Today we’d like to introduce you to Keelan Parham.
Hi Keelan, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My wife, Barbara, and I own Artistic Talent Group, a state-licensed Talent Agency that represents visual artists like myself for the special events industry and at retail locations across Walt Disney World. For more than 20 years, Artistic Talent Group (ATG) has established itself as the nation’s premier provider of artistic entertainment. Producing the highest quality artwork available, our team of award-winning artists entertains while they create. Focusing on the core principles of professionalism, customer service, and quality, our team is kept in high demand for special events around the world.
Before we started Artistic Talent Group, I was Elvis. Yes, you read that correctly. Well, I was an Elvis impersonator at least! Way back in 1992, I moved to Orlando after graduating from Savannah College of Art and Design. I met Barbara, or “Barbie” as she’s known to her family and friends, soon after I arrived. I had several odd jobs (and I mean ODD), just trying to pay my bills and make enough money to take her out on dates. One of those was being an Elvis impersonator for a few short months. I did pretty well (Yes, I can still sing a mean “Don’t Be Cruel”) and got a bit of local recognition, performing in concerts at Old Town in Kissimmee and winning some Elvis contests (including one at Flea World in Sanford). But I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life.
One fateful day I saw an ad in the Classified section (remember those?) of the Orlando Sentinel for a job as a Caricature Artist at Walt Disney World. I got the job, and I’ve been drawing caricatures and other art at Disney for twenty-eight years. Several months later, Barbie and I got married, and in November we will celebrate our twenty-eighth Anniversary! We joke that we’re the perfect team because I am ALL right-brained and creative and Barbie is ALL left-brained and logical.
Artistic Talent Group truly began when I left Disney briefly and we opened our own caricature kiosk at the Pointe Orlando shopping complex on International Drive in 1997. In 1998, we began partnering with Disney directly and opened our first theme park location, Animal Kingdom. We currently own and operate 13 retail locations across Walt Disney World Resort property, including our first brick and mortar storefront, The Art Corner, at Disney Springs.
These days, Barbie and her team run our daily retail operations and book talent for Events across the nation and the world. I interview and train new artists, develop new art products and styles, and after probably 500,000 caricatures or so, I am still drawing! I draw at events, at our retail locations, and in my home studio for freelance clients.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It’s not what you go through but how you go through it. Is life ever a smooth road? We’ve always seen ourselves as very blessed to be able to do what we do, but over the years there’s definitely been bumps here and there. The most recent has of course been the Covid shutdown. We are very happy that Disney reopened after a relatively short time, but being closed for those months was hard on our business like it was for so many others. No tourism, no events, was pretty devastating. I was able to get some freelance work, and I did ZOOM Art lessons for virtual conventions and corporate clients, though.
We are just now reopening some of our retail locations at the Disney resort hotels and are rebuilding a lot of our artist roster as so many of them had to move and/or find other jobs while Disney was closed. But finding and training artists has always been one of the challenges of our business! Somehow though, we always find them or they find us.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I love to draw, and I’m constantly creating. Whether it’s drawing comic book stories, caricatures or drawing the environment and scenes around me (Urban sketching). I even occasionally break out my canvases and acrylic paints.
But at the end of the day, I am a cartoonist first and foremost. I was a comic book geek before that was cool! There were no comic book stores or comic book conventions when I first started reading them ( Yes, I’m that old. ), and you had to go to 7-11 all the time to see if your new issue was there. I think that waiting in between issues is probably what made me really start drawing. I would just draw my OWN superheroes and my own comic books.
In art school, they didn’t encourage cartooning, so I actually was trained in classical figure drawing. I never did Caricatures at all until I got a job doing them! But since I always loved to draw people, and I loved to draw cartoons, it was easy for me to “marry” the two and start drawing cartoons of the people who wanted to pay me to draw them.
To this day, I like to think of myself not as much as a “caricaturist” but just as a cartoonist who specializes in likenesses.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
My wife and I live in the Dr. Phillips area with our two daughters, both of whom draw.
Contact Info:
- Email: info@ArtisticTalentGroup.com
- Website: www.ArtisticTalentGroup.com www.CaricatureConnection.com
- Instagram: @ArtisticTalentGroup @TheArtCornerbyATG @KeelanArt
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artistictalentgroup
Image Credits
Photograph of Keelan and Barbara Parham by Rafael Tonghol
