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Join Dr. Kim Kutsch, the brilliant mind behind CariFree, as he explores the extraordinary lives of thought leaders in the dental industry, and beyond. Contrary to Ordinary explores further than dentistry - here we unravel the minds of change-makers, paradigm shifters, and world shakers.
Every two weeks, we dive into the stories of our remarkable guests—ordinary people who continually defy limits. Discover their tales of success, resilience, and self-awareness, and explore how they leverage these experiences not only to elevate dental practice and patient care but also to champion personal growth and entrepreneurship. Listen for captivating conversations with innovators who seamlessly blend art and technology, pursue curiosity, and create the truly extraordinary.
Contrary to Ordinary isn't your typical dentistry podcast—it's a vibrant community that's hit #1 in ‘Entrepreneurship,’ #3 in ‘Business,’ and #21 in ‘All Podcasts’ for a reason. We've had the pleasure of hosting inspiring guests like innovators, dental leaders, pioneering inventors, and artists, including Angus Walls, Machell Hudson, Dr. Simon McDonald, Dr. Bobby Birdi, Rella Christensen, Professor Phillip D. Marsh, Carmen Ohling, John Kois, Dr. Susan Maples, Doug Young, Colt Idol, Stephanie Staples, and many more who've graced our mic.
Each episode isn't just a listen; it's a lesson in living an extraordinary life authentically, embracing rebellion, and nurturing leadership. We dive into diverse topics, from mentoring, coaching, personal development, and work-life balance to self-awareness, emotional intelligence, leadership, storytelling, altruism, and motivation. And yes, we also cover dentistry—exploring natural dentists, dental health, dental laboratories, oral care, oral surgery, dental hygiene, caries disease, brushing teeth, and overall tooth care.
Tune in to Contrary to Ordinary for a unique blend of wisdom that goes beyond the ordinary and resonates with all aspects of life! This podcast aims to empower you to be extraordinary in your dental practice and improve not just your dental care but your overall life!
Do you have an extraordinary story you’d like to share with us? Or perhaps a question for Dr. Kutsch. Contact us on our Instagram, Facebook or Twitter today.
About Our Host:
Meet Dr. Kim Kutsch: a retired dentist with 40 years of experience, prolific writer, thought leader, inventor, and researcher in dental caries and minimally invasive dentistry, brings his insatiable curiosity to the forefront. Eager to learn from those breaking boundaries in dentistry, particularly in preventative and non-invasive dentistry approaches, Dr. Kutsch launched the Contrary to Ordinary podcast. As a keen creative and curious mind, Dr. Kutsch extends his podcast guest list to artists, entrepreneurs, and fascinating minds who have piqued his interest. He wants to learn from them and see how he can be inspired by their extraordinary ways of living and adapt his learnings into his own life and his business, CariFree.
About CariFree:
CariFree is the new model for oral health and cavity prevention. Dr. Kutsch is the CEO and founder of this business. They create cutting-edge technology and science-based solutions to common dental health concerns for the whole family, making it easy to banish cavities for good with preventive strategies over restorative procedures. Find out how dentists are using CariFree products to revolutionize their dental practices here: https://carifree.com/success-stories/.
Recording:
Extraordinary.
Leader.
Innovative.
Integrity.
Courageous.
Curious.
Thoughtful.
Brave.
Unafraid.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
There is a place where technology and art meet, where work and play are one and the same. When the threads of curiosity are pulled in this place, the spark of innovation ripples across industries. Those who make this place their home are giants. Titans, who pursue creative passion while leaving their mark.
Recording:
Creative.
Flexible.
Brilliant.
Clever.
Confident.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
They are courageous thought leaders set on changing the practice of dentistry and their corner of the world. More than the sum of their parts, we deconstruct the traits that bind these uncommon innovators.
Recording:
Humble.
Daring.
Disciplined.
Playful.
Principled.
Spontaneous.
Open.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
To discover what makes them Contrary to Ordinary, where we explore the extraordinary.
Hi there. I'm Dr. Kim Kutsch, host and founder at CariFree. I'm fascinated by what makes the paradigm shifters, world shakers and art makers, tick. Let's embark on a journey. Extraordinary is a place where ordinary people choose to exist. Together we will trek the peaks of possibility, illuminate the depths of resilience, and navigate the boundless landscape of innovation to discover how some of the most innovative dentists and thought leaders unlock their potential and became extraordinary. On this season of Contrary to Ordinary, we'll continue to explore the motivation lives and character of the innovators who see limitless potential around them. In this episode, I'm excited to branch out a little from the practice of dentistry and into the world of art.
We'll be returning to dentistry soon enough, but I'm excited to include some conversations with extraordinary people that will expand your horizons and really make you think differently. I'd like to start our journey today with a quote. We all know that art has monetary value, but its true value is much deeper. Art transcends race, religion, wealth, status, and age. It is connected to us at a soul level. The need for artful expression has always been and will always be. It is for everyone, by everyone.
These are the words of today's guest, Colt Idol, a painter who is described as the new face of the old West. Colt uses color and form in a way that I just love. I actually own some of Colt's paintings and can get lost in their beauty for hours at a time. I think most of us appreciate art, whether we hang it in our homes or experience it in a gallery. Art in all its forms gives us a glimpse into other worlds and transports us, momentarily, away from our own. I paint a little myself, and it's helped me understand the huge amount of work that goes into creating pieces that move people. Truthfully, I'm just happy if my paintings look like something when I'm done with them. Colt is the son of a famous outdoorsman, sculptor and TV personality, Dick Idol. Dick started out as a taxidermist who eventually branched out into art.
Colt Idol:
He's a real interesting guy, and my brother and I were very fortunate to be raised the way that we were. Grew up in a big chunk of land in a little cabin against state land in rural Bigfork, Montana. And my dad was a college football player at NC State. He was pretty solid. Probably could have been a somewhat promising NFL career, but all he wanted to do was be in the outdoors. Grew up on a tobacco farm. He was a farmer rancher. He was a 4H guy. He's taken all these different paths. If he would've focused on some or one of these early on and rode it out, he may have done different things. He worked with Jim and Dick Cabela when they were first getting started, all these outdoor brands, and he had a TV show on Discovery early on. He introduced some of the first non-green camo patterns to the market.
Then that segued into other non-hunting apparel and then furniture. And simultaneously he was getting into sculpting and he found a niche, you could say, in mascot-themed monuments. So he did some of the largest bronze monuments in North America for Cabela's. But then he's done a handful of monuments for like NC State University, University of Arkansas, Razorbacks, and that's kind of at the last stage of his career. And he paints as well. He co-founded North American Whitetail Magazine. So my brother and I, it was camping and hiking and fishing. And then the art scene. He's only done what he's passionate about. He's never really been motivated by money. If he was passionate about it, he was doing it. So I guess you could say the one downside to that is he carried a lot of these projects to a certain point and just kind of lost interest.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
God, I wonder that must've been like to grow up with a dad who was an artist. Was that part of the influence for you to become an artist?
Colt Idol:
Certainly. As a kid, I remember spending countless hours drawing more than anything. I had 100-page blank books that were filled every page with drawings. Most of them were weird. I thought if I was going to do anything in art, it was going to be kind of fantasy type stuff. Like a lot of kids, as you get older, sports overtook. So I played basketball in track and football, and that dominated certainly high school. And I went to college, Montana State University for basketball. And boy, that chapter of my life was just year long, year-round athletics. I never took any art classes in high school. It was always in the back of my head, but I just didn't really care. And then as soon as I get to college, before the school year's even started, I tear my ACL, have the surgery. And at the time it was a pretty devastating injury.
All I had seen in front of me in my future was athletic related. And bounce back from that, prepared to get right back into the sports. Second injury, same knee, five months later, third injury, same knee. So simultaneously after that first injury, I shifted course a little bit at school. I went from university studies into being an art major. This was at Montana State. This was studio art as opposed to graphic art. So it's drawing fundamentals, things like that. I got a fair bit out of that. I really enjoyed that, especially art history. But from the fundamental standpoint, I'd been doing a lot of this on my own, and I stuck with that a little bit. But after my third surgery, so at this point, I'm 20. I'm in my third semester of school and I take a semester off and it came back to Whitefish where we live.
And this was the supposed to be the time to be like, okay, I'm done with athletics, right? What's next? My dad had a project that he was going on for a, I guess you could say, furniture company. They're a overseas company. They have a headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. They needed artwork for low price point, home decor, wall decor. So they needed it for giclée prints, but they also needed it for carpet patterns and things like that. And this is a pier one Bed, Bath and Beyond type company. But they wanted to do a slight shift and get into some step up a price point and focus on some wall art. So they had a license with my dad to create a certain number of images and they would mass produce the pieces. And so when I came back from college at this point, I've painted in oils for a couple of months, and I basically just worked in my dad's studio for the better part of a year.
And we painted together, we painted on pieces together, and we were trying to create somewhat generic western art. Obviously, that's not where long-term any artist would want to go, but it was a great opportunity to have a really focused period of time. I was working six days a week, eight, 10 hours a day, just painting. And to get out of my comfort zone, we had easels set up next to each other, but we were really different in the way we would go about creating art. My dad's a researcher. He's a big reader. He knew everything there is to know about art, but he's almost meticulous to a fault, and he's slow moving. I was going in with full-blown naivety. I was just like a dog that was just needing to be let out of the cage. That's all I wanted to do. I'd rather go full steam ahead into a piece and fail and start over again than over plan and lose that excitement.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
It's easy to see the nostalgia and romance of Colt's paintings reflected in his early life. Working with his dad in his studio side by side at their easels, there's something idyllic about that image, but eventually it was time for Colt to go back to school and finish up his art major.
Colt Idol:
Before I left, I walked into a little gallery in downtown Whitefish and showed us some pictures of my work, and they said, "Well, we'd like to put them on display." So I dropped off the few pieces I had and drove off to school. And I remember that I'll never forget this, I'm getting gas halfway there, and I get a call and, "Well, we just sold one." And it was a $3,000 piece. And in that next about three weeks, they sold everything that they had. And I probably jumped the gun a little bit early. It worked out, so I guess not. I dropped out of school a few weeks in. Unlike other degrees, studio art, your purpose is to sell original art, mostly in galleries. I can further my education in other ways without the monotony of four more years in a very rigid, time-consuming schedule.
And I did that. I pulled out of school, I was painting for this gallery. I got into a second gallery, and I was taking workshops under artists that I liked. And that's one thing I will say. A couple of these workshops, I felt like I learned and grew a semester's worth of furthering my education in art in about a four-day period. Very targeted. These are artists that I had books of. I've read their books, familiar with all their art, and I got to work under them. And a lot of them teach. And again, I can only speak to where I was in the time that I was there, and I know a lot of artists who have gone to prestigious art schools and it's helped make them who they are. But one thing I've always thought is that a lot of art schools tend to be contemporary leaning, and contemporary is a fickle thing.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I'm thinking about, I can't remember the artist's name, but the guy died maybe in the fifties, but he just had blocks of color, in this, it's an orange red. It's like this famous painting that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's just a painting of an orange block sitting on top of a red block, and people would go to see it and evidently stand there and cry.
Colt Idol:
Well, the best contemporary artists, they're contemporary by choice, not by force. And you can tell as soon as you look at the work, and this is where I've got to admit, art history, I wish I took a lot more of it. That really helped me a lot. But you can see art principle at play even in the most abstract work. And these are artists who have conquered the principles of art, and then they kind of climb this hill. For example, most contemporary artists can paint realism. They conquer realism, and then their work gets simplified.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Is that a natural progression, do you think, for artists?
Colt Idol:
Yes. I think not only for artists, but for societies. The longer that art societies are around, they move more impressionistic. Because you're not buying or really appreciating an artist's dedication to time or meticulous nature. You're buying their decision making. If photorealism isn't as much decision making right as impressionism, I don't consider myself terribly contemporary, but there is a reason why the highest price tag art is abstract, is contemporary. It is the most thought-provoking, and it actually opens, it's the biggest arena for artistic genius to be displayed.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Colt has really opened my mind to the power of contemporary art. By blurring the lines of where reality starts and ends, you find a real sense of freedom. The Old West was all about freedom with its rolling hills and frontier spirit, you can see why Colt would paint this into his work, stepping away from the photorealism into something a little less tangible. When I speak to extraordinary people, one of the common traits I've observed is the ability to be courageous when following their own path. Colt is no exception.
Colt Idol:
Courage is a good word. When I go to museums and the artists, we have an art gallery, and when we go to other art galleries, and this has been great sharing this with my wife, she's really into it, you can look at a painting and immediately tell how confident the painter is by their brushstrokes and their purpose. Those are words that I really look for when I'm looking at work, is purpose and confident. Is this an accident, what they're doing here? This nice effect that's going on, did they stumble on to this or did they do this on purpose?
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
They're able to communicate more with less.
Colt Idol:
That should be a goal for a good chunk of painters. You want to say the most that you can with the least amount of brushstrokes. It's not just the motion of the brushstrokes, but also another way to achieve that is the size of brush. You use the biggest brush that you can, you're trying to paint an entire passage on an animal's body, you're trying to do that with one stroke.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Then letting the brain fill it in.
Colt Idol:
The standard of art is not to reach the level of realism that it looks like a photograph. And from a collector's point of view, if you want a photograph, then buy a photograph. You want an artist's interpretation of something. It should not look like a photograph, but our eyes, they make decisions when we see things, they blur edges. They focus on one area at a time. Cameras don't do that. And so you have to be conscious, what's my focal point? Lost edges. All these art techniques that you apply to a painting, to say what you're trying to say. And that's where the value's at.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Yeah. That's really interesting. And you do that really well in your work, I would tell you, Colt. One of the things that's interesting to me is I'll be working on a painting and I'll have this just great brush stroke, and then I'll go touch it and then I'll go, "Oh, I shouldn't have done that." And it's too late. You can't fix it. You can't go back. Right? Because I haven't got to the point where I can play on that kind of stuff yet.
Colt Idol:
Bob Ross, he had a handful of things right, but putting yourself in a position of creating happy accidents is a good principle. And that's one thing in my first couple of years, I could not figure out how to finish a painting. I always overworked it. And in the back of my head, the problem was that I got here too quickly or I got here too easily.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And you didn't think you were done yet.
Colt Idol:
Exactly.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So how do you know when you're done?
Colt Idol:
Now it's all gut. It's a gut feeling. It's not, is the anatomy perfect? It's not how many hours I have in it. I'll have $15,000, $18,000 pieces that are some of my best works, and I've got four hours of work in them. And then I have some where I have 80. Sometimes you hit that momentum, everything's clicking. I'll have Jen, my wife, I'll have my dad. I'll have other people come in and just see their just visceral initial reaction. A lot of that tells me a lot. And I'm like, "Please, I don't want compliments. Tell me what's not working." It's one of our jobs as artists, we can invoke the emotions that we want to invoke without the viewer knowing why. Saying, "I like this, but I don't know why. This is pleasing. This is calming."
And there's a lot of tangible effects to get there. And so when someone views it for the first time, and I'll hear things such as, "Well, this feels out of balance. This feels heavy on one side, this is really intense." I'm like, why? I hadn't really thought about that. That's hadn't crossed my mind.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
When I look at Colt's paintings, I feel like I'm a part of the story they're telling. I could stare at them for hours riding out into a perfect sunset, or as a passenger on a steam train heading for a new life out west. Does Colt paint stories into his work? Or do we as viewers apply our own dreams to them?
Colt Idol:
I feel what's really motivating for me is I like having purpose within the medium, if that makes sense. I want to show what the paint can do, not necessarily a deep transcendent message within the subject matter, because the subject matter oftentimes is secondary to me. I'm just as happy in landscape, in figure, wildlife, or even still life or painting something that is not really easy to define. I like color, light, and value.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And shadows, like where's the light coming from? I always like to do some art stuff and sketch and whatever, and I appreciate it. But I would go to an art gallery and you're like, "Oh yeah, I like that. I don't like that. Oh yeah, that's interesting. Oh, I like that." And now it's like, that shadow's in the wrong place. The light can't be coming from two different directions. And I find myself critiquing, trying to put myself in like, what was the artist thinking when they drew up this composition? And then I start to break it down. It's just interesting when you start looking at stuff, you start seeing it differently. I get a sense that a lot of your artwork is self-taught. Is that fair? I mean, a lot of stuff that you've done is by trial and error you've learned as you've gone?
Colt Idol:
Yeah. I'd say, if I could bullet point it, the works under my dad and his education and his experience, the handful of workshops I've taken, and then probably my top dozen or two dozen books that I've really have all bookmarked and everything. But as far as time, hours and furthering my education and my understanding of art, would have to be trial and error.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
You're doing it.
Colt Idol:
For 12 years I've been doing 150 paintings a year, even with our two little kids and our gallery that we're right running. I'm still at the easel, 60 hours a week, easy. And working on probably 25 to 30 pieces at a time.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
It's amazing to me just how dedicated Colt is to his art. And the fact that he works on so many pieces at once is mind-boggling. But things change, of course. Colt has two beautiful boys now, and he sees a future where he slows down a little bit.
Colt Idol:
I would like to decrease those amount of hours at the easel.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
The volume?
Colt Idol:
Yeah. And thus decreasing the volume. And not only just, the main driver right now is to spend a lot more time with my kids.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, you've got two kids. They're adorable.
Colt Idol:
But even when they go off to school and all that, not feeling the pressure so greatly to produce and just cut down. And I think for me to make a lot of change, it will have to happen on the planning end, and I'll have to put more time on the front end instead of getting into them and then trying to say, "Okay, I'm committing more time to this piece, but I'm already in it."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Everybody has to do that, right? So yeah, I just feel very fortunate that at this point in my life, just to be able to paint for fun and enjoy what I'm doing in the process.
Colt Idol:
I've seen some pictures of what you're working on, it's looking good.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And it's been fun, but I really enjoy just listening to you because it's like you hear an artist's perspective in somebody that's granular, this organic. You're in the real world. You're doing this every day, right? And you're painting every day. You're painting a lot every day, and you're really absorbed into it. And you have a gallery and you have the business side going. It's like I'm just so proud to know you.
Colt Idol:
Thank you very much. Appreciate that. I want to ride that line between believability, and I hate to use the word fantasy, but that's all I can think of right now. The work gets too fantastic. That happens all the time. I'll passage on a piece and I'm like, this has no tether to reality. It's too far. But then if you go too far the other direction, it's like, this is kind of mundane. I want every moment to be that once in a lifetime moment in my pieces. So I'm trying to use bold color while color control is the hardest thing for me. I'll just go off the wall with way too much color and then have to reel it back in. And I want a sense of realism. Some of my newest works, I like to have maybe 20% hard realism, the best that I can of getting a very realistic interpretation of an area. And then it kind of deconstructs as you move away and then you really play with the paint and have heavy paint, very visible brush work.
So I think where I'm at now and where I'd like to move forward, I really want to keep improving with my art principle. A lot of the museum shows is where you face up, it's where you stand in front of the judges. That's not so much the case in the galleries. When you go to museums, everyone there has an art critical eye, they're talking about some of the things we've talked about, your decision making, and to move forward and to be a career painter, you've got to paint for 50, 60 years. You have to improve and to get to certain price points. It's not just your popularity can't carry you into these upward price points. You have to have work that can be scrutinized and have the most art savvy people say, "Okay, this is not only a very talented person, but this is a person who has done the work."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Done the work, they've done the 10,000 hours.
Colt Idol:
So I guess that's like to go while keeping my identity intact.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Your integrity as an artist, and your message.
Colt Idol:
Yeah.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
But are you moving toward any discoveries about yourself that you've made in painting? I mean things about yourself that you've learned from your painting experience as time goes by?
Colt Idol:
Well, I can tell you one thing from the athletic career really segued into the professional career. And that is dedication, perseverance, putting in the time, putting in the work. And that's helped me to not give up on pieces. And that's when I've had breakthroughs. You have a piece of like, "Gosh, nothing is working." So I'll just literally, I'll cut the canvas through or I'll throw them in the garbage or I'll sand them. I don't even want them in their current state.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Anywhere around you anymore. They're just like, I don't like that piece. Right, yeah.
Colt Idol:
Yeah. But some of these pieces, I'll be 20, 30 hours in. I'll hit a point, I'm like, okay, I don't think this is going anywhere, but I'm going to stick with it and then I'll have some breakthroughs. And all of a sudden you have a nice piece.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Aha moment, and you go, "This is what's not working and here's how I can go forward with that."
Colt Idol:
But I think this is going to sound a little self-serving for an artist, but I think one of the big takeaways that I've learned over time is the importance of art. It's not a utility, or is it? Is it so important to our hearts and our minds arts in all the various forms that it actually is a utility? If you removed the arts from society, what does it look like? Because at times, I think earlier on I thought, boy, this is such a non-essential. And here I am trying to stand behind and tell someone why they should. I still haven't gotten over the fact that anyone wants to hang my work, let alone pay for it. And I'm trying to sell it in that way. How do you sit there and say art's important? That's kind of how I felt earlier on. And the longer I'm in it, the more it's just kind of set in. I said, I do think it's very important.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So I have to disclose this to my audience here. I own one of Colt's paintings. Actually, I have a couple pieces of your work, but I have a painting of a pack train crossing a creek with an elk and a guy riding a horse with a cowboy hat on. And it's like the brilliant use of colors you have in that and the focus down, I mean, it draws your focus to that story of the rider and this pack train, and it hangs over my fireplace in my cabin. And I look at that painting all the time, and it's just like I can just almost be there when I see that. I mean, you got the TV going and whatever's going on, but I look at that painting and it's like, I can just put myself in the painting. I can be on that horse riding across. I've done that, and it just transports me there.
Colt Idol:
Well, I love hearing that, and that's what art does for me. And again, like I said, my wife, we've bought a fair bit of art throughout the years now, and our favorite piece we have in our house is, it's called Mongolian Dancers. And it's these three dancers on stage. It's a very kind of almost mystical scene. The artist is deceased now, she has work in the Smithsonian, and we bought this in the Jackson Hole art auction. And it has a profound effect on people. A lot of people don't even know why. They don't know the context. You can't even tell immediately that this is an Asian painting. I mean, it's a North American artist, but we have mostly western art in our house and in our gallery and stuff. But what that painting does for us is hard to put into words. And if I'm lucky enough to hear that from people who buy my work, I mean, that's all the motivation I need.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
In dentistry, we're close to the people we help. We see how our work changes lives all the time. In the art world, you might create a piece and never know how it's touched the people who have seen it. We now live in a time where so many things are digitized. I wonder, does art still play the same critical role in our existence as it used to? Colt thinks so.
Colt Idol:
But to bring it closer to home, so many of these things are cyclical, it seems, fashion and music and art and what's in and what's not. But I think fortunately, some of the younger generation, I focus on that just because it seemed like it was moving away from that, that a lot of the art collectors, their houses were full, or maybe they were passing away, and the newer generation wasn't interested in art. It seemed for a while that it was going that direction. In my experience, it seems like it's coming back because one of the worst things that you can be right now is disingenuine. It's all about authenticity. And you'll find younger people, they'll spend a lot more money on certain things, furniture and things like that, that have a story to them, as opposed to just buying the cheapest thing that they can because it's functional, which naturally I like to hear.
One thing that we talk about when people who are interested in talking about art is we'll just ask them, they're looking at a piece, we'll say, okay, say five words, just single words or two word phrases about this piece that you feel right now. People will say heavy, intense, calming, all these things. And then we'd ask them, say, why do you like this without really using art language? And it's kind of hard to do. It's kind of like describing flavors that you pull out of a wine. Even having pieces in your own house that you can talk about, you can talk about why you bought them. You can talk about why you like them. And you can talk about why it matters to you. So that's something you can be proud of. You don't just say, "Oh, this is just something filling up the walls for me."
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
But I think you experience art. So I think in some regard, I can see it coming back because your generation is so about experience that art is experience.
Colt Idol:
I'm glad you said that. You're spot on.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
One of the things I was thinking about during this conversation was the idea of art being an investment. I've got a few pieces in my house that I bought 30 years ago that have gone up in price by an unbelievable amount. I would never have guessed that they were investment pieces. I just liked them. So how does buying art fit into Colt's business?
Colt Idol:
I'm a single station artist. I'm creating work that I'm selling in gallery or in auction or commissions, and then our gallery is a single location. We're not buying collections. We're not evaluating art on any serious level. But one thing we do like to do on the brain teasing front is of all these artists that we know a lot of, either newer or living artists, which ones are going to have that value carry, and why? We've predicted a lot of them. You look at a painting for 10 seconds and just be like, this is very underpriced. Wow. Very underpriced. This artist is going up. And then you see a lot that this is dollars spent in branding, is equaling these sales. Because a lot of the art magazines, we get them all. There's a lot of art that's on the poorer side.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And I think they end up painting a formula. Authors do that. I mean, after you've read two or three of their books, it's like, I already know how this is going to end. I know who the protagonist is. I know where the red herring's coming up.
Colt Idol:
So that's another fantastic opening. You've got your museum group, your peer group, your business group. Now, who defines the success of an artist? Because we'll see a lot that don't naturally meet in the middle. I know plenty of artists who are the Patrons Choice Award, the Museum's Choice Award at every show that they're at. And there's artists like myself that are just drooling at their works, it's so good, and they can't sell it. And then there's artists that, I won't say who, I know we have some in our gallery, that can sell everything they paint immediately, but they're not going to be studied in the next century about the greatness of their art, but they'll make more money. You need to have a little bit of both.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
It is fascinating to hear Colt grapple with the question of art and success. It's sometimes hard to pin down what makes someone's work widely known or loved. But one thing's for sure, it can't hurt to have more people experiencing deeply moving pieces of work.
Colt Idol:
I'd encourage anyone to go to your local art galleries with a critiquing mind. "I like this. Why? I don't like this. Why? If I could have one piece, which would it be?" And then we have a lot of fun at these art auctions. And there's a lot of them. For the first year, I've got a piece in the Scottsdale art auction, and I'll have a piece of the Coeur d'Alene art auction, and about a half dozen others this year. And those are fun to go. Some of these are about 45 seconds a lot. So that's where it's really brutal. It's like the wild jungle for art. People aren't paying you compliments. Your work is being viewed purely in a brutal market. And you'll see what a lot of serious collectors that do invest and really keep tabs on the market, you'll see what they think about it. The auctions are sort of the standard, because anyone can put their price.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
So that's kind of a barometer for you as an artist.
Colt Idol:
Yeah. That's the west. There's a lot of art databases, like askART is one of them. And all the collectors that buy my work in auction, they all know how my previous six auctions have been. And they know that with a ton of other artists. It's not only nerve wracking for the immediate result. You feel embarrassed if you have a piece that just tanks or you're over the moon if you have a piece that goes above the estimate range. But there's also broader implications that so much of this, your momentum, so much of it is subjective that there's, there's risks to entering the auction market. Because if your work goes down, then a lot of people might start to associate your work on the decline.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
They're going to look at the other pieces and go like, "Eh, I don't know."
Colt Idol:
Yeah. "He's not as desirable as I thought. Did you see how this..." I've been fortunate, my last six sales have all been consecutive PRs. I'm thankful for that.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
And I'm not surprised.
Colt Idol:
Well, it makes me nervous. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
Well that's awesome, Colt. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. I wish you nothing but the absolute best, and I know that you're going to continue to achieve great things. You are talented, but you also put the hours in, obviously put the hours in behind in your work. You're dedicated and disciplined.
Colt Idol:
I really enjoyed this discussion. I appreciate you guys listening. Thank you.
Dr. Kim Kutsch:
I think these conversations about art and its place in our lives are incredibly valuable, and I hope that what you've heard today might encourage you to look at the pieces in your local museum or art gallery a little differently next time. Thank you so much to Colt Idol for taking us on an incredible journey through his practice. If you're interested in seeing more of Colt's art, you can find his website and Instagram in the show notes of this episode. And thank you for coming on this journey with me today. Around here, we aim to inspire and create connections. We can't do it without you. If this conversation moved you, made you smile or scratch that little itch of curiosity today, please share it with the extraordinary people in your life. And if you do one thing today, let it be extraordinary.