Brush Projects with Sam Shennan

A look into brushproject.com by Kane 'Trait' Horspool

Recently I caught up with long time La’ Division affiliate Sam Shennan about his latest venture. I had caught a glimpse of a big project he has been working on with his good mate Rhett Simons. I wanted to find out more and was lucky enough to get a bit of his time to probe him.

Even though I’ve only met Sam a couple of times he’s always been a really positive and outgoing bloke and appears even with a mountain of work nothing changes. “I've been great! Life's been opening up some really fun opportunities recently”. He explained to me the basics of the quasi mural agency he has created The Brush Project. “We're trying to create a better way for people to find and hire professional mural artists. It's been a distillation of the feedback I've heard from my clients over the years about finding artists online”. 

Sam has been working as an independent artist for some time and naturally takes on commission work to fill the voids between his own self-propelled projects. Over time he has noticed a short coming in the way clients and artists establish connections. “Lots of my own clients over the years have contacted me because I'm the only artist they know. They don't know where to find the talented available professional artists. This amazed me because I know there's heaps of us! The Local Artists Division (La’ Division) is just one bunch of artists that I'm a part of who are always up to mural mischief. In our collective alone, I know so many people who have the specific skills needed for each job that I started collaborating to get my jobs done better. 

After a few years of managing my own collaborative jobs and creating customised murals for my clients in the hospitality, beverage industry and corporate activations I thought to try and formalise this process into an agency”.

It seems the guys are trying to build something more than just a file sharing data base. More than just a job agency for artists but a collaborative network between artist to artist and their clients. “I've got two focuses with this project. On the client side, I want businesses to be able to have their visions brought to life. By adding large scale custom artworks to their spaces they can engage their customers. By adding art to their business, they can increase foot traffic and make more sales. Artwork can get loads of extra social media content to raise awareness online too.

On the artist side of things, we want to help out artists to get work that fits their unique skills and natural talents. I believe in the artist's journey to create art that expresses themselves in their own voice, to share their own perspective in their own style. So, finding artists jobs that match their style with client’s visions for the job everyone is happy”

And that’s where I think the Brush Project differs from your average artist agency that tries to facilitate commission mural work. The website is set up not the way an artist would look at things but definitely more in the way a customer would. Makes sense, right? But I think a lot of the time, especially with mural work, what the artist is thinking and what the client is thinking is so far removed it becomes almost impossible to get on the same brain wave.

The website straight away offers the potential client an extensive search engine. An array of choices under the headings of Purpose, Size, Style, Location and even Subject. These are things that an artist may not even think about. We are so involved and surrounded by the culture of public art that I think we forget that the rest of the world isn’t. So, I feel it’s such a unique take on the Business of Mural Art. And yes, that may seem like weird words to put together but at the end of the day artists deserve to get paid and why not make the whole process easier. Because anyone who has even dipped a finger into paid mural work knows that it is full of false hopes, red tape, mis-directed guidelines and varied outcomes.

“To save potential clients trawling the web for a mural or street artist we have built a custom search tool. 
People are pretty comfortable narrowing a search through dropdowns on websites and we are doing that with our art categories. 
Some of our clients over the years don't know the terms to use to find the art they want, so we lay out some categories for them to find what they want. We want to smooth the process of finding the right fit for the job.

I found that when I was looking through other agency sites you had to keep jumping in and out of each different artist profile to see what they can do. 
We wanted to make it easier to be able to pull up all your for-example portrait artists on one grid, then be able to narrow it down to black and white or cartoony etc”.

And from a business sense doesn’t it make sense to keep the client happy. Yeah sure we may all complain about clients from time to time (and some deserve the criticism) but at the end of the day most clients have a business to run. The artwork that adorns their walls is not their main focus they have overheads, staff to pay, product to sell and taxes to pay so it makes sense to allow the connection of artist to client to happen as fluidly as possible.

“Trying to find a way to save our clients time will save them money. Time not spent bouncing through websites, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr to find working artists adds up. Having an array of imagery from diverse styles in a filtering search tool will speed up that process. 
It's more like a retail experience online and is more natural to someone who is used to shopping online who knows what they're looking for”.

But of course, an elaborate website and agency such as this is not as simple as just creating profiles and linked images. ”On the backend, it means a hell of a lot more work to tag up all the artwork with the overlapping categories and we had to build a whole new custom site to be able to do that. It took some web magic to get it to refresh fast so you don't wait for pages to refresh when you're flicking between the search categories.The end result will make it heaps easier to find the kind of art you're looking for, even if you don't know what the artsy jargon is.

For our artists this means that they have a lot more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for their work as we share out the content to our own social media sites and reach out to clients that may never have come across the artists in Brush Project”.

The beauty in simplifying a system like this is it not only facilitates easier collaboration between artists and clients who have no idea what their delving into. But clients who deal with artists on a daily basis will also still benefit from a simplified system. “For a lot of interior designers or events agencies this ability to find the appropriate style for their client's project needs will save a lot of time. 
They go through a frustrating dance trying to get quotes from a range of artists after sifting through instagram for ages. Brush Project will be a way to have faster access to experienced professional muralists. We want for our artists to land some of the larger jobs out there because the clients feel comfortable having an artist driven agency who understands the logistical challenges of working at these larger scales”.

The real benefit with a project like this is when you have so many amazing established artists under one banner it allows for a lot more collaboration between artists. It spreads the net a little wider making it possible for collaborations between artists who have no common links. It also creates a platform to expose more content to the viewer and expose the artists and their work. “Rhett is from a video and editing background too so we are really excited to be able to shoot time lapses and create videos of the walls being painted. This will level up the value for our artists as they get some high-quality media to use to promote themselves and get more eyes on their work. Our clients love it because we stretch the project out and rather than just the wall being finished and out of there, we document the creation.

This extra value gives Brush Project, the artist and the client a bonus tool to promote the collaboration beyond the still image through the explosive sharing of video content on social media these days”.

The project is really just in its infancy but already there has been a ground swell of interest and even a couple of projects already completed. “So far everyone's been really receptive to the idea and artists are stoked to get involved, we've got a big backlog of incredible talent to load into the search. 

We've already been doing jobs with some of the legends from LADIV (La’ Division) in Sydney and Melbourne. Skulk has a video up from his wall at Bulletin Place and Keo did some rad work for a client in Melb .We're bloody stoked to have Keo helping us out down in Melbourne to manage the jobs down there”.

Even if you’re not a potential client the Brush Projects is an amazing website to view incredible pieces of large scale art with a long list of established mural artist.  You can find the Brush Projects at the straight forward address www.brushproject.com