Painting Joy | Professional artist Heather Haymart | The Vance Crowe Podcast

About this episode

Heather Haymart, a St. Louis painter Vance met at the Clayton Art Fair, walks through her decades-long path from art teacher to muralist to fine artist running her own online-first business. The conversation covers the anxiety and logistics of art fairs, the economics of galleries (50% cuts) versus co-ops versus direct online sales, and the discipline required to treat creativity as a business rather than a hobby. Heather and Vance find deep common ground on habit and ritual as the engine of creative output — her "fill the water bucket" trigger mirrors his own routines — and both connect meditation-like states (her painting, his jiu-jitsu) to managing anxiety. The episode closes on intermittent fasting, Naval Ravikant's fit/wealthy/happy framework, the concept of Lindy (durability over time), and a pointed detour into whether Gauguin's biography should affect how his art is judged.

“A lot of my decision making about my career as an artist has been based on putting my future in someone else's hands. So every time I've met a situation where I am dependent upon someone else to allow me to do what I wanna do, I try to figure out a way to not have to do that, only because at any point they could take that away, right?”

“It is definitely all about habits and like routines for me in particular... I have to get it from the kitchen and take it down to my basement studio... So that's kind of like one of those things like if I look across and see my bucket, I'm like, just get over there and fill that with water. Let's go.”

“There's nothing magic about it. I mean, some people are, you know, technically minded and some people are mathematically minded... It's really just about observation... one of the tips is to draw around things rather than draw the thing, draw the space around things.”

Key moments

• Heather explains why she avoids being dependent on any single art fair or gallery for her livelihood — echoed later as "building barns on rented land" (craft/money).
• Vance describes his own limited art vocabulary and Heather's technical description of her thick, textured, three-dimensional paintings.
• Heather traces her path from art teacher (six-seven years) to muralist to abstract painter, driven partly by discomfort with classroom discipline.
• Detailed breakdown of gallery economics (40-60% splits) versus artist co-ops versus direct online sales, and why she avoided ceding control of her career to gatekeepers.
• The "fill the water bucket" ritual as the discipline hack that gets her into her basement studio every morning, tied explicitly to Steven Pressfield's concept of Resistance from The War of Art.
• Heather explains her painting practice functions as meditation/mindfulness, slowing down constant background anxiety.
• Vance parallels his own creative process (needing to run five miles before ideas come) and jiu-jitsu as an anxiety-reset mechanism.
• Discussion of teaching art as teachable technical skill (drawing negative space, pencil technique) rather than innate magic.
• Intermittent fasting, Naval Ravikant's "fit, wealthy, happy" framework, and whether creativity should be added as a fourth pillar.

Notable quotes

“So every time I've met a situation where I am dependent upon someone else to allow me to do what I wanna do, I try to figure out a way to not have to do that.”

“It's kind of like one of those things like if I look across and see my bucket, I'm like, just get over there and fill that with water. Let's go.”

“It's really just about observation... one of the tips is to draw around things rather than draw the thing, draw the space around things.”

“Why are we celebrating this man if we know?”