Meet the Founder

Canvas & Company grew from an observation I kept returning to through my work in industrial-organizational psychology: adults spend an enormous amount of their lives performing.

We work. We lead. We solve problems. We meet deadlines. We manage relationships, expectations, responsibilities, and increasingly blurred boundaries between work and everything else.

Yet many of the places designed for adults to gather tend to offer the same few options—restaurants, bars, networking events, or environments where the expectation is still to perform socially in some way.

I wanted to create something different.

My background in industrial-organizational psychology—the study of people, behavior, and experiences within the context of work—shaped how I thought about Canvas & Company from the beginning. Rather than simply opening a place where people could paint, I became interested in designing an environment around some of the human needs that can get crowded out by demanding professional lives.

That thinking influences how we design our experiences around autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

• Autonomy means giving people meaningful choices rather than requiring everyone to create the exact same thing.

• Competence means providing enough structure and guidance for someone who walks in saying, “I'm not artistic,” to experience the satisfaction of making something themselves.

• Relatedness means creating conditions where people can connect naturally through shared activity rather than forcing interaction.

It also explains why Canvas & Company is family-friendly while intentionally designing much of our brand and programming with adults and working professionals in mind.

Sometimes people need an after-work reset. Sometimes they want a date that isn't dinner. Sometimes coworkers need to interact outside their normal roles. Sometimes someone wants to meet new people without walking into a traditional networking event. And sometimes a person simply needs a couple of hours where nobody needs anything from them.

Art gives us a surprisingly effective vehicle for all of those things.

I don't believe everyone needs to become an artist. I believe people benefit from having places where they can exercise curiosity, make choices, experience accomplishment, connect with others, and occasionally do something simply because they enjoy doing it.

That's what I wanted Canvas & Company to become.

A place to paint. A place to connect. A place to create.

Dr. Brandon J.T. McCray
Founder, Canvas & Company
Ph.D., Industrial-Organizational Psychology