Merrily Grashin's career began in New York City, doodling images and writing clever puns about the world that surrounded her while waitressing and bartending. Encouraged by the people she met along the way, she used her natural skill as an artist to launch her own greeting card and print business.
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I always say that I'm mediocre at a lot of things, and I'm exceptional at puns. It's just something that my dad and I have a super freaky talent for. I'm by no means a poet or words smith's in other ways. I have no idea why I have such a talent with puns. Merrily Grashion is many things. An illustrator, a flourishing author, a strong but modest woman. There's something effortless about the way she describes her career that could lead one to believe it's been easy to be fair. It might just have been the day that I caught up with her. This was Merrily's twelfth day in Los Angeles, recently relocating from New York City, and she's still wrapping her head around a few things. What began a spontaneous sketches during her early days bussing and waiting tables has developed into a small business called Great and Potatoes, which produces humorous screening cards and prints featuring food and beverage theme drawings and cons Merrily has also written and illustrated a book called Women's Libation, a whimsical celebration of women history and cocktails. All of this in a fairly impressive window of time. But don't tell her it's impressive. I've just always drawn. I studied art a ton, I studied our history and are a lot of art theory and art for political change. But as far as skill, I'm always learning and getting better. By the end of the book, I had just picked up a bunch of new skills just in drawing. But no, I haven't. I'm not like trained. On this edition of On the Job, I'm speaking remotely with Merrily gression to hear more about her career as an entrepreneur, a creative person, and her personal journey that has taken her to Los Angeles. By embracing opportunities and connecting her work experiences in the service industry, Merrily has nurtured her raw talent as an artist to find herself in a favorable position of choosing what will come next. I've spent more than the last twelve years in New York City, where I moved right after high school, kind of supported my way through college, working in bars and restaurants primarily, actually just applied to one college out of New York, and it's the kind of typical liberal arts introduction, and then you know, got like coffee shop, rasta jobs, a lot of serving waters saying, and then I found my home and a restaurant and really learned about food and wine and just got really excited about it. It wasn't just a job. I was actually learning a ton about the history of This was a Spanish restaurant, so I learned a lot about Spanish wine cuisine. But I also was finishing my thesis in college and working all the time and studying all the time. Naturally, merrily was developing a love for food and wine while working in restaurants. But I was curious to understand where this crossed paths with illustration and art. I started interning with Just Seeds, which is a national artist collective of I think around twenty artists all over the country. But I was working directly with Josh McPhee, and he's a primarily printmaker, but he's an organizer and activist, teacher and curator. I learned a lot from him about the idea of passing around affordable art. And I was just kind of an intern, but I really learned a ton about kind of just the process, but also the history of making art for political change. So I was working a ton and bars and restaurants. I was studying, and I was making my own art but just doodles mostly, and then working with this really inspiring artists and organized our an activists, and it all just kind of came together, meeting the best people and then who inspired me to keep making art, and then learning that wow, I don't want anything to do with the actual art world in the gallery kind of capacity, because it's just not accessible. It's just it's everything I don't believe in in terms of what art can be, because I worked with this artist who really taught me or is for the people, not something that shouldn't be accessible. Anyone looking through Merrily's body of work would find it evident that she's embraced this concept and aesthetic and made it into her own by never being overly precious or serious. At some of the bars and restaurants I worked, I would start drawing these little playful cards, just doodles. I would see a bottle of Apperall and write apper All, we've been through or for net and say her net about it, or You've always given me a reasoning to stay, And then I pass out the cards and I just started I was I've always been a compulsive doodler, so I would just start drawing these cards and became a whole series that would just live in my handbag. I like to call them dad jokes. And I was drawing um a lot at work, the different bars and restaurants I worked at, and passing them out to friends and co workers and patrons at the bar or whatever. And I my friends encouraged me to start a greeting card line and that developed into a few years ago, I started a company called greet and Potatoes like Meat and Potatoes as a greeting card company, and they were all food and beverage themed greeting cards that we're kind of for all occasions. But they were set from illustrations of mine, and I worked with my friend Emily Johnson, She's a Bushwick based printmaker, making it something that was really personal, super playful, but affordable and something you could really literally just pass around and you know, get for less than ten dollars or five dollars, so you know, not a whole lot of money in that obviously, but it was it was cool to know I could be doing it with people in my community, other strong women. And then a lot of stores started picking up the cards in a bunch of kind of independent brick and mortar stores around Brooklyn and some scattered around the US, and I started selling them online. So that was kind of how that started. And then two years ago somebody picked him up and did a big BuzzFeed feature on them, and that was Alison Roman. She put that article out and I totally changed my life. I got all these people in the publishing world and agents reaching out to me, like, what are you doing with your art? Come on, makes more stuff? And I'm guessing her agent, Jannis Donned, was one of those people. She was just one of the most seasoned professional literary agents in especially in the food and beverage world. And she sat me down and she said, I really like your art, and I know you have some more good ideas. Let's make a book. And I was like, funny, you should say. I have this idea about ladies who also have funny cocktail names. And before I knew it had eight to ten pages mocked up and was selling this idea to a bunch of publishers. Came out in the fall of two thousand seventeen called Women's Libation. It's a cocktail guide cocktails to celebrate a woman's right to booze. So it's all comes from my illustrations and kind of riffs on classic cocktails, each one dedicated to a influential woman in history or kind of landmark in the history of women's liberation. So that was kind of the last project I worked on in New York and moving over here to l A, I've kind of started thinking about a lot of new projects, creative being not necessarily the same, but a lot of creative ideas more with Merrily the illustrator turned author after this one company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Sounds like a big number, doesn't it not to Express Employment Professionals seeking a skilled labor position or administrative work. Maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits supporting. We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. Express Employment Professionals is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. Let us help. We'll open doors for you to go to Express pros dot com to find a location near you. Welcome back to on the job. In my conversation with Merrily Grassien, who developed a small print card business, while bartending and waiting tables in New York City and is now a burgeoning author. The journey of becoming an author artist, it's all been tied into the interdisciplinary parts of New York artistic life that come back to supporting yourself in a restaurant, working in bars and restaurants in hospitality. It's a well known dilemma for artists, balancing the production of creative work and the business side of things. I asked Merrily how she was able to keep managing eating potatoes while writing a book. I kind of shelved it for a bit. When I was working on the book, I was still sending out online orders. Because as much as I love drawing and I love this company, I've loved building this company and the learning experience of it. I'm not really a business person at all. So working on something like a book where I had a whole team of people doing not only like the business end of it, the editing and production and whatever, a couple of years or I was trying to figure out how much profit, how much the percentage of profiting, and obviously not paying myself for labor. I would rather just be the creative I'm better at that too, and the book was happening, and I was kind of putting Green and Potatoes on hold. Clarkson Potter is in the publishing world, but they do more kind of gifty kinds of art and prints, and they contacted me and Weeds partnered up and they are taking over production of Green and Potatoes. Were launching a twelve card pack that will be much wider distributed, um maybe of an internationally distributed. You can just find it in a lot more places, so it's not just me sitting on my living room for stuffing envelopes. Will be able to get these cards out there to a lot more people. They're still printed really beautifully, so it's really exciting. I'm excited to see where that goes. Merely identified her creative strengths and weaknesses and sought partnerships to help fill the voids and relied on separate teams for both her company and the completion of her book. I would not have been able to do it without them. And then my editor, she and I got really close, and she's she's like a right brained version of I guess the left brained version of me. So she was my editor, so she would look at a piece of paper that looked chaotic, and she would just make it make sense. She was like the oil to the machine, like she just made it run. Gave me the confidence to keep working and being creative, and she's inspired me to like take all of these crazy, jumbled ideas and talents I have and put them on paper and maybe hopefully make it into something that somebody else can relate to and put a book finding on it. Women's Libation gracefully combines charming artwork with coherent cocktail instruction and is packed with so much clever wordplay and twists on established historical names like Vermouth, Bader, Ginsburg, Joan of Ark, and Stormy Florence, Nightcap, and Gale, all in the spirit of celebrating women who have impacted the world. My biggest achievement has absolutely been completing writing this book. There's the journey I went on from sitting in my agent's office and having this tiny idea for a book and hers telling me to mock up a couple of pages two in less than a year, coming up with seventy recipes and accompany kind of like biographical blurbs on these women, and just the research that went into it and just getting really excited about something kind of silly, which is just like a cocktail book, or you can kind of playful that a project like this can mean something and has meant something to a lot of people. Strangers, friends, friends of friends have reached out to me out of nowhere and just saying I really needed this book right now. It really felt like people were as excited about it as I was making it, and makes me want to just do more stuff like that. And I'm not quite sure what yet, but I'm excited to explore it. I'm sure fans and followers of Merrily's work are two, so as being in Los Angeles part of a new chapter in her own life. I'm thinking about this move to l A as an eventual bicoastal life that I'm not sure it's achievable, but that would be my dream. Something I've always wanted to do is open my own bar. I have a bunch of experience, I really know what I can really envision what would work for me at least, so that might be in my near future as well. But coming out here, it's on this like Hiatus was in some part inspired by coming out with this book and realizing, Okay, well this is done. I want to keep this momentum going. Can I do that if I don't have another deadline set and rather than waiting around, keep that momentum going onward upward, try something new, shake things up. I left New York kind of heartbroken. Leaving New York. I'm in love with it, but I'm glad I left it that way where I can come back any time, and I don't really mind being in cars. I can listen to podcasts. I'm Liz Reagan. And that was Merrily Gression. And that's all for this edition of On the Job. Find more at Express prose dot com, and you can listen to every podcast this season at express pros dot com. Forward Slash Podcast. This podcast is produced by Decibel Studios in New York, I Heart Radio and Red Seat Ventures. You can subscribe on iHeart Radio and iTunes, where we hope you'll leave a nice review that helps other folks find us. And of course you can listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time On the Job mmm