and Reddit. It just takes time and patience to get your stuff in front of more eyes and build a fanbase and client list and sometimes it seems the algorithm is working against you, yet if you shrug off the frustration, it becomes just another tool you can implement that eventually benefits you. It’s an investment of time, to say the least. The only downside is that to take advantage of these benefits, you have to constantly be churning out content and the upside is that because of the unending drawing my abilities have increased tenfold; however, it is exhausting to commit to putting artwork on a near daily basis, and like time, creativity is a finite resource that needs to be replenished with rest or the well runs dry.
Contact Info:
- Email: skgallag@gmail.com
- Website: http://www.skgcreative.com
- Instagram: @the_ridden_word
