#364: Larry Heyman (Scenic Designer) (pt. 2 of 2)

This week on the podcast is part two of our interview with Larry Heyman. He’s an internationally recognized and award-winning freelance scenic designer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Larry has over 30 years of experience in set design, as well as properties design, fabrication and supervision, across theatre, film, opera, television, commercial projects and higher education. 

Companies he’s worked with include: The Goodman Theatre, The Huntington Theatre, Prague Shakespeare Company, The Cleveland Playhouse, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV. 

Stream the episode to hear how Larry incorporate in-depth research and problem solving to give his clients what they want. https://www.historyofchairs.com/

Transcript

Welcome And Larry’s Background

Announcer 0:18

Welcome to the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast, Making Art Work. We highlight how entrepreneurs align their artistry, passion, and vision to create and pursue opportunities to capture value in the arts. The views expressed by guests on the Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast are solely their own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the podcast or its hosts. The appearance of a guest on the podcast, the venture they represent, or reference to any product or service does not imply an endorsement or recommendation by the podcast or its hosts. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute business advice. Here are your hosts, Andy Heise and Nick Petrella.

Andy Heise 1:01

Hi Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast listeners. I'm Andy Heise.

Nick Petrella 1:04

And I'm Nick Petrella. Larry Heyman is with us today. He's an internationally recognized and award-winning freelance scenic designer based in Cleveland, Ohio. Larry has over 30 years of experience in set design, as well as properties design, fabrication, and supervision across theater, film, opera, television, commercial projects, and higher education. Companies he's worked with include the Goodman Theater, the Huntington Theater, Prague Shakespeare Company, the Cleveland Playhouse, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV. Larry has many more accolades than we could mention in the intro, so we'll have his website in the show notes so you can read more about him and see photos of his captivating designs. Thanks for coming on the podcast, Larry. Thanks for having me.

Andy Heise 1:51

Larry, was there a point in time when you realized that you could create and make a sustainable living as a designer?

Larry Heyman 2:01

Um Yeah, and it was relatively recently, but yes. Um I mean, I've I've always as I said, I've always been affiliated with some sort of institution, and there was just some point where I was like, I kind of counted up the number of hours and number of days and number of weeks that I was doing things and decided that I could probably figure out a way to kind of push other stuff out and have more time during the day, where I just, I mean, you can you can't see it. I'm sitting in my studio right now, but I have a room that's basically dedicated to sitting and reading and sketching and drawing and painting and drafting at the computer. And um, yeah, it came relatively late. I mean, I worked as a as a theatrical and stage employee for a while before I became a designer. But yes, I mean, and yes, there's it's it's relatively easy to make a sustainable living as a theater employee if you're willing to do other stuff as well as design.

Andy Heise 3:00

Right. So it was that that experience that you had as an employee at other shops and uh maybe uh you said you mentioned earlier universities or other institutions. Right.

Larry Heyman 3:10

Hearing the questions that were being thrown at designers and listening to the solutions and watching the process and seeing sitting and watching a designer making sketches for one show while they were in technical rehearsals for another kind of made me realize that it was that it was uh you know totally manageable.

Choosing Freelance And Buying Time

Andy Heise 3:29

And and then and so you said recently you you figured you kind of did the the mental math and said, wait a second, if I wasn't doing all this other stuff, I could actually do these other things which would allow me to go out on my own and be do the freelance start your own design business.

Larry Heyman 3:44

It also doesn't hurt to have one or two solid like commercial shows where you know you're going to go and do this event so that you will then have a month or so worth of worth of salary kind of to do other things. So yeah.

Andy Heise 3:59

Buys you t buys you time whether in how you use that time, whether for creative you know uh endeavors or use that time to you know work on the next project, whatever it is.

Larry Heyman 4:09

Marketing development. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Going to be able to do that. Coming out and talking and visiting and seeing people. Yeah.

Andy Heise 4:16

Doing doing podcasts, things like things like that. Yeah.

Nick Petrella 4:21

So you're known for developing a specific type of stage blood. What issues do other bloods have that prompted you to look into it? And how did you come up with the recipe?

Ingredients, Safety, And Stain Control

Testing Fabrics And Real-World Results

Larry Heyman 4:32

Oh, how I came up with the recipe is super confusing and hard to explain, but I'll try. But what I will say is one of the major driving factors for me doing this is the cost of successful stage bloods and the drawbacks of them. Um they're all like the commercially available product is almost always just crazy restrictively expensive. I'm talking upwards of hundreds of dollars for a gallon. And I've been looking at and imagining and viewing different ways that blood has been made for the stage since I first started in in my very, very first job at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, where the late Larry Pennington was the costumes and or he was the wig and makeup master. And man, this guy, he was great. He knew what he was doing. And he made a product that that was really usable, really inexpensive to make, really easy to reproduce. And so he and I talked a little bit about it. And I'm I'm always fascinated by breaking things down. And so one of the things that I've noticed over the years is um people tend to throw just they they get this magical thinking and they start throwing ingredients into stageblood without necessarily knowing what any of the things are doing or without any rhyme or reasons. So you'll get you'll get stage bloods that contain laundry detergent, which is a terrible byproduct to put into a stage, to something that's going to come in contact with a human being. You'll, you know, there are dish soaps, there are shampoos, and I just thought, is there any way to make something that is safe, that is effective, that doesn't stain, that uses a minimal number of ingredients, and that is repeatable. And the biggest challenge was stain. And that and that idea it's been sort of floating around in my head for a long time. So the principal ingredients of most bloods are very similar to the principal ingredients of a paint. You have a vehicle, which is something that carries the whatever the substance is. You have a colorant, and then you have, you know, resists and dryers and things that modify the way it behaves. So the vehicle for most stage blood that I've encountered is corn syrup. It's a polysaccharide, it's super easy to obtain, it's not very expensive, and it's fairly user-friendly. I mean, you can get corn syrup on your skin and it gets sticky and gross, and you wash it off and it goes away. You know, you don't get a rash and you don't get, you know, long-term side effects from it. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing is the colorant. And one of the things that I discovered fairly early on is that the liquid colorant, the food coloring that you buy at the grocery store, tends to be the cheapest possible solution. And it wasn't until I had fooled around with it a little bit that I discovered that there are much higher quality food colorings available for commercial baking and commercial food preparation. That usually come in the form of a gel, they're usually stabilized, and they always look the same. So that was the second thing. And then I started to realize that there we had to figure out a way to make it so the food coloring would somehow not float as freely in the solution. And I started reading ingredient lists. I wasn't reading recipes, and I wasn't backwards engineering, and I wasn't doing any chemistry experiments. I was literally reading ingredient lists, and I discovered a couple of ingredient lists that all contained some sort of acid, usually citric acid, and some sort of alkaline, usually bicarbonate of soda. And I started fiddling around with that, and I showed an ingredient list. I was really approaching this, I showed the ingredient list to a friend of mine who was a she's a molecular biologist who works with um diabetics, and so she studies the way sugar behaves. And when I asked her about, I said, you know, I've got the colorant, I've got the vehicle, I've got a resist. Um the original resist for peanut for blood was peanut butter, and a resist is just a thickening agent that makes something sit on the surface of a fabric. Um and I've also got something that adjusts the way water behaves. I put glycerin into it, but I don't understand the presence of acid and alkaline. And she said, well, the acid probably works as a chelating agent. And I said, I don't know what that is. And she said, a chelating agent is something that helps adjust the absorbency of another product. And we I realized that what it was doing was it was the acid was messing with the way the polysaccharide, the corn syrup, was attracting and allowing things to attach to it. And that the bicarbonate of soda is basically a buffering agent, so that the acid isn't quite as sharp. And I'm butchering this, I'm sure there are going to be chemists who listen to me tell this story and all the things and go without the body. I'm not chemists we have. This guy has no idea what he's talking about. But what ended up happening was I just basically went into the shop on a Saturday with all of the ingredients, and some students and I began mixing things and playing around and fussing with racing ratios. And the other thing that I got on to the idea of is the concept of titration, which is adding enough of something to a solution so that it's exactly balanced and not oversaturated. And one of the things that I learned is most people dump coloring into their solutions. And so what I did was I mixed, I added a teaspoon. I had come up with, I think I measured the amount of corn syrup that was in a bottle, and I did some obscure shop math where I took a fraction of that and made a chelating agent with water, bicarbonate of soda, and acid, and I combined the two things together. And then I added glycerin and I added colorants. And what I did was I started with very small amounts of colorant and slowly built the amount until I reached a point where it looked right and then stopped. And the amazing thing was that for 36 ounces of liquid, I only needed two teaspoons of colorant. So I added two teaspoons of the red, and then I thought, well, blood isn't pure red, so I added a drop of blue, and then I thought, you know, it's like mixing paint. I'm looking at it and trying to figure out what it needs. And uh we use a product in in prop shops called um acid-proof color or caramel coloring that's used to make tawny beverages like coke and tea and whatever that color. And it's useful in a shop because in a theater because you can make something that looks like the beverage but won't stain because it's just colorant. And so I added a few drops of caramel coloring to make it brown and kind of mixed it up and put it on my hand and walked out into the shop, and the first person who I saw in the shop said, What did you do? They didn't say, What is that? They didn't say, That looks really good, they didn't say, Cool, you've got stage blood. They assumed I had cut myself. And I said, I looked at him, like I honestly I couldn't make the connection. I was like, What do you mean, what did I do? And he went, What happened? What happened? You know, and he was becoming more and more frantic. And I said, Oh, I this is this is stage blood. And he came walking over and looked at it, and he went, That's pretty good stuff.

Nick Petrella 12:28

Yeah.

Open-Sourcing The Recipe And Costs

Larry Heyman 12:29

And so the next thing that we did was we tested it on fabrics, and that was really the the the chelating agent changed the way the corn syrup felt, and it changed the way the blood sort of ran off my hand. And I put it on a painted surface and wiped it up, and it didn't stain the painted surface. Wow. And I started applying it to fabrics, and then I got super lucky because a very good friend of mine is the craftsperson at the Huntington Theater in Boston and has been for about 41 seasons. And she asked me if she could use some of my product for a show, and I said yes. And she tested it, and I want to say she tested it on over a hundred fabrics. Wow. And she got back to me with it only stained two of them, and I know what I know why it did. Wow. So, yeah, we have this. I've since used it on other things, and everybody's very skeptical, and then I take it and wash it off, and it's just this sort of magical thing.

Nick Petrella 13:24

So do you sell it?

Larry Heyman 13:26

I don't. Um, I give away the recipe because so many places are finance challenged, and it's such an easy thing to do. And um I asked, I actually consulted with an attorney and said, Can I patent this and sell it? And he said, you know, when you patent something, it sets up a whole bunch of limitations. And honestly, this would be a really hard thing to patent because you can't prove that you're the person who came up with it. And you know, and so rather than um, rather than selling it, um, a friend of mine published it in her in her stage blood cookbook and gave me credit. And um, and I now know that it's being used at a bunch of theaters around the world, and I love that. But I I I would have a really hard time making money off of people where I'm selling them corn syrup and food coloring, you know what I mean?

Nick Petrella 14:17

Well, so my ears perked up when when you said a couple hundred dollars.

Larry Heyman 14:22

Yeah, no, it's I mean it's it's disturbing, but if you go to companies that manufacture like theatrical stage blood, you you know, a good company um can get three or four hundred dollars for a gallon of it.

Nick Petrella 14:34

Yeah, that's crazy.

Larry Heyman 14:35

And um and they're selling super high quality product and it's beautiful stuff and it works wonderfully, and actors love it. But when you're doing nonprofit theater, a $400 gallon of anything is cost really. Like I can't, I couldn't get a, you know, I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't pay $400 for a gallon of really good coffee.

Nick Petrella 14:53

So I mean it it it must cost under $10.

Larry Heyman 14:57

Yeah, I think I I think I I bid it out and for a for a gallon of it because the food because the colorant is expensive, I think I bid it out and a gallon of it cost was thirteen dollars to produce. Yeah. But a gallon of it will last, I mean, unless you're doing like Coriolanus or or you know, or particularly bloody version of Julius Caesar, a gallon of it will last you forever. Um but yeah, it's very reasonably priced, and like I said, you can duplicate it easily. The biggest challenge that I had was last summer I went and worked for the Prague Shakespeare Company and discovered that um corn syrup is not universally available around the world. It's an American thing. And I had to find a useful syrupy polysaccharide that would work in its place. So fascinating. Did that answer what you needed answered? Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Staying Current Through Curiosity

Andy Heise 15:58

So as we've been talking about, you've you've worked on uh a range of uh different materials and projects and all sorts of different things. How do you stay current with uh new technologies and fabrication methods uh while also maintaining your own uh design sort of voice and and and uh vision Wow, that's a that's a really good question.

Larry Heyman 16:21

That's one of those things where I I'm sort of I have a friend who kind of refers to me as an antenna. I sort of work through walk through the world and grab onto things and latch onto things, and I pay attention. I sort of keep my head up and look around me, and and I'm um my wife will tell you this. My wife is a my wife's a doctor, and she's always been sort of I won't say fascinated, but she's always been interested in the fact that I have a certain level of intellectual curiosity where I see something done and I want to know how it's done. I want to understand things. And so a lot of the times I will examine or explore. A lot of the times it's reading books or websites, it's visiting art supply stores, it's just staying open to the universe a little bit and getting an understanding of how things work. Um I mean, and and I also think that in theater technology, we spend a lot of time trying to find something that looks like one thing but behaves like something else. So a lot of the time it's just literally looking at something and going, wow, I could I could take a pool noodle and bend it around something and turn it into Bo Peeps, you know, hook or whatever. Um it's just a lot of imagineering, a lot of looking at things and just being tactile and touching things. But there are also times where I mean, I've kept good friends, and so I'll reach out and ask people stuff. There's a movie, and I I have to I'll I'll I'll load this with the caveat that I'm not a horror movie buff and that I don't particularly like horror movies, but there's apparently a movie out called Bring Her Back that's by um their their brothers, their twin brothers directors. And it's apparently a very disturbing film, and there's a moment where someone in the movie is possessed by a ravenous demon, and there's a scene where the a character begins eating the dining room table. And I've seen it in conversation forums backstage behind the scenes and those sorts of things, um, where um a lot of people are saying I read I I cringe when I watch that because it's so believable and so awful and so terrifying, and it looks like it would be painful. And and so I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who have worked in the industry for a while, and they said, you know, we'll we'll find out for you, just to find out how it was done. And I discovered that the table was made out of balsa wood, that it that the finish on the table table was flavored with sweetened chocolate, and that the 12-year-old actor playing the part had um uh a dental appliance. He was wearing dentures um that that allowed for teeth to break off. That's how disturbing the scene is. Oh man. And um, and it was really it's also really funny because I found out after reading an article that somebody steered me towards that the young man playing the character really didn't want it except the part. He didn't want to be in this movie, and then he read it and thought it was interesting, but the he found it disturbing as well. So that was sort of refreshing. But uh it's just it's knowing who to ask and knowing where to go and knowing where to look and just being curious and looking for answers and wanting answers. I mean, I it's it's really hard to sort of trait trace the path, but yeah.

Practical Effects And Simple Solutions

Andy Heise 19:54

It's it's a combination of you know divergent and convergent. You're like you start with, here's what we want. Now, how what are all the ways we could do that? And you say, okay, well, this is what it needs to do, so then you start coming up with a solution. And then I mean it requires both both ways of thinking, right?

Larry Heyman 20:10

So another example that I'll give you, because a lot of the times it really is just solving a problem with the simplest possible possible solution. And so there's a pretty famous scene that a lot of people know about in King Lear, where the uh Duke of Gloucester gets his eyes poked out. Um and it's one of the it's one of the talked-about scenes in Shakespeare. Um, and I believe it's the it's Cornwall, the character who gouges his eyes out, and it's in the text, you know, poke it poke out his eyes, and then the left one mocks the right one, poke that one out too. And it's awful. But um as we get more and more cinematic in our production of theater, there's the desire to give the audience a cringe moment where the actor is going through the motion, and you're like, oh my gosh, I can actually believe you know, you're sitting there. I'm sitting in the audience watching it happen during a technical rehearsal and hugging myself, even though I know how they did the effect. Anyway, one of the questions that came up for me was um they're on a bear stage, the character who's getting his eyes poked out is bound to a chair. The character who's doing the poking walks in front of him, and they wanted to have blood packs. And um, and the character who plays Cornwall's wife, one of one of Lear's daughters, is on stage as well. And so the question came up: how do we get the blood packs into the actor's hands so that he can then break them and then do the gesture and turn around with blood all over his hands? Uh uh the characters sort of walking around the stage. I was up there walking around with them and looking at things, and I looked at the back of the chair and I said, Well, what if we, you know, what if we taped a Ziploc bag to the back of the chair and we put the blood packs into the Ziploc bag, and then the Daughter, I think it's Reagan. Again, the Shakespeareans in the audience will roll their eyes. But Reagan walks what if what if the daughter walks behind the chair, lifts the blood packs out, and then Cornwall walks in front of the chair and takes the blood packs from from her. Just do a magician's handoff, you know, and then does it. And they all kind of looked at me like we were gonna use rubber bands and attach them to our wrists and do this. And I was like, okay, but a bag on the back of the chair means that you don't have to attach it to your wrists. Like, this is just a cheap magician's trick. Like hiding something. Yeah, sleight of hand. It's like you're palming something and handing it off. And and it was just interesting to me because it's like we often make solutions way more complicated than we need to because we want to feel like we've invented some sort of technology. And that's where I fall back on, and Nick may recognize the quote, but that's where I fall back on what what the graphic artist uh Paul Rand used to say, which is don't try to be original, just try to be good. Just try to make it believable. So, you know, that's that's really it. That's great.

Nick Petrella 23:15

You're touching upon kind of my next question is do you approach design differently when working in different genres, say theater to film to opera?

Designing For Theater, Opera, And Film

Larry Heyman 23:24

Yes. You almost have to because film, you see things from all different angles. And the other challenge with film is when you're dressing a set or decorating a room or setting something up, you're never a hundred percent sure where the camera's going to be. So you have no idea where, I mean, you can you might be able to get like a like a mulligan and say, where are we shooting, you know, and and see, but a lot of the times you have to dress the room with the with the the perception that the camera could be anywhere. And and similarly, like uh a cinematographer may walk into a room, this happened to me, where we had very carefully arranged arranged for and paid for expensive blinds and drapery for the room. And the cinematographer came walking in and said, You gotta take down the drapes and we've got to open the blinds all the way because I want to put a light outside. And it was like, okay, well, that completely blows the way, you know, the the however many hundred few hundred dollars. But you have to plan for every contingency. And then you have to be willing in film, as the as a decorator, designer, production designer, art director, whatever you are, you have to, to a certain extent, be willing to walk away because they're gonna come in and shoot it how they want to shoot it. So it's entirely possible that something that you love will never be seen, and you just have to sort of own that. It's not your babies. Right. So that's one thing. Um, and then yeah, uh the difference between theater and opera is that opera is bigger. Um, and that's both literal and figurative. Um, because frequently when you're in when you're producing opera, you're producing it on a very large stage with a very large proscenium arch and a certain amount of depth. So you have to be able to fill the space. And and you have to be willing, uh this is gonna make me unpopular, but you have to be willing if if you think a 40-foot-high wall is what you need to make something meaningful. If you're doing a production of Aida and you want to have this gigantic yawning space in front of the audience, and your your scenic department is like, oh, for crying out loud, you're gonna make us move a 40-foot wall on and off stage, or build a 40-foot wall and get it on stage, or whatever. You kind of have to put in your earplugs and design what you want to what you want to see. But yes, in general, opera is a little bit bigger, it's a little bit broader, it's a little bit sort of coloring outside the lines, whereas theater leans on either figurative realism, abstraction, or realism.

unknown 26:03

Yeah.

Larry Heyman 26:03

Does that make sense?

Andy Heise 26:04

Yeah, totally.

Larry Heyman 26:05

Yeah.

Andy Heise 26:08

So competition for design work can be fierce, just like many jobs in the in the arts. Um have you how have you approached building and maintaining relationships that that lead to opportunities? We touched on this earlier.

Relationships, Reliability, And Humility

Larry Heyman 26:20

Um Yeah, um I start a lot of rumors about other designers. No, it's a joke. Um you know what? It's it's tricky because uh uh and I I I keep mentioning names, but there are people who have given me given me great advice or helped form my my my current self, my current iteration. Um and Diana Angel, who is the she's the pro production manager at the Cleveland Playhouse, and I just she's awesome. I just love her. And um one of the things that she said to me was you have to be willing as a freelance designer to walk the fine line between being persistent and being a nuisance and potentially being a telemarketer. You have to be willing. You it's the most uncomfortable thing any of us could ever do, especially if we were raised in the Midwest, is to talk about ourselves and to self-promote and to say to somebody, I've never done a production of this and I really want to do one, just to see if maybe you can get the emotional vote. But um maintaining maintaining a positive attitude, answering your phone, answering your texts, answering your emails, don't make things overly difficult if you don't have to. If the designer, if the I'm sorry, if the technical director calls you and says, I know you drafted these so all of the Sash windows on the set open, is there one or two that don't need to open? Actually take that question seriously and go, let me let me let me make a phone call and talk to the director and I'll get back to you. And if you can, make it easy for people.

Nick Petrella 27:59

Yeah.

Larry Heyman 28:00

Say to somebody, say to your scenic artist, if they come to you and they give you a color and it's not a hundred percent, a thousand percent, you know, the cones and rods in my eyes are reading it differently than the cones and rods in her eyes or whatever. Don't say, oh no, that's not the color. If it's close, close counts and just accept it and be easy when you can afford to be easy. Because then when you really need something to be a certain way, people aren't constantly rolling their eyes and going, wow, this guy's a pain. So um be positive, stay open to the universe, be easy to work with, be lighthearted, be a little whimsical, be flexible, and and respond when people ask you questions.

Speaker 2 28:43

Yeah.

Larry Heyman 28:44

Great advice. I mean, and and I've maintained friendships with people who are like, you know, who I mean, I have imposter syndrome. I think I'm a pain. I don't think I'm easy to work with at all. I'm constantly convincing myself that other people are looking at me and rolling their eyes and saying, oh my gosh, I can't believe he's late with his drawings, or whatever. And then I hear from those people and they're like, they have nothing but, you know, they they want to work with me, or they liked working with me, or they want to work with me again, or they mention my name, or they come to Nick and tell him that I should, you know, be on his podcast, or whatever. So I mean, I'm very lucky that way, I think.

Nick Petrella 29:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, we had asked you.

Larry Heyman 29:26

Yeah.

Nick Petrella 29:27

But we but we saw your work though.

Larry Heyman 29:29

Right. But I mean, I think another part of it is just be a little humble. Yeah. Like be be be you know, a really good friend of mine who works at a huge scene shop in New Jersey now. She and I started out in props together. And she always talks about, you know, it's the Midwesterner in us that says please and thank you about everything. But I think that that that saying please and thank you will get you a long way.

Freelance Business Setup That Works

Nick Petrella 29:53

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, as you know, Larry, we focus on arts entrepreneurship on this podcast. And I'm wondering if you were prepared when you started as a freelancer and what you wish you learned about entrepreneurship in college.

Larry Heyman 30:09

Um, I wish that I had learned that I'd like to do that. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Okay. One of the things that we don't teach and that I've seen taught at some universities, but not enough, is um the business of arts. How do you get paid? How do you value your work? What limits should you set? What is a significant no? Like, when is it okay to say, no, I'm not gonna do that? Um, so you have to you have to do that. I learned, it's funny, I mentioned this good friend of mine who brought me on as a as a as a dude working for her in her in her in her commercial production work. And one of the things that she told me was, um, you need to get an LLC. You need to get an LLC, you need to set up a business bank account, and you need to do your accounting for the LLC separately from your own accounting. And uh I thought, wow, that's super complicated. And then I came to Ohio, and in Ohio, it's like, I can't even remember what it is. I want to say it's like a hundred bucks or something, maybe not even once, and you get the LLC and you get a business ID, you get your your federal ID number, and then um I walked over to my literally, I'm not even making this up. I walked over to the Chase because I bank at Chase, and I walked in and talked to their business banking person and told her what I was doing, and she said, you need to deposit $2,000 in an account and dirt and designate it as a business account. Yeah. And so I have a business account that is the history of chairs design LLC, and um it's you know, and that's so I learned that, and then um I actually this made it made life so much easier. I downloaded an app called something like easy expense, and it's it uses AI, you photograph your receipts, it categorizes them and saves them for you. And at the end of the year, I actually print out an Excel spreadsheet and send it to my accountant, and those are all my business expenses. And that's awesome. And and he actually, my accountant actually reached out to me because uh I sent it to him as an Excel spreadsheet. And he said, Did you do the print spreadsheet or did you use software? And I told him I use easy expense, and he was like, Man, that's that is great software. Because it identifies like it knows that when I go to Office Max, it's most likely business supplies. Right. And when I go to a restaurant, it's going to be a business meal or whatever. So yeah, if I had learned that, I probably would have started doing this a little. If I knew how easy this was, I probably would have started earlier.

Nick Petrella 32:47

Yeah.

Larry Heyman 32:47

That's great. And just about things like getting an accountant, and that QuickBooks is great, but there's a very good chance that you don't know the tax law as well as you need to for it. Yes.

Nick Petrella 33:00

Well, and they change.

Larry Heyman 33:02

Right. Right.

Nick Petrella 33:03

You could Yeah.

Andy Heise 33:05

But you to your point, you're the you're you make your accountant's job easy, right? Right. That's it. So it's super affordable and easy for for them to do that. If you just like said, hey, I need to do my taxes and didn't have any records, didn't have a separate bank, you didn't have all those, all those logistical things in place. Like much more much more complicated and expensive to have. Right.

Larry Heyman 33:27

Or if I had sent him a zip Ziploc bag full of receipts, you know, and made him go through it and lay them all out.

Speaker 2 33:32

Right.

Defining Success And Lasting Impact

Larry Heyman 33:33

And then the other thing that I learned that, you know, again, you gotta you gotta make money to you gotta spend money to make money, blah, blah, blah, all those, all those, those um um old adages. But um uh there was a year where I have a shop in my house because I also build some things, and I bought a table saw, and I bought, I bought a saw stop, which is an expensive table saw that protects your fingers from getting cut off. Seems significant. But it was a few thousand dollars, and um I sent that to my accountant, and his response was that's a good purchase. And I didn't understand why, and he said, Because you want some sort of bigger purchases that offset all of the various untaxed money that you're getting. So making bigger purchases on behalf of your business is not a bad thing. Not a bad thing.

Andy Heise 34:28

Yeah, yep. So when you think of your career as a whole, how do you define success for yourself and as um as an entrepreneurial artist designer?

Larry Heyman 34:42

Um having people remember my name and having and and occasionally, and this is weird, this is gonna sound weird, but um there have been a couple of situations where I designed something and forgot about it, and then I'll mention something, you know, I'll do one of those. This sounds like such a stupid and trivial and humble braggy sort of thing, but I'll somebody on Facebook will do the game where it's like in in one phrase or less, um tell me something about how you what you remember about me or how you met me or whatever. And somebody will throw at me this chestnut of something that I did when I first met them in terms of work. And I'll realize that I I've had it, there's been an impact there. Um, another thing that happens occasionally, not often, but occasionally, is um I'll have a student come back to me and tell me that um something that I said in a class made them think completely differently about how to be creative and how to create art or craft or whatever. And and it's something where I I literally think of whatever it is as a throwaway idea, and for somebody it was important. So I don't know if that answers the question, but I think it's I think the larger answer is probably um the impact that I've had on other people's professional existence and artistic life. Yeah, that's great. Yep.

New Personal Art Experiments

Nick Petrella 36:23

So before Andy kicks off the final three questions, do you have any fun projects coming up that you can share with us?

Larry Heyman 36:29

I really don't. I've been um I'm experimenting with something that isn't that I wouldn't consider a project because it's personal, but I am experimenting with um, I I've been at this age, I've been toying with the idea of selling art just for art's sake. And I started experimenting with printmaking, and I've become fascinated with um jelly print transfers and and back painted printmaking, and so I'm exploring that. Cool. And I'm hoping that um as we sort of slide into the to the holiday season, I may have some art available on my website for sale. Cool. So that's something that I'm experimenting with. And I recently um finally downloaded, I had it down some downtime, and I went into my shop and I downloaded some plans for an easel, for an artist's easel. And I actually built an easel out of maple and birch. And I'm now bound and determined that I have an easel, I must put a canvas on it and and try painting. And I've painted before. I I mean I, you know, obviously I have a BFA. I I had to take art classes, but this is the first time that I'm really sort of kicking off and doing it to see what I can discover.

Nick Petrella 37:46

So you heard it here first. Future Larry Heyman designs are going to have easels and prints. Yeah, possibly.

Larry Heyman 37:54

We'll core them online. You know, mention this ad when you emailed me. Yeah, that's right.

Alternate Careers And Visual Merchandising

Andy Heise 38:01

You heard it on this podcast, right? Right. Um You know, there's a question that's been rattling around my head from a few questions ago when we asked you. Uh so this is sort of off script. But if you hadn't been in stage design and production, that's side, that sort of things, what what might you have done professionally? What might you have pursued?

Larry Heyman 38:21

Um interior design, possibly. Yeah. Um, or possibly something that I always feel is sort of analogous to this is visual merchandising. And I know several people who worked in I would I know a bunch of people who were costume designers and props people who worked in department stores. Right. And just doing display and arrangement. Um I know for one that several of several major national chains hire just quirky art type bodies to work in um in their in their display and and and visual merchandising. We've had at least one on the show.

Andy Heise 39:03

Right. Right. They're yeah, because they yeah, they're making those Instagrammable scenes within retail settings and things like that.

Speaker 2 39:12

Right. Yeah.

Advice, Access, And Decorporatizing Arts

Andy Heise 39:14

All right, Larry, we've reached the point of the interview where we ask all of our interviewees the same three questions. And the first question is what advice would you give to others wanting to become an arts entrepreneur?

Larry Heyman 39:24

Um don't stop, don't stop working. This sounds stupid. Don't stop working. Don't don't discount creative time. Like you need to find creative time where you can close yourself off. And it shouldn't be late at night or in the, you know, in the wee small hours in the morning. Set aside time. Set aside time for your for yourself to listen to music, to sip beverages of your choice, and to simply draw, paint, sketch. Work digitally if you work digitally. If you're on an iPad and you're using Procreate, download brushes and experiment and explore. You have to stay open to the universe.

Nick Petrella 40:07

What can we do to ensure the arts are more accessible and reaching the widest possible audience?

Larry Heyman 40:14

Um decorporatize them. I think one of the largest, one of the biggest complaints, one of the largest complaints, I just read here's this is a total, this is a completely niche market, but um just recently in Cleveland, I went to the um oh, I can't remember the name of the venue. I went to the little rock and roll venue that's here and saw the band Garbage, which I've been seeing since I was in college. I mean, I've loved Garbage since they first started producing stuff. And um and I've seen them probably five or six times in their career. And this marked in 2025 marked 30 years since their first album, their first major album, and um and um they announced that this is their last headline tour. And their lead singer, Shirley Manson, said um, the industry has made it almost impossible for artists who are artists and not other things to work. And and and I thought about it and I was like, well, geez, I you know, I bought general admission tickets for the agora, that's at the agora um ballroom in in Cleveland, and I think they were 45 bucks, and then I checked out how much the the general admission in Columbus was, and it was a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five, and in Chicago it was 150, and in LA it was stupid. Yeah, yeah, and um so I think I think kind of you know having having small theaters that produce local productions that aren't doing gigantic productions of the Lion King. I'm not saying that the Lion King doesn't have its place, but when corporations took over the production of theater, they made it largely inaccessible to a lot of people. The the cost of a ticket to Hamilton should never have been what the costs were. And I say that as somebody who makes my living off of the arts. You know what I mean? But the bottom line is that the designers and below-the-line employees never see what's being charged. Neither do the performers, neither, for that matter do the the writers or composers. That money is going to venues and it's going to producers and it's going to production investors.

Andy Heise 42:36

Which are often which are often one and the same company. Yeah.

Larry Heyman 42:39

And it's, I mean, it's the weird part, it's the unpleasant part of it, but it's the reality.

Andy Heise 42:45

Lastly, what's the best artistic or entrepreneurial advice you've been given?

Best Advice: Embrace The Weird

Larry Heyman 42:54

The best artistic advice. Um It's not really advice, but one of the best things I think I've ever been told, and I've lived by it. Um, and this came from, I'll name him. Uh he's he's still out there and I love him. He was my um a professor in graduate school. His name is Richard Isaac, he was a set designer, and um he knew that I had a certain level of whimsy when I was designing, and he looked at one of my designs in class in an in-class critique, and um he went, Wow, you're weird. But I mean that in the best possible way. And and and then he went on to sort of express what he saw in the in the design that I had sort of thrown out there. And and I was sort of doing like, geez, I hope this works, but if it doesn't work, I'm gonna crash and burn in a big ugly way. Um, don't be afraid to be weird. Be afraid to be the one who sees something that nobody else sees. And sometimes a doorway doesn't have to look like a doorway.

Nick Petrella 44:10

Yeah. That's great. Well, it's great having you on, Larry, and really impressive just how much research you put into your designs and just general problem solving.

Larry Heyman 44:21

Well, thank you. It was, I mean, I'm so glad you guys had me on. It's been a real pleasure, and I love more than anything else, I just love sharing. So I'm so happy to have done it.

Announcer 44:32

Thanks for your time, Larry. Thanks for listening. If you like this podcast, please subscribe. Visit Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast.com to learn more about our guest and how you can help support artists, the arts, and this podcast.