Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work · Nick Petrella and Andy Heise

#371: Rich Simmons (Visual Artist) (pt. 1 of 2)

·41 min·2 clips

Pain plus creativity equals art therapy: getting it out of your system in a healthy way can save your life.

1. The Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast, episode #371 (part 1 of 2), follows British artist Rich Simmons from teenage street-art fandom in London to gallery shows in over 30 countries. 2. Hosts Andy Heiss and Nick Petrella, who have both taught at universities and conservatories, interview Simmons, who calls his genre "pop punk art" and founded the mental health message Art is the Cure and the social network Create Scene. 3. Simmons's core thesis is that being self-taught let him "make my own rules," and that business, music and storytelling lessons mattered as much as art technique. 4. His breakthrough came with a stencil of Will and Kate dressed as the Sex Pistols, painted at South Bank Skate Park before the royal wedding, which by the end of the day drew the BBC, Japanese TV and five paparazzi and led to exhibiting next to Banksy and Picasso at Opera Gallery. 5. He says he learned stencil cutting by taking things apart, through trial and error, YouTube videos and daily practice at Leake Street tunnel under Waterloo station, so the success "didn't come from nowhere." 6. Being untaught came with costs, he says: galleries in New York refused resin-finished work, and a thousand blue skull t-shirts in a red-shirt market became his example of skipping research, forcing him to remake five pieces and pay shipping both ways. 7. Simmons traces his rule-breaking to pop punk bands like blink-182, skateboarding friends and garage bands, where "can't go to a gig, so let's start our own band" became his template for hooks, merchandise and ticket sales. 8. He calls Da Vinci his hero, visiting the Madonna of the Rocks at the National Gallery and the Mona Lisa in Paris, and claims Da Vinci and Michelangelo were stencil artists who transferred drawings with pinholes and chalk, concluding that "today he'd be a punk." 9. Simmons says art helped him through a broken home, bullying and an undiagnosed autism spectrum experience, and he teaches schools that "pain plus creativity equals art therapy," describing mental health as "an invisible straitjacket" and noting he has lost friends to drugs and self-harm. 10. Aspiring artists, arts educators and mental health advocates will get the most from this episode.

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