Crista Cloutier with ArtPlacer

A Deep Dive into Artpreneurship and Financial Literacy

Maria Añez: Hello and welcome. I am Maria Añez. This is Women’s Talk: Reshaping the Art World.

As part of our celebration of Women’s Month, we have a series of interviews where every Tuesday we sit down to talk with one of our dear friends who are creators, artists, galleries, curators, and women who are reshaping the art world, as we just mentioned before.

And today, I have the joy of being accompanied by Crista Cloutier.

Hi, Crista. How are you?

Crista Cloutier: I’m fantastic. It’s so good to see you.

Maria Añez: Thanks, Crista. It’s always good to see you.

I’m super excited for this live. We have been talking about this subject for a few days, back and forth, and I want to start the interview with a quote, as we have previously done on all previous interviews.

I think you read this quote. This one is a quote from one of our users. We reached out to the ArtPlacer community and asked all women—curators, galleries, and artists—about their opinions on the state of the art world and gender equality in it.

Artist Kim Lanier said:

“Historically, the gender gap has been a real barrier for women artists. Even today, you can walk to major museums and will find limited female representation. The social media platforms offer a real opportunity to level the playing field through better exposure and creative experience. It also provides a great support system for female artists, creating a community for building strong relationships.”

Representation is important—not only what we see or what we create in these spaces, but also there is one conversation, I believe, where our presence is lacking, and that is the money talk. And that’s the reason why Crista is here.

So, first of all, welcome to this conversation. As I mentioned before, we wanted to start talking about money and income, taking over our power, and our literacy about this subject. That’s why we brought you.

So I want to let you introduce yourself. Can you tell us a bit about your background?

Crista Cloutier: Sure, sure. I’d love to. Thank you for having me. Thank you for introducing me. This is a pleasure to be here, and thank you for challenging me to do an Instagram Live.

It was scary, but we need to push ourselves to do scary things, including money. Money is very, very scary.

So my story began—I was an art student. I went to university and studied art, and when I graduated, like a lot of art students, I ended up with a lot of debt. I worked my way through school using loans.

And how do you make a living as an artist? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

Maria Añez: Yeah.

Crista Cloutier: So you get a job. You get a day job. And I was lucky enough that my day job was working for a really well-known art studio.

My job started out as an intern, and I worked my way up. I was the assistant to the sales manager, and it turns out that I had a real talent for selling art, which I never knew.

And within a year, I had worked my way up to become director of the whole company.

So the vast majority of my career was leading that art studio and selling the art that we created in that studio to museums, to collectors, to galleries.

So I was doing everything an artist does, but I was working with other artists to create their work, and then I was selling their work.

And I think at one point I had what I called my midlife correction.

Maria Añez: Okay.

Crista Cloutier: Which wasn’t very pretty. But I just remembered that I am an artist and that I had my own things to say.

And I feel like the years that I spent leading this studio were a great learning experience for me. It was like an apprenticeship. Many artists—we have a history of apprenticeship—so I learned a lot about the business. I learned about art. I learned a lot about what I wanted to do.

But I hadn’t really found my voice, so I needed to go somewhere where I could find my own voice. And that was Europe.

So I moved to Europe all by myself. I moved to the middle of nowhere in France. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t speak any French. I just needed quiet.

And from there, I started a new life, and I created an online professional practice program called The Working Artist.

So for about the last 10 years, I’ve been working with artists, teaching them how to navigate the art business and how to make a living from their art.

Maria Añez: That’s amazing. And one of the things that I’ll highlight the most about The Working Artist is this strong feeling of empowerment that comes with actually knowing what it is that you want to achieve, planning it out, and also believing that you can do it.

So that’s going to lead me to question number one. The first question I have for you is: how important is it for women artists to improve their financial literacy?

Crista Cloutier: It’s imperative. In fact, it’s imperative for all artists, to be honest.

But I think as artists, and maybe women more so than men, because I think men traditionally are taught more about money and about financial literacy.

You know, I’m looking at my parents, and my dad is trying to teach my mom because he’s older and he’s in worse health—how to pay the bills, where do we do the taxes, and all of those things.

It’s always been the men’s domain. And as women, it’s really easy for us to put that off and to kind of go like this: “I don’t want to know.”

And I think that that’s changing, and I think it needs to change.

So empowerment is a great word. And empowerment comes from in here. It doesn’t come from someone outside empowering us.

The lottery doesn’t come and empower us with money. We really have to make the switch in our head and in our heart, and a lot of that comes from learning—learning about the financial world, learning about dollars and cents and how money works, and also learning about our own patterns and our own ideas about money.

So it’s an emotional learning as well, and I feel like that’s all part of financial literacy. And it’s all within our reach.

I don’t like math, but I tell a story about an architect, or a woman I know who wanted to be an architect her whole life. She ended up becoming a teacher, and yet her whole house was full of books about architecture, and every single vacation she took was looking at architecture.

And I said, “Why didn’t you become an architect?”

And she said, “I just couldn’t do the math. Math skills were too difficult for me.”

And I thought, gosh, I mean, this woman hates being a teacher. Wouldn’t you rather hate learning math and then get to the other side of that and do what you want to do?

But we put these limitations in front of us. And a lot of women especially, we say, “I hate math. I hate numbers.”

So we avoid them. We avoid learning about them.

Maria Añez: Yeah. Financial literacy is imperative for all people, but women in particular. We need to start having this conversation, especially within the art world, given the great difference when it comes to wage gaps that we have in the art world.

We need to start talking about how much are we earning, how much is going into our practice, how do we create a sustainable practice? That is what we want to do as a long-term goal.

So that’s going to take me to question number two.

How important is it for an artist to actually create a business plan?

And I don’t want people who are watching to get scared just from listening to the words “business plan.” I want you to listen with an open mind so we can start diving into this money talk.

Crista Cloutier: Business plans used to be big and scary to me too. I’m like, “I’m an artist. I don’t do business.”

But if you want to work as an artist, you are doing business. And you have a business. Like any other business, you are an entrepreneur. You are not exempt from a business plan.

A business plan doesn’t have to be a big, scary, horrible thing. It can be really simple, and it’s a matter of just following the steps and putting the pieces in place to create a plan.

And I just see so many artists working with the hope plan.

You know, “I hope a gallery or an agent will come save me and will do all this stuff for me so I don’t have to do it.”

And that plan never works.

I don’t believe that there are many galleries out there anymore who take care of the whole business for artists, especially an artist who is unknown, who has never handled their own business.

If a gallery is going to come in and represent an artist in the way the old-fashioned galleries did, where they handle everything for them, they want to work with people who already have a foundation.

So there’s a gazillion talented artists out in the world right now, and you may be very talented, but it’s not a question of talent. This is a business.

You will save yourself so much time. You will save yourself so much pain. You will save yourself so much money if you approach your business—if you put on your big girl pants and approach your business like a business.

And maybe there would be more women in the museums if we were more empowered to treat ourselves seriously first.

I think really that’s where it begins: empowering ourselves and stopping waiting for the world to empower us.

Stop waiting for the museums to say, “Oh, now we’re opening our doors to women.”

Don’t sit there and twiddle your thumbs until someone gives you permission. It starts in here, and then we have to go out there, and that’s how we’re going to change the world.

And imagine—imagine what the world could be like if women were empowered with their business, with their finances, with the way we spend money, with the way we make money, with the way we talk about money.

We could change the whole conversation, but it starts with us.

Maria Añez: So a great part of this empowerment that we previously talked about has to do with being proactive and not waiting for things to happen. It’s just bringing your own share to the table and starting up some conversations.

And you mentioned creating a business plan can be scary at first, but it’s just following steps towards a goal that we want to achieve.

In your 10 years working with artists, one of the biggest challenges they usually run into when they’re trying to come up with a business plan and take their practice in a more serious way—what are the challenges?

Crista Cloutier: Oh, yes.

This doesn’t happen to me all the time, but I think this story is very common in many fields.

I work a lot with universities and university art students.

And sometimes after I give a talk, a young woman will come up to me and ask me questions.

They’ll say, “I’ve got questions about the art business.”

And I say, “Great. Tell me about your work.”

And then they’ll say, “It’s not for me. It’s for my partner. My partner is an artist too, and we’ve decided that I’m going to help him get his career off the ground, and then when he’s up here, he’ll help me.”

So this seems to be something that I’ve run into a couple times, if not several times.

And it really—it makes me sad.

And I really want to go back in time and ask them, “How did that work out for you?”

It’s hard enough for anyone to work as an artist. Where do you measure that point where he’s going to turn around and put his hand out and help you? And by that time, maybe you’re having kids, so maybe it never happens.

We all know the stories about the women who put their husbands through medical school. You know what I mean? And then what are they left with?

“Get your chance. Yeah, then you’ll get your chance.”

And there’s no blame here, because when I look at my own life, I’ve done that a lot too. I put my partners ahead of me.

And do I regret it? Yeah, kinda.

Maria Añez: Yeah. Be honest.

Crista Cloutier: Yeah. So it’s kind of—yeah. There is a need to put ourselves first and at the center of all of this planning and all of these ideas.

Maria Añez: Yeah. You actually mentioned earlier that this is not about looking for validation on the outside. So the only validation that you need is the one you can give yourself.

And I think it starts here. If it’s a challenge to put ourselves first, that’s the first thing that we can tackle.

So we have to talk about the common challenges that you see artists run into when working with a business plan.

Now I want to know, let’s say I’m an artist and I have created my business plan. How can this actually help me navigate the art world? Why is it so crucial to have a business plan?

Crista Cloutier: Well, like I said, hope is not a plan.

A business plan gives you numbers.

I think it gives you a sense of direction, and it also shows you what you need to know.

A lot of times we don’t know what we need to know until we’re asked the questions in a business plan.

It’s just important to know your values and to put real numbers and real action plans in place.

I work with a lot of artists, so part of The Working Artist is creating a business plan. And when I work with artists, a lot of times I’m like, “Okay, so how much do you need to make every year?”

And they’ll say, “A million dollars.”

I’ll say, “Wow. Okay. You need to make a million dollars. Why?”

And then they’ll say, “Because that means I’m successful.”

And it doesn’t.

It doesn’t mean you’re successful. It means that you’re really busy. It means you might not be able to make the work you want to work—the kind of work you want to make. It means you’re probably not going to be free.

A lot of other people will have a say in that.

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with making a million dollars, and you absolutely can make a million dollars. But the first thing I want artists to do is to separate their self-worth from their net worth.

Your value as an artist is not equal to the amount of money in your bank account.

So those are really important numbers to divorce yourself from.

How much money do you need to live and to work? Those are business plan numbers.

How much money do you need to prove to your family that you’re not a failure? That’s not business plan numbers. That’s a conversation to have with yourself, to have with your therapist, and to have with other artists too.

Because I really believe that we’re at a time in history—and I’m going off a little bit here—but I really believe in this, that artists need to be leading these kinds of conversations.

The whole world tells us that our self-worth or our value as an artist should be equal to how much money a painting can get, or our work can bring in, and that is absolutely false.

But again, we can’t wait for them to change that narrative. We need to change it in here.

They’re not going to take us seriously if we’re not taking our business and ourselves seriously first.

So having a business plan really gives you that foundation.

And again, you don’t need to support yourself—you don’t need to make a million dollars from your work. And part of your business plan might be doing side gigs to support your art.

I always say, “Your art is not here to support you. You are here to support your art.”

What does that mean?

It means that you can’t just—just because you put pen to paper or a brush to canvas doesn’t mean that suddenly your work needs to go out in the world and earn a living.

No. If you want that to happen, you need to earn a living to support that art, to find your voice, your true voice, to improve your craft, to understand the business of art, to build an audience.

All of that you need to support that. And if that means having a side gig or several side gigs, that’s okay. You can absolutely do that. I do that.

I ran away to France to find my own voice and develop my craft, and it’s taken me a long time to do it.

And what I did, I treated The Working Artist as my side gig.

Did this plan pay off? Absolutely.

I’ve built an audience. I have found my voice. I have developed my craft. Now I’m showing internationally. I’m publishing a book.

So it’s a long—it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

But I remember when I started, people said, “Well, you could be 50, 60 years old before you see any success with your plan.”

And I thought, “I’m going to be 50 or 60 years old anyway, if any—with any luck. How do I want to spend those years?”

What do I want my side gig to look like, and how can it feed my work?

I think that can be part of your business plan too.

Maria Añez: Yeah. I like that idea.

First, I love the idea that you’re here to support your art. I think that is the core of everything.

If you’re here to support your art, it doesn’t matter if you’re 20 and just out of school and starting and have a bunch of debt, or if you’re a mid-career artist, or you’re struggling to balance your daily life with your artistic practice.

If you’re putting your art at the center of everything, then it’s easier to start drafting goals that are actually realistic and that can turn into a proper business plan that can sustain your practice.

So it’s kind of—we did a simple math in there. I know we both say we don’t like math, but there is a simple math in what you just explained.

So I want to ask you something.

At this point, you said hope is not a goal, and I totally agree with it. So my question would be: how can an artist set realistic, finite financial and business goals?

Where do you have to go? What is the mindset to set a goal that is actually realistic and not, “I’m going to change the world”?

What is the realistic type of goal that we’re looking for?

Crista Cloutier: Well, how much money do you really need, realistically?

And how much money does it cost to make your art, realistically? And how much money can your art bring in?

Just because you can make fabulous art, you might be living in a market that doesn’t support that. Your prices really have to be based on real-world market numbers.

And real-world market numbers aren’t a reflection of the quality of your work.

Sometimes artists live in the middle of nowhere and they’re showing out of the local town gallery, and those people just can’t afford New York City prices.

And I see artists beat themselves up or get really angry at their market, but you have to respond to your market.

So the numbers have to be based on reality.

And you also have to deal—I believe, and this is especially important for women—I believe that you really have to deal with your own money demons and get all those stories out of your way.

Understand what your money stories are.

And especially as women, and especially as artists, we get told a lot of false money stories.

Maria Añez: I was going to ask you—yeah, I understand the idea, but for our audience, how would you define these money stories?

Crista Cloutier: Well, I do an exercise with artists where I take them through a meditation, and I have them sit in a room, and I have money come into this room and sit across from them. And I have them listen to what money has to say.

I see Mary’s on this call, and I remember—Mary’s the perfect example, because I hear this a lot. She’s like, “Money, I don’t want to lose the money. Money has nothing to say to me,” you know?

And when I did the exercise, the first time money was so mean to me. Money was just telling me basically, like, I’m never going to be worthy, that I don’t do enough, that I don’t have enough, that I’m not good enough.

And it’s like, wow. There’s not really someone named Money sitting across from me, so where is this coming from?

And you realize that, oh, it’s stories I’ve heard through my family, through the culture, through my partners, through maybe a bad experience that I’ve internalized in a certain way.

And it all becomes a story.

We are nothing more than the compilation of our stories. Our whole success is the compilation of these stories that we tell ourselves.

And the only person who can change those stories is us.

So knowing what those stories are, and really listening to them, identifying where they come from, and then doing the work to change those stories.

And then working with your numbers so the fears and the judgments are not married to those numbers anymore.

That is a very powerful recipe for success.

Maria Añez: That is an amazing exercise, actually, because at the end of the day, what you just said—we’re just this collection of stories that we have gathered through our life, through our experience, through the context, to where we live, what we learned, and we just repeat them over and over.

And conversations like this and exercises like this actually allow us to recognize what it is that we’re repeating ourselves, even without noticing, and that it’s actually defining what we are doing.

And I believe one of the most common challenges that especially women artists run into is probably the life-balance part, because we are challenged in so many directions.

We’re head of the house. We are head of the gallery. We are ahead of our own careers. And at the same time, now we have to add one more title, and we have to be at the lead of our money and our financials and our business.

So, in your opinion, is there a way to find a balance, particularly between the business side and the creative side, without losing one for the other?

Crista Cloutier: What is happening right there? I was hoping you could tell me that.

It’s such a hard balance. No one does it gracefully. I think that’s the first thing to understand.

I don’t do it gracefully. I work with women who are world-famous artists. Some are mothers, some are not. Neither one does it gracefully.

We’re all floundering in this time-management soup that we can never really win.

I think it comes back to story. I think it comes back to acceptance.

My favorite word is grace. I aspire to feel graceful in my creative work. I aspire to feel graceful in my business and in my personal relationships.

Am I always that way? No, not at all. There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth in my world too.

But it’s a practice, right?

If we can get back to that graceful place, it’s a practice. And the more we can get ourselves back there, the more we can feel graceful, because that’s what we’re all looking for in this work-life balance.

It’s just to feel graceful.

And part of that is accepting that sometimes, in this dance of creativity and work, sometimes the creativity gets to lead, and that’s really fun. And sometimes the business has to lead, and it’s not as much fun.

If we could stop beating ourselves up for what we’re not doing and give ourselves wholly to what we are doing, always—being aware, these are my goals, because you’ve got a business plan now, right?

And I have found it personally really helpful in my business plan to include a time-management plan.

Every quarter, these are my goals for the quarter. These are my goals for the month. Am I actually meeting those goals?

So when I’m working on creative work, I’m aware of what my goals are. Am I doing that, or do I need to make some adjustments?

Because you always have to be open. Real life has real conditions.

Maria Añez: Yeah, consequences.

Crista Cloutier: With my business stuff, okay, maybe I’m hitting those goals, but do I have creative goals that I’m not hitting?

Or, like right now, I’m visiting my elderly parents who are unwell. I’m working on some big business things. I’m putting together a new workshop.

I’m not getting to write my book right now. I’ve had to take some time off from writing.

I used to be, “You’re not a real writer. Real writers write every single day. You’re not a real photographer. Real photographers—”

But no. That’s not fair to myself.

You have to go. You have to dance the dance.

And I think for mothers, especially young mothers or mothers of young families, this becomes especially challenging because we really, really need to be with our children.

And it’s really easy to think that you are kicked out of the art club once you wear that mom badge. You’re not allowed to be an artist anymore.

And that’s not true, and it’s not fair.

And I tell mothers that I work with: create creative time with your kids. Create playtime with your kids as much as you can. Marry your creativity into what you’re doing as a mom.

That’s beautiful. You get to be in the art club.

If you can set some really gentle goals for yourself, do that, so that you know that you’ve still got your foot in that world.

That’s okay. That’s enough. It’s all okay.

The stories we tell ourselves—that’s what gets us into trouble.

Maria Añez: I love that idea, and I love that we go back to this concept of the stories that we tell ourselves.

And I have a dance background, and one of the things that we usually say in the dance world is, “A dancer is always a dancer.”

It doesn’t matter if you have been practicing since you were three, or if you stop for a few years because you’re working on another career, or if you just stop because you wanted to change.

You’re always going to be an artist. It doesn’t matter in which stage in your career you are.

And maybe that stage right now is you need to make a stop because you’re taking care of family, or you need to make a stop because you need to go back to your basics and define what your actual goals are, and define how your art is going to support all of this process and make it profitable.

And that idea of profitable takes me to: what is it so uncomfortable to talk about these subjects?

Because the minute we touch subjects like money and our art being profitable and business, we all get kind of like, “Oh, this is going to be—”

It’s a hard conversation.

Why is it so hard to talk about this, and how can we break that idea or that story and make it a more friendly conversation?

Crista Cloutier: Because money has been used for centuries now to enslave us.

Now, money is not something that really exists. It’s not something that was in the Garden of Eden. It’s not something in nature. It’s something that we created simply to facilitate exchange.

Money was sent here to serve us, but it’s been subverted into this thing that has come to enslave us.

So we are afraid of it. We give it much, much more power than it deserves.

We think it’s the only resource we have. We think it’s going to save us. We think it’s the only currency.

But it’s not.

There are other currencies that are much more powerful than money, such as relationships, for one. Our energy is a currency.

But that’s why I harp on about stories, because that’s really all about energy.

So I think having these conversations about money, being able to look at our own money story and look at our own numbers, empowers us and helps us to change the culture and the conversations around money.

Imagine—why don’t we even teach about money in school?

Maria Añez: Yes.

Crista Cloutier: Why don’t we?

Instead, we’re all raised to fear money, and we’re all waiting.

“If I had more money, then I could do this. If I had more money, I would be this.”

Don’t do that. Do it anyway. Take the leap, and that’s when the net appears.

The universe supports you.

And I can say this in my own life as something I know for sure, because I’ve taken a lot of leaps.

Moving to Europe—I didn’t have any money, didn’t have any friends, didn’t speak the language. But something told me I had to do it, and I felt like I needed something to show me it would be okay first, like money.

I was playing the lottery really heavy. “I can do this when I have the money to do it.”

And I was like, “No. You need to do it, and then the support will come.”

And maybe it’s not even money.

And it wasn’t just money. All of a sudden I met someone who needed a house sitter for a year.

It’s like—resources.

Be open to all kinds of different resources, because support comes in many, many different ways.

And I think as women, that’s where we can also help build a paradigm, because we’re all about relationships. We’re all about working.

We’ve been very thrifty for many years because we haven’t been in charge of the money, so we know how to make the world work with money as a resource, but not the only resource.

Maria Añez: I like the idea that money is not the only resource, because it takes us back to—if we put art at the center of all of this, we’re going to start seeing all of these other options that are also a sustainable reason to keep this process going, or a sustainable way to keep this process going.

So I think, with the last question of this interview, I’m gonna take us back to the beginning.

You talked about leaps of faith. You talked about being, or feeling, empowered to make decisions, or to even get the knowledge that we lack when it comes to our finances.

So my question is: what strategies, or what advice do you have for women artists who are trying to get more confidence when it comes to their finances and their art practice, and how to make it profitable?

Crista Cloutier: Well, that’s a great question.

And I go back to what I said earlier about: look at your stories that you’re telling yourself.

Do that exercise. Do a meditation like I was describing, where you sit quietly and you invite money to come and sit in a chair across from you.

Listen to the stories that money is telling you about yourself, or the stories that you—you know, basically, money is a mirror for us.

So really listen to that and see what’s getting in your way and where you’re getting in your own way.

And then really look at your numbers. Really look at what you truly need, not just what you want.

Needs versus wants are two different things.

And how much you’re bringing in.

Maybe that number is zero, or a number very close to zero. Don’t be afraid of that. Don’t curse it.

Everything you’re doing is to empower you, so don’t get afraid of it or run away from it.

It’s about educating.

And then learn more about how finances work. It’s kind of something you never need to stop learning. There’s always more and more.

Once you start making money, you can learn about investing, for example. Investing in art, maybe. Maybe other people’s art.

I encourage artists to invest in other artists’ work.

Maria Añez: I love that. I love that, because it’s like the community contributing to its own community.

And in that same way, we can give the push that someone gave us. Someone pushed us up and helped us. We can do it for other artists once we get to that stage.

Crista Cloutier: And artists and art institutions, support—try to support the things you want support from.

We want support from the greater art world, the museums, the nonprofits.

Why don’t we support them too? How can we best support them? How can it be an exchange?

Money is supposed to be an exchange.

And what happens is that too many people hold onto it. And, well, they believe there’s only so much money in the world.

If I don’t have this, then someone else is going to get it.

And I don’t believe that’s true. I believe that there’s plenty of money in the world.

And if we all just let go and we start that dance of the exchange, it’s going to change the world profoundly.

It’s learning to let go in ourselves first, and learning to let go of that fear.

And also understanding that, as artists particularly, I have found that there’s great value in learning to live simply.

I live in Europe now, but I’m visiting the United States, and every time I come back, there’s a stark reminder that this is a culture where we are constantly told that you need bigger, that you need more, that you need newer.

Everyone wants more room for storage.

How much stuff do we really need?

And certainly when I was an art dealer, I was part of that culture. I had a really big house with storage, with an attic, and everything was just full of stuff.

And I couldn’t stop buying stuff.

And that was why I wasn’t free when I wanted to leave, because I’d spent all my money on stuff.

Eventually, I just got rid of all that stuff, which was really hard to do, because I realized that I was starting to identify myself by my stuff.

And my stuff is not myself.

And that was a real addiction. When I moved to Europe, it was a painful addiction to break—that shopping addiction.

“I need this to define me.”

But you don’t.

And artists are much more effective as artists if we can be free.

That’s how we weather financial storms. That’s how we’re able to do a big project that is kind of outside of our realm.

If we can be free and not be tied to stuff, it really helps us to catapult wherever we want to go. It gives us a lot more mobility in all kinds of ways.

Maria Añez: It’s amazing because it gives us such a big lesson about what we value and the value that we see in ourselves.

And that all relates to, well, how do we manage our resources, and how do we get to a certain point or stage with the resources that we have and the work that we do?

Well, we have come to an end for this interview. I have loved this conversation with you, Crista, so thank you so much for joining us today. It’s always so much fun to talk to you.

Crista Cloutier: Maria, you know I love that. And you are rocking those fingernails, by the way. They’re beautiful.

Maria Añez: Thank you. Just adding a bit of spice to the situation.

And thank you, all you guys, for staying with us all through this conversation.

Remember, it’s going to be recorded, so you can watch it at your own pace later. You can take notes. You can go over the exercises that Crista shared.

So thank you so much, all of you, for staying with us online today, and thank you, Crista, for coming over.

See you next week on our next interview.

Crista Cloutier: It was a pleasure.

Maria Añez: Thank you. Bye-bye, everyone. Bye.

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Written by Crista Cloutier, artist mentor + founder of The Working Artist. (learn more about Crista here)