Markus Sebastiano, Artist Entrepreneur
Show Notes:
Episode Notes:
Markus Sebastiano has carved out a niche for himself as a go to artist for interiors of restaurants and hotels across the country and as far away as Dubai. His Blochaus Gallery just opened up in a new space in Newberryport, MA.
Join us as we go down the rabbit hole on how he became an artist, his multilayered, multimedia paintings, his definition of what art is, and we even explore a bit about his recent NFT experiences.
If you like art and artists, this is a great episode to start out with.
EXPLORE THE SHOW:
Visit http://www.theartofmattmckee.com for all the episodes of the show.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CHERRY BOMB! THE PODCAST HOST MATT MCKEE
Subscribe to his newsletter, explore his Sweet Blast, Tools and Found on the Beach art series and listen to all of Matt's shows at http://www.theartofmattmckee.com
INSIDE THIS EPISODE:
Guest can be found at https://www.markussebastiano.com/ and www.theblochaus.com
His Etsy shop is here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MarkusSebastianoShop
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markuSebastiano
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artistmarkussebastiano
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markus_sebastiano/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markus-sebastiano-064b32145/
Follow Host Matt McKee on twitter and instagram https://twitter.com/mckeephoto and https://www.instagram.com/mckee_photo/
About Cherry Bomb! The Podcast
Join host Matt McKee as he talks with artists, chefs, entrepreneurs and innovators on the subjects of Food, Art and Sustainability.
The Inspiration for Cherry Bomb! The Podcast
After creating Cherry Bomb! and the rest of the Sweet Blasts series of photos, Matt found that every time he showed the works, deep conversations were sparked between him and his viewers as well as between the viewers themselves.
The podcast was the natural next step to continuing the conversation and sharing it with a wider audience.
Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Matt McKee, with consulting help from Suzanne Schultz at Canvas Fine Arts, the Specialists in Coaching for Creative People, and editing from Bill Shamlian at Orb Sound.
Markus Sebastiano Artist Entrepreneur
Cherry Bomb! The Podcast Transcription
Marcus Sebastiano 00:00
The winter, you know, you have those moments where you're like, you know, I don't know if I can swear, but what am I doing? Why did I decide to do this? You know, like, why didn't I just go get a job as a designer, you know, went to school for graphic design, I could have worked for one of the snowboard companies or stuff that I was into doing stuff that I liked. But I guess that wasn't for me.
Matt McKee 00:19
McKee, and welcome to Cherry Bomb the podcast a series of conversations with people about food, art and sustainability. Today I'm speaking in the studio with internationally known artists, Marcus Sebastiana. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his work, I'll link to his webpage in the show notes at the art of Matt McKee calm. Marcus, I appreciate you coming in. I know that thanks
Marcus Sebastiano 00:40
to look, you got a great radio voice. Yeah, there's a lot to look at him. Looking around while I talk. It's it's interesting.
Matt McKee 00:49
This is what my wife calls the inside of my head, we get
Marcus Sebastiano 00:53
a lot going on your head all the time
Matt McKee 00:55
is crazy. So you described yourself to me as a Boston based mixed media artist who specializes in exclusive large scale art installations in restaurants, hotels, commercial spaces, and homes from looking at your body of work. I get the feeling, though, that you've actually solved for that fine balance between creating art for art's sake, and also for creating art for others as a more commercial endeavor. Sure. How did you get started down this path?
Marcus Sebastiano 01:24
Man, this is a good question, and probably a long one. But I'll try to make it short as possible. I started really taking more of a fine art contemporary art approach about 10 years ago, and I started building with this certain style, this mixed media layering style. I put that out there in the world, I did a few shows, a couple people started following my work. And that led to one of my first commercial pieces was in the gallows restaurant in the south end, which interestingly enough, that piece just got stolen last month off the wall, commissioned probably seven or eight years ago, and the restaurant closed. And they were in the process of removing the piece from the outside and someone stole it. So interesting. That kind of started my career, I guess, in the restaurant industry, or the hospitality industry where, you know, as making these specific pieces for public and kind of interior spaces, you know, the more people that kind of caught on to the style of my work led to new restaurant owners or hotel owners to calling me to do more work for them.
Matt McKee 02:26
That's awesome. Yeah, mostly word of mouth, then or you actually really only
Marcus Sebastiano 02:30
ever word of mouth. And then I did a couple big shows with my friend Louis, you know, you're talking about the intersection of food and art, he started an event called Create. And they matched bartenders, chefs and visual artists together. And it was a huge event averaging like 800 people per event, we used to do it at the design center we did in the north end. And you kind of just do a pop up of all your work, you know, you make a station with the food, the drink and the art, it will be all cohesive, like as if you're going like around the world type thing. No, man, I got so many leads from those things. And I still kind of connect the dots going back now and go, you know, where did that come from? A lot to my buddy Louie de bakary. He kind of started that and opened me up to this whole other industry and group of people that I wouldn't have been exposed to.
Matt McKee 03:18
for that. You would also talk that your work has been collected now. It's in Dubai, it's all across the country.
Marcus Sebastiano 03:25
Mostly Boston, New York, Miami, all over California, mostly major cities in between, but I got a couple international collectors, London, Dubai, Greece, there's a couple places out there in the world. Yeah. That's cool to say that that, you know, landed in those different places. Yeah,
Matt McKee 03:42
either. When somebody comes to you to commission a piece or you decided you wanted to do something for yourself in the studio, how do you go about starting? One of the things that was always fascinating to be looking at your work is that it's very abstract, but at the same time, there's also some very concrete feelings that come through it.
Marcus Sebastiano 03:59
Sure. It's a multi level process. There's a lot of layers that goes into it, you know, so it depends on what type of application I'm thinking about doing. But I mean, most of my inspiration comes from whether it's like a figure a portrait, a model shot that I've seen somewhere, or texture from the street, like graffiti or just a peeling wall, weathered metal, you know, I'll take pictures with my phone often, like, Oh, I love how the pink peels off of that green chair. I'll kind of keep that in my little archive. And when I go back for inspiration, I'll say maybe I just start with this color palette. If I'm doing a commission, maybe it's something specific, like a cityscape or, you know, a dock or a bridge or something, you know, and I'll kind of bring that inspiration, the color and the texture into the piece that way. A lot of it starts on Photoshop, mostly where I kind of create, you know, the subject matter and the textures. And then I build a outside of that physically I build a canvas, usually on aluminum, and then I lay our vintage paper paint textures, sometimes metal perforated Metal, I build all those textures up, I photograph that, bring that into Photoshop. Combine that with the other concept I was already working on, it starts physically and digitally, separately, then kind of gets merged together digitally. I'll put it to physical, and then hand painted in again. So it's really like four layers, it's kind of hard to explain without looking at it. You kind of have to see it even in person just because photos don't do the depth. Justice is what people have said to me. I bought, I was certainly wondering that it was like should have bought a piece with me, I probably would have been smart. But you'll see one someday,
Matt McKee 05:36
definitely. If you're at all interested in this unique form, go check out his website. It's amazing. What is your definition of art? Let's start there.
Marcus Sebastiano 05:48
It's a great question. I've been in have quite a few debates on this too. I'm kinda from the school of thought that I feel like it's any type of expression, personal expression, even physical good craftsmen. I think it's all hard. I think it's all expression. I think if someone else can look at what someone made, and see beauty in it, or see depth or see a uniqueness. I mean, I guess from the in the art world, there's a very big difference of what's considered fine art, commercial art, and everything in between. And that comes with the school of thought that you need to get a master's in art to know how to make a piece of art where most of the people that I know that went to school for art don't make a living as an artist or even work in the art field. But I think there's something to be said about someone making a hammer in someone's seeing beauty in that, you know, like attention to detail as a craftsman and someone just painting a portrait. I think they're in the same category. And I consider them both art. And I know that classical opinions on this been in debates about whether something is fine art, and people would say, you know, my work isn't technically fine art. It's commercial art or technically, you know, I call it mixed media, which is kind of a broad category. But
Matt McKee 07:04
this is a very Duchampian question actually, yeah, I think about
Marcus Sebastiano 07:07
it, I don't really have a true opinion on it. I really don't. I consider myself an artist and a craftsman and someone that just likes to make beautiful things. I like to make things beautiful for myself. And I also appreciate other people appreciating what I make. That's how I've made a living is not just creating what I love, but creating something that other people co design with me or something, if I go do a commission, maybe I wouldn't do something specific, naturally, that they would want me to do. So then it's like kind of meeting in the middle. And I guess I'm more of an entrepreneur, in some senses, even before I am an artist,
Matt McKee 07:42
that was another subject to have wanted to go into was that you went from I don't know the exact order, but you are an artist, and you've been creating these murals, but at the same time, you created an art space out in LA, called Black House. Yep. Yeah. From what I was reading about, it almost felt like it was an incubator for young artists or emerging artists, I guess.
Marcus Sebastiano 08:04
It became that only because it was a really large space. And it was difficult to afford the rent. When we jumped in there. Almost nine years ago, I had started taking art work really seriously, like, you know, trying to become professional and sell art to make a living. I knew I needed a bigger space because I always wanted to go big. So I found this old mill building in Lawrence 250 Canal Street. And I walked into this space and man, like I was in love, it was like, No, you always have these visions of your life. And sometimes when you like physically step into it, in reality, you're like, Man, this was what I always saw in my vision in my dream, you know, and I never knew that that could have been real, you know, so I got this giant space. I knew it was gonna be a lot more than I could afford. So I just said yes. And I took it, I figured out how to get other artists to rent smaller spaces within that. So furniture makers, fashion designers, artists, photographers, painters, you name it over the course of the seven years, we probably had 30 Different people renting spots for one month, one year, you know, just kind of in and out. And then that led to building a gallery within those walls, a finished gallery that kind of became a collective, we started showing artists from all over New England and having these big shows and bringing a lot of people to Lawrence. And that's kind of what put our name on the map, leveled up again. And now we're in Newburyport was where I opened, the new block house building was sold in Lawrence and kind of the writing was on the wall. I wasn't going to be able to do the business I wanted to do there which was like, have a liquor license, sell alcohol, have a store front where people could walk in and buy things off the wall. So that's what we have now. Newburyport
Matt McKee 09:38
Wow. In your little blurb you sent to me You said I may be naive and thinking that every person has a purpose. But I'm starting to really double down on this. When I think about all the people in my life they all have a gift, a trade a skill, something that is unique to them, and something of value but not only to themselves, but to others. Life is a battle of self It's you versus Do you have yesterday? That last line? What do you mean by that?
Marcus Sebastiano 10:05
I probably plagiarize that from like Matthew McConaughey or something. I've heard a few people speak to that, it really resonated with me. Because in whatever industry you're in, you're going to have competition, you're gonna have people that do the same thing as you maybe you know, at different levels of the career, it can make you anxious, looking around and seeing what someone else is doing, if they're going bigger, or they're doing something that you wish you were doing. Of course, in the age of Instagram, and Facebook, and all this, it's like everyone showing their best selves. For me, it actually pushes me to be better. So I look at those things. But you know, when I feel anxious about it, like, Well, I'm not where I'm supposed to be in my career or been in one of the bigger shows in our basil or something, I just kind of look back and go, Well, you went from this, to this, to this to this. And you're only in the race with yourself, we all are, like going back to what I said about being blessed with certain gifts. You know, I can only look at the world through my lens and do as best a job that I can. We all do something different is what I'm saying. Like, maybe if I just was okay with focusing on being an artist myself, I would maybe already be further down the line. And technically, as a selling artist, maybe selling more pieces are more expensive or being more collected, whatever it is. But it's not like what I feel like I'm here for I'm doing something a little bit different, where it's like, I get just as much enjoyment selling someone else's art. Do selling my own.
Matt McKee 11:33
So your concept for yourself is evolving. Would you say in terms of yeah, you started out learning the craft of art and the art of art? Yeah. And then now, it's that connection that's happening with your own? Yeah,
Marcus Sebastiano 11:46
it's a few different things. Like when I'm too much in the sphere of making art, I want to be more back out connected and doing different things. And, you know, when I'm too busy doing all the other things, I want to go back into the studio and make art. So it's like, kind of like they inspire each other. And, you know, I'm often inspired by what other people do, too. I mean, we're all just looking at things and stealing color palettes and ideas. And we're all just feeding off of each other and putting things back in the pot. You know,
Matt McKee 12:13
one of the things that you had mentioned when we were talking on the phone earlier was that you were working to put together some of your work as NF T's. Yeah, I really kind of wanted to explore that. I know, I've looked at it. Sure, but got intimidated very quickly. Yeah. To the process. How was that process for you? And is it something that is worth pursuing?
Marcus Sebastiano 12:33
Yeah, so it's such a funny thing and FTS man.
Matt McKee 12:37
Maybe we should start by defining what that is. Yeah. So these non fungible
Marcus Sebastiano 12:41
tokens is what an NFT is, it's a digital asset that people can collect and trade and resell and share. I can only speak mostly to the art aspect of it. I know a lot of people are into sports cards, and, you know, selling experiences and everything now is NF T's, like buy a concert ticket as an NFT. And you get all these certain downloads with it or, you know, maybe you get to meet the artist, there's all types of things floating around. Now, within this concept, you know, it's supposed to revolutionize the world in this kind of like digital sphere people are living in.
Matt McKee 13:12
So they're using the Bitcoin concepts to sell these unique experiences. Yeah,
Marcus Sebastiano 13:19
there's a lot of complexities to it, I kind of jumped into this three month crash course, during the pandemic, being you know, in the house most of the time, and I was on the the clubhouse app. And a lot of these rooms that I joined, were all about art. And then from that, people started mentioning these NF T's. I had another group of friends, mostly West Coast that started selling them. And I kind of became part of this collective group, you know, just on a iMessage and on email and in chat, and I kind of learned a lot from them. Okay, I started asking a lot of questions. And I was in these chat rooms, learning about NF T's and figuring out, you know, I only bought a little bit of Aetherium as cryptocurrency before that. I didn't know that, like NF T's are only sold on the Ethereum network at that time. So you had to have ether as a currency to pay a gas fee to upload your NF T's. And when people bought them, they also paid a fee to buy a work was all based in Aetherium. And then now, a lot more platforms, you can sell NF t's on? Yeah, so I had some success. I sold probably a dozen on a few different platforms open. See, there's another one known origin I got accepted to foundation. Some of them you have to get accepted to others like open see, it's pretty much like the eBay of NFT is you could just learn how to upload your image. It gives you dress and everything. You have a crypto wallet, you can store it, sell it and put it out there in the world.
Matt McKee 14:45
And in terms of the success of these kinds of endeavors, is one of the things that I noticed early on when Etsy first came up. Friends of mine got involved in Etsy and we're selling some artwork on there and a lot of the fine artists ended up kind of backing out of it because it came down to, I shouldn't say the fine artists that a lot of people I talked to got out of it because it came down to how well you market yourself at the day didn't really matter what platform you were playing with great whether it was Etsy or if it was selling art shows or art fairs or things like that it really came down to do you have an audience? Have you built an audience? Can you build an audience and bring them to the marketplace?
Marcus Sebastiano 15:22
It's a really good point. I've seen a few examples of people being successful selling art in the real world, crossing over into NFT world, and being even like, 100 times that most successful people 60 something million for his Yeah, I mean, but you know, people that just hear that number, whatever, don't realize that that guy has been making a piece of art every day for the last however many years, 12 years, I forget the number how many years and that's what that one art piece was was, you know, a little clip of every single one of his pieces of art. What I love about it is that it does allow the artists, especially digital artists to monetize, like before, people wouldn't buy a digital piece of art, like something that you would be so beautiful and put, you know, hundreds of hours into it, that you're going to just view on a screen, because it's not a physical piece of art. Yeah, you know, it wasn't appreciated as much. And now people are viewing NF t's on screens, portrait style and landscape. And now they're making new canvases digital canvases. And people are collecting art in their homes and selling it showcasing and fts. It's a whole new ballgame. Now, it's very different.
Matt McKee 16:25
But how does that work? In terms of say about a piece of your work? Yep, as an NFT? Yep. Can I then print it and display it on my wall?
Marcus Sebastiano 16:35
No, the artist always retains the rights for print. The NFT is basically to show like a certificate of authenticity, that you actually own that digital image because everyone's like, well, you can still screenshot and I can put it on my TV to your like, but you don't own it. Like what makes a baseball card, you know worth what a baseball card is when you just hold in your hand and like put in a little glass case, okay? This is just like, a different way to look at that, you know, it's a digital piece, you know, it's made of pixels or whatever. But it's still you own the one of one or the series that one of 10. And you can upsell that. I mean, one of my good friends in California Holly Sebat, he's made about $1.3 million in eight months selling JPEGs I mean, you're literally selling JPEGs Wow, wow, it's pretty wild. And then the other thing that it does to protect the artist is like let's say I sell a physical piece of art here in the real world. A lot of the times I don't even know what that ends up. Yeah. If it gets resold, I don't get a percentage, which I've had people call and have me assess and they've resold my work someone else. I don't get a percentage of that. Here. It's connected to the blockchain of you upsell, you automatically get 10% or 15% of that transaction. So you see a lot of people in the market that are hot, someone buys a certain price upsells if you know sometimes I saw one today up sold it for like 70, which is like close to $30,000. Oh my God, and they got $7,000
Matt McKee 18:02
fun now I like this. Yeah, like
Marcus Sebastiano 18:04
this, because it's always tracking you back where it came from. When it's minted on blockchain.
Matt McKee 18:08
Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, it's pretty well, it seems like somebody buys a piece of art. And part of it is being able to show off in your living your may I've got a Matisse and hanging in my living room. It's a print but whatever. Yeah. Can they put it into like one of those digital?
Marcus Sebastiano 18:25
Yeah, that's what they're doing can show it off digitally. This is what I was saying about the digital canvas. Yeah. So now that's creating a whole other market where it's like, how can I display my NF T's and people are getting a kick out of just having them in their wallet on their phone, you get like this digital asset, wallet, a crypto wallet, so you can basically slide through it and just say, Hey, I own these images. I own these, these NF T's
Matt McKee 18:45
which in mind, right back to when we were trading baseball cards. Yeah. Even if
Marcus Sebastiano 18:49
it's on your phone, you're holding it like this, like the size of a card already, if not bigger, just because it's pixels and not physically printed item.
Matt McKee 18:57
And I've got a McKee over here and I'm gonna treat it to a Sebastiano.
Marcus Sebastiano 19:01
Yeah, I mean, now that trading digital cards anyway, all these, you know, athletes are getting in a piece of their of themselves.
Matt McKee 19:07
So if there was a younger emerging artist, or just any artist wants to get into doing these kinds of things, where's a good place to start going on clubhouse or
Marcus Sebastiano 19:17
there's a bunch of different resources. There's an NFT tips.com That my friends run that's really helpful. Those guys are always on clubhouse too. And Twitter. Honestly Twitter's like I never even used that before. And I got heavy using that probably seven or eight months ago because that's where all the NF T's sales are happening. And a lot of it comes down to people watch the collectors. The collectors are kind of dictating the market. As for traditional method, if some random crypto collector who you don't know who the person is, you know, blue 27 IV is like all of a sudden he starts buying up someone's work these other collectors kind of get anxious about and what does he know that I don't know. They'll go over and buy a piece of It's kind of what happened to me I had a nice little run where kind of these different collectors were getting in on it. And that's how I ended up selling a bunch of my stuff.
Matt McKee 20:07
Very cool. I'm gonna do some research then I gotta do some more homework on that,
Marcus Sebastiano 20:11
to wrap that up. I, I do believe that. You know, right now kind of NF T's is the craze and 99% of the things people are buying are crap, I don't think they're going to have any value in the future. I think it's just because it's a new thing. Everyone's trying to like dictate how the market goes. And also people have billions of dollars in cryptocurrency to spend. So a lot of these whales they call them that have just unlimited Aetherium Bitcoin, you know, multi, multi millionaire, some of them billionaires, they're just kind of having fun. They're just, they're buying things to buy it, they're kind of dictating where the market goes. But I do however, see, maybe even when the bubble kind of burst or deflates a little, I see it more being how you sell an artist, I sell original artwork, I sell reproductions on canvas of my originals. And I also sell like a lower price point like a print on unsigned print. Yeah, sometimes limited edition, they're all at different price points. I see NF t's just being within that sales kit, you know, just like, you know, an original 10,000 print is 4000. And the NFT of that is 1500, whatever it is, just so someone can still have them buy the digital asset from you, but not just like conflated crazy, it's going to be worth $20 million type of ideology.
Matt McKee 21:23
They can't put up one of your giant prints. Yeah, they can put this up in
Marcus Sebastiano 21:27
one of the NF T's Yeah, and show it on their TV.
Matt McKee 21:31
What do you wish you knew when you started?
Marcus Sebastiano 21:36
Started life. I think outside of art, I started living more than an entrepreneur style life. When I was about 20 years old, I started my first apparel company with a friend from high school, which at the time was just kind of a really big hustle. We made denim jeans in Pakistan, we had crazy line of sweatshirts, T shirts, accessories, everything. And that kind of set me down this path of creating my own reality in a sense, knowing that I kind of wanted to live in my own space and rely on myself to make a living and I wanted to live an authentic life. Outside of like, I guess the system? was an easier way to say that. I don't know. I kind of wanted to figure it out on my own basically. Yeah, I don't know if that was like the stubbornness. I wanted to own what I did for a living. Yeah. And that took a lot of tries, as opposed to working for Yeah, operations. And I always had jobs. You know, I was fortunate enough, my dad owned a sheetmetal company. So I grew up working in that place since I was probably 12. Off and on. So if I really didn't need money, I could go with him and minimum wage until I was older. But I learned how to weld at young age, I got my master's license sheet metals license, you know, I learned to build for my grandfather. And you know, I was always into like, exploring and trying new mediums and different things. But they were always a creative outlet. Not what I would like to have known. But just reiterated that, like, you're going to figure it out. Like the me now talking to that kid, I would have wanted to hear like, you got it, you're gonna be alright. You know, in the darkest moments, you know, I was telling you earlier like sleeping in a warehouse and, you know, watching mice run by and being freezing. Next, a little space heater. In the winter, you know, you have those moments where you're like, you know, I don't know if I can swear, but what am I doing? Why did I decide to do this? You know, like, why didn't I just go get a job as a designer, you know, went to school for graphic design, I could have worked one of the snowboard companies or stuff that I was into doing stuff that I liked. But I guess that wasn't for me. I could have done that. But,
Matt McKee 23:36
but now not to take us down a tangent, but now you are working with Burton snowboard.
Marcus Sebastiano 23:41
Yeah, it's all the things that I said that I hoped for. I'm checking those off the list. As time moves forward, yeah, we do an awesome program with Burton called chill with young kids. They teach them how to skateboard and then they design and make all their own skateboard decks at the end of the program, which is really cool. A very small program. We do you know, anywhere from five to 15 kids at a time. Oh, wow. So we've been doing that for four or five years with them now.
Matt McKee 24:07
Then you also mentioned to me the mutt society. Yeah, yeah. So it sounds like between forming a community of artists with blockhouse Yeah. And that's giving back to the artists community. Chill. Obviously, he's giving back to the snowboard community, which is something that I think you feel very strongly Yeah. What what is the mud society?
Marcus Sebastiano 24:27
The mud society is one of my really good friends. Trent Sanders. He owns another creative agency called 36th grade of Salem, New Hampshire. He kind of created this thing. Based on his love for biking. They're really into downhill mountain biking, which is like one of the biggest, fastest growing sports in the world. I've seen the videos so yeah, it's it's pretty wild. These guys are not Yeah. And they're fearless. And he's just overall a super generous person. And he started kind of creating this little fundraiser style. company and also putting his own money in donating bicycles to kids in need. And then that kind of grew into giving bicycles to kids specifically, they're into downhill mountain biking. And this led to, you know, several trips to Puerto Rico. They were rebuilding their whole mount bike park after it got destroyed. With the hurricanes and all that. El Salvador, Cuba, we went to Romania about two years ago. But 10 of us we brought five brand new bikes, this little town in Romania with these kids, like we're riding these junk bikes and just like, you know, Transylvania, like all the all the things you thought about Romania like we've kind of explored those that the black forests, they took me Mom bike until we we got a little roughed up me and a couple of the other guys and don't do it often. So yeah, you know, it's just, he's always been about giving back. Kind of empowering kids. I mean, bicycle is the first form of transportation. You think back? Yeah, transportation freedom. Exactly. When your kid when was that first moment? I was like, I ride my bike. Who how far can I go? Yeah,
Matt McKee 25:59
I remember calling my father saying I'm in. I'm on a payphone. I'm not sure exactly where Yeah, exactly.
Marcus Sebastiano 26:04
Yeah. Yeah. So I think he realized that and I guess a lot of us all had bicycles growing up, and you don't realize a lot of kids don't.
Matt McKee 26:12
That's wonderful. Yeah. I got one question left.
Marcus Sebastiano 26:15
That'd be good. Right? Well, this
Matt McKee 26:18
is always my favorite question. Obviously, between my sweet Plus series, and my girth, food is very important to me. Sure. At the end of the day, you get done painting, installing, or whatever you're working on, or printing out and then painting on top of that. What is your comfort food?
Marcus Sebastiano 26:37
There's a couple different ways to look at this. I was thinking about this before, because we were talking about food. You know, I'm always like, trying to look at food as fuel and not as like a comfort thing, because it's, you know, just something that I kind of battle with, but I love food. So I'm like, Alright, if I was gonna pick honestly, it would be my mom's chicken College. She's got these like amazing chicken cutlet. If it's in the winter, I would say it's something like that Sunday dinner, meatballs, chicken, Dad's garlic bread type of thing. If it's nicer, like in the summer, it would be more of like a lobster roll or something local lobster or french fries, that type of thing. And if it's just like an every day, I don't know. It's funny. I didn't eat pizza for so long. And now like, I was never like, I want pizza right now. But for the last year or so. I'm like, Man, I really crave good pizza. You know, I mean, I guess that could be that's a comfort food. Right? So yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they'll probably be more to that. Or maybe buffalo chicken tenders. That's all we're gonna
Matt McKee 27:33
do networks do. What's next for you?
Marcus Sebastiano 27:35
I think it is going to be to build up this new retail gallery that we have in Newburyport right in downtown. And it's probably eight different artists showcasing right now. From New England and beyond. I'm starting to bring in some work from Colombia, my good friend Felipe street artists that goes back and forth from here to Colombia. So we're selling a bunch of exclusive prints from the street artists over there and half the money goes back to them. I want to do more stuff like that. We also have like led Music and Art series where the first one coming up Friday where we bring in a notable band or DJ or whatever and kind of mix that with an art signing or you know showcasing one of the artists, bringing people together. That's one of the things I really like to do is bringing, you know like minds and not to like minds together in a room and seeing people conversate connect and network. I just really enjoy that. So look forward to building that brand up.
Matt McKee 28:30
I wish you the best with that.
Marcus Sebastiano 28:31
Thanks for appreciating
Matt McKee 28:34
this episode of cherry bomb. The podcast is sponsored by guacamole a part of my sweet Class series of limited edition photos. I created the series with the mission to start conversations in the room about the bigger topics of food, art and sustainability. And now you can start this conversation in your living room or your dining room. This podcast is the companion piece to that project where I get to share with you some of the discussions this week last is inspired for me. Browse and purchase images at the heart of Matt mckee.com. Please share this episode to your Facebook, Twitter and all your social media so your friends can listen and join in the conversation. Thanks for listening to Cherry Bomb the podcast. I'm your host Matt McKee. Today's guest is Marcus Sebastiano. You can get links to his amazing work and all his social media plus other notes about this episode at the art of Matt mckee.com and click on Cherry Bomb the podcast and I'm also on Twitter for questions and comments at McKee photo. This episode of cherry bomb the podcast could not have been done without the help of Suzanne Schultz and campus Fine Arts the specialist and coaching for creatives and editing by the superb Bill Shamblin edit board sound. Thanks for listening. And let's start the conversation.