I trained as a fine artist, and I've never stopped being one. I still paint in oils — slowly, in layers, the way anything worth keeping gets made — but the painting is only the visible part. Artists learn to see what's actually there rather than what they expect to be there, and most businesses have never once been looked at that way.
The other half is that I read. Voraciously, omnivorously, and almost entirely in nonfiction — the history of the fork, the correspondence of John Adams, the wardrobe politics of Marie Antoinette. It sounds eccentric until you need someone who knows that the fork was once a scandal, that reputations are built in letters, and that what a queen wore was never just clothing.
Every brand problem you're facing, history has already staged — in better costume, with higher stakes. I've read the transcript.
People call me brilliant, a genius, wildly intelligent, and crazy. Usually the same people. Usually in that order, somewhere around the moment the thing I said would work, works.
So when a client tells me “something feels off but I can't say what,” I can say what. Usually within the hour. Politely, but I will say it.
Then I fix it — with the eye of an artist, the mind of a reader, the precision of a designer, and the engineering to build what the others would only put in a slide deck.
April
Kensington House · Durham, NC
