Meet Max Devereaux | Artist, Musician & Filmmaker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Max Devereaux and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Max, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking.
Hello thank you for your question. I think about risk taking as being fundamental to an artist’s journey. Because artists are ultimately expected to invent, it is very important that you are always finding time to experiment and journey into unknown territory. This exploration is essential as a means to broaden the scope of your own creative output and thus potentially expand the possibilities in your chosen artistic field.

I would say that the above could be applied to my own artistic career, but I have also found another, more specific aspect of risk-taking within the intrinsic risk-taking that comes with being an artist to be beneficial, that would be the study and application of improvisation in my work. I could go on endlessly about this topic, but for the sake of keeping things brief I will just say that improvisation can be a type of high risk/high reward risk-taking. For me, improvisation offers an even deeper opportunity to broaden the scope of my work by inviting concepts like chance, duration and contact to factor in and influence the end result. I also tend to improvise when I am receiving a piece of artwork/ content/inspiration, and I believe this approach is rather novel in the sense that on any given day I could hear something, see something or experience something and have no fixed response or reaction to it. This allows me the flexibility to find possibilities in an extremely wide variety of sources.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Certainly, I am an artist, musician and filmmaker. I was born in Milwaukee, WI and I now live in Southern California.

I am not gonna sugar-coat this. What sets me apart from others is my delusional approach of thinking that I can be an artist, a musician and a filmmaker simultaneously. The common advice is to specialize and pick one. This has proven to be a major challenge for me in having people take me seriously and also in finding work that pays money in these fields. I probably just come off like a wanna-be artist-influencer type who just dabbles a little in everything and has no deeper connection to it all beyond being able to code-switch about disciplines/mediums at parties (do people still have parties?).

I am most proud of my ability to be relentless in the face of insurmountable odds. In Zen we say, “all things come from nothingness”. This is freedom from chains, there is nothing to aspire to, nothing to gain, nothing to do, nothing to lose.

I am nowhere professionally beyond just trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel for the scant few remaining opportunities for modern artists as they are being viciously replaced by faster, cheaper AI replacements. This is a terrifying reality for artists and it needs to be discussed in order to find a balance.

To make sure to answer all of the questions above, It was not easy, it was hard. In order to overcome the challenges I have had to live in poverty, live on the fringes of society, alienate myself from my friends and family and work well over 10 horrible, soul-sucking jobs in a variety of industries but primarily always in some type of customer service.

The lessons I have learned along the way are if you don’t come from money or don’t get extremely lucky, hard work most certainly won’t pay off, especially when you live in an era of rampant over-saturation in the arts. People like me are a dime a dozen and it shows not only in the way my work has been received but in the overall tone of my responses to these questions.

I want the world to know that I am really trying my best here to remain positive and that giving up is definitely not an option, but I am deeply entrenched in the “I have no idea what I’m doing” stage of my career as an artist. I guess you could call it a beginner’s mindset and maybe that’s gonna be my saving grace in the end.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
EAT: Sushi Ken (Torrance), Chicken Maison (Any location), Jang Su Jang (Torrance), Tokyo Central (Gardena), The Habit Burger (Any location), La Cabana (Venice), Gaetano’s (Torrance), Riviera Mexican Grill (Torrance), Pho Hana (Torrance)

DRINK: Racer Tea Bar (Redondo Beach), Tiki Ti (Los Feliz)

HANG OUT: Redondo Beach Pier, Torrance Beach, Redondo Beach Esplanade, Manhattan Beach Strand, Del Amo Mall

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Shoutout to Los Angeles. A city I have never felt truly welcome in, despite over 10 years of trying to find a place/way to belong. I absolutely love LA but it has turned me inside out more than once. Really really hard place to live and survive in.

Website: https://linktr.ee/maxdevereaux

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maxdevereaux/

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/max-devereaux

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVfHnOU_Us15qZToV9qDV7w

Other: MUSIC:
https://maxdevereauxarchive.bandcamp.com/

MORE FILMS:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH-_HgzQp_ztt6szJxw8eZQ

MORE PHOTOS:
https://www.pinterest.com/maxdevereaux/max-devereaux/

Image Credits
Photos by Jiselle McCollam