One Take with Karen Lee Dunn

Karen’s boss at McCann, Alex Young, once told me “This is an ungrateful job. When we’re doing our job well nothing happens.”

Karen, who worked at McCann-Erickson Mexico in account management, puts it more succinctly, “It’s like herding cats”.

So, for this episode we are going to break our usual format and talk to Karen about one of the most amazing, inspirational pivots ever: from the highly business-oriented ad agency that is McCann to a very successful gallery owner and painter in San Miguel Allende, Mexico.

First the context: Karen went from doing free-lance illustrations to working with Noble, one of Mexico’s legacy ad agencies, and the moved to McCann-Erickson, then the Darth Vader of advertising in Mexico where she worked with great brands like L’Oreal and MasterCard.

Inevitably, her high performance got her into the top tiers of the agency and she travelled all over the world.

The shift:

First, she “fell out of love” with the industry. Her moment came during a meeting when all of a sudden, she realized she’d rather be somewhere else.

Second, the realization that there had always been the dream of becoming an artist. But Karen had never had the time to pursue that dream properly. She had not gone to art school.

Third, first steps and putting yourself in position to take advantage of the dream. In Karen’s own words “The journey was an accident. I moved to San Miguel. I walked around and looked at all the art. I got all excited. I thought, wow, this is incredible. This is where I should be. And I would admire all this art. I actually fell in love with this one artist named Tom Dixon. I would go look at his work. He was very prolific. And he painted San Miguel street scenes. And I thought, that's what I want to do.”

Fourth, the hard work. She went to Bellas Artes (Fine Arts) in San Miguel and started taking art classes. First learning, then oil. Then she started taking classes with another artist, fine tuning her art.

Fifth, take risks. At one point, during one of her classes, the teacher, Donna, mentioned she was moving away from San Miguel to Puerto Vallarta and asked Karen and another woman, Susan, whether they would like to take over her gallery.

Susan and the other woman agreed, split the responsibilities and took over the gallery.

Six, work hard. Karen paints every day. She goes out all the time, takes pictures of San Miguel and then paints the street scenes that people pay hundreds for. She helps Susan run the gallery… it’s work.

To sum it up in Karen’s own words “I discovered my passion. I discovered that I could actually do something that I had dreamt about for years and years. And it was just like a surprise. It was just a surprise for me that I could actually sell. And so here I am. I mean, I'm not a famous artist. But I'm an artist who really is a happy one. If you believe in it and you have put in the work, you need to do it.”