Today we’d like to introduce you to Eric Grady.
Hi Eric, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My business partner is Jackie Brown. We’re the owners of Crooked Easel LLC. I started doing caricatures way back in 1987 while in art school at the Art Institute Of Atlanta. I had seen caricatures being drawn when I was little, and when I got to art school, I saw them being done and I remembered how I wanted to do that when I was a kid. So I taught myself to draw them. After art school, I worked at an amusement park, and then sometime later, I decided to open my own place in Myrtle Beach, SC.
I opened my first location in 1992 in Myrtle Beach. I had multiple shops there over the years. Myrtle Beach is a seasonal town. It’s very busy in the summer, but most places close for the winter. And that’s how we worked.
Then, in 2018, I hired Jackie, among others. But Jackie shined. She learned quickly, she experimented with technique, she really pushed the envelope. She’s a fantastic artist. But also, she so nice to people, and she was really good at getting customers, and they all thought she was the nicest person and everybody enjoyed her work.
Then covid hit. It was right after we had opened for the season, and everything shut down. A few weeks later, the restrictions were lifted, and we were able to open back up, and the public was allowed to come back out. And come back out, they did… in droves. There were so many people.
I was down to two people working for me at this point. Jackie being one of them. Then a couple of days after opening back up, a couple of gang members from another town, and while visiting Myrtle Beach, happened upon each other, about 20 feet from the door of our shop. The gang members recognized each other and fired shots. Thankfully, no one was killed or even seriously injured. But it happened right outside our door. Then next weekend, it happened again, three blocks down the road. The next weekend, again, three blocks in the other direction. The next weekend, it happened five blocks down the road, and unbelievably, the next weekend, five blocks in the other direction.
I thought I have got to get my team out of this area. So I offered both workers to join me in a new company, and they would both be partners, with a year round location in Florida, IF we could get a location in Orlando. One of them accepted my offer. It was Jackie.
Jackie is a very talented artist. She came to work with me and she learned very quickly. But more than that, she became a real student of the art. She started looking on other artist’s Instagram pages and Tiktok pages and Facebook, and everywhere else she could find more caricatures to learn from. I don’t know of a lot of people who would trust a young woman, at 21 years old, to be a partner in a business. But Jackie became so good at every aspect of this business that making her a partner in this company was by far, one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever made in my career. She’s got great ideas for helping the company. If there’s anything she hasn’t learned yet, she’s so quick to learn it. I’m so happy to have her as a partner and I hope she’s able to have this as a good career. I’m so proud of her and so lucky to have her as a business partner. And so, we sought out a location in Orlando to open our new business, Crooked Easel LLC.
Luckily, we were able to obtain a location at the Premium Outlets Mall on Vineland. And we’ve been here ever since. We also hired some very talented artists who are doing a terrific job, which occasionally gives us a little bit of time to go back to the Carolinas to visit our families or to spend some time with them when they come to visit us in Florida.
We’re settling into Orlando. We’ve found a couple of restaurants that we have deemed our favorites. We try to go eat at each of them at least once a month to have our business consulting meetings. The weather? What can we say about the weather? It’s so warm here for so much longer than it is in Myrtle Beach. The traffic can be a little hard to deal with. Somebody needs to do something about that. But overall, we’re both really happy here. We really hope people like what we do. We hope we make our customers happy. And we hope we’re able to stay here for a really long time.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
We’ve been lucky that things have been pretty smooth for us. Sure, we’ve hit a few little bumps in the road, but for the most part, things have been good. We’re definitely looking forward to covid being a thing of the past and all the tourists being able to come back. But we’re not unhappy at all with our time here so far.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
What we do and what we specialize in is we draw caricatures of people and sometimes animals. I’ve been drawing caricatures since 1987. Jackie wasn’t even close to being born yet, but she learned at 18 years old, and she’s learned so much, so fast. She’s an amazing caricature artist and a real student of the art form.
I’m very happy that we’re able to make a living by drawing caricatures, and I’m really happy that we’re able to make that happen for our artists as well. I’m so proud of Jackie and how far she’s come. But what I think I’m most proud of is making our customers happy. And that may sound a bit cliché, but I really am proud that we’re able to bring that happiness and laughter to so many people. It makes me happy to see them happy.
What sets us apart is we like to have fun with our customers, as opposed to just drawing them and getting them out of the chair and getting the next customer in it. We want to make it an experience for the customer when they have us draw them. I’m actually a professional comedian. If you were to google the world’s tallest comedian, you’d get me. So joking and laughing is mostly how my days and evenings are filled. But I love joking around with the customers, and I try to get our artists to do the same.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
One definitely needs a mentor in this business, in my opinion. You can try to learn on your own, but it’s so much easier to learn from someone who already does it well. The people we bring on to work with us typically have never drawn caricatures before they came to work with us. They can already draw beautifully, but typically, they can’t do caricatures yet. So we teach them our technique. By the way, we’re very patient teachers. You have to be, to be able to teach this. But yes, I definitely believe in monitorship when it comes to learning a caricature drawing technique.
Pricing:
- Face in black & white……….. $15 per person
- Face & body in black & white …………. $20 per person
- Face in color …………. $25 per person
- Face & body in color ………$30 per person
Contact Info:
- Email: CrookedEasel@gmail.com
- Website: CrookedEasel.com
- Instagram: @CrookedEasel
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/Crooked-Easel-Caricatures-107075711342546
Image Credits
Caricature drawings by Jackie Brown and Eric Grady
