Everyone's heard the term
starving artist. Perhaps you have even been discouraged by family/friends/colleagues for pursuing an art career when they respond with: "You're going to be an
artist? Don't you know they call them "starving artists" for a reason?"
Never-the-less, you don't let them get you down, you take the leap and forage ahead into your art career. You buy your supplies - be it paints and canvases, beads and wire, a slab of marble and chisels, whatever suits your medium of choice - and you begin. This new creativity takes hold and you feel wonderful.
Look what you are able to create! You show your family/friends/colleagues who scoffed at you and - hey! even they are impressed. (In fact, they want you to
give them certain pieces - or offer a steep discount - because they know you personally.) Soon you realize it falls to you to start marketing your art for the rest of the public to see and you get a website and/or start a blog.
Things start moving along for you (and maybe there are a few false starts or stalls along the way until you really find your style, but you never give up) and you finally make a move to launch a serious marketing campaign when... your domain expires because your debit card was renewed this year, but you happened to be out of town at the time without access to the
one e-mail account that you used to set up the domain
and, try as you might,
you keep getting the run-around when you try to renew it because: a) the domain is locked b) it hasn't met x number of days c) it's beyond x number of days d) the reps you talk to don't know what they are talking about and make offers they can't make good on, or e) (as in my case) ALL OF THE ABOVE.
So you call the company and you play nice, then you get a little frustrated, then you finally say, "Look, I'm going to be in a show next month and I have all these business cards with the wrong domain on them! Isn't there anything you can do?!?"
And you know what? They look at your site; they hear you are an artist going to be in a show; they hear that you actually have had business cards printed, and
they try to price-gouge the heck out of you to get your domain back. But, you are too smart for that so you buy the .net of the domain and back-order the .com of the domain and you are happy that you know a cheap place to order your business cards from.
Then, you look at the lessons you learned from the mistakes you made - and you share them with others so they can learn from them too. So, here are the lessons you can take away from this blog post:
Lesson 1:Don't let other people's opinions of your career in the arts have any bearing on what you do. It's your life to live, not theirs.
"Live as you will have wished to have lived when you are dying." - Christian F. Gellert
Lesson 2:If you want to be successful at your art career, you will have to promote yourself at some point. I, personally, don't mind marketing and promotions, but at a lot of presentations I've given about promoting your art online I have heard grumbles and protests about this aspect. Realize it's part of being a
professional artist (versus a hobbyist). Your efforts are in vain if you simply create your works and store them all in a basement and hope you are discovered one day.
"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves." - Logan P. Smith
Lesson 3:No matter how many starts, stops, stalls, trials and errors there are -
keep going! You are worth it!
"I know the price of success: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen." - Frank Lloyd Wright
Lesson 4:Always keep your accounts current.
"D'oh!" - Homer Simpson
Lesson 5:Try looking at something that seems negative from a positive perspective. For example: I must not be viewed as a "starving artist" since the price of my domain quintupled. I mean, surely no one would expect a failure to pay those outrageous prices!
To further illustrate looking at negatives from a positive perspective:
"I'm in a wonderful position: I'm unknown, I'm underrated, and there's nowhere to go but up."
- Pierre S. DuPont IV
Feel free to share lessons you have learned in the comments!
to teach, guide and inspire their children through creative play. Some of the great toys I got for my daughter on her 3rd birthday this month are pictured in this post. She is absolutely thrilled with all of them.
te for future purchases for the kiddos in your life - be it your own children or kids of friends and relatives. Christmas will be here before you know it!
This piece is 16x22 inches, color pointillism in ink on paper, titled Stargazer. It is not for sale.
Onion & Peppers is a 7" x 5" acrylic painting on canvas board. Working on this today helped me get back in the rhythm of working small after the large painting. I liked the shiny smooth texture of the peppers next to the duller sheen of the onion's outer skin. The imperfect shape of the green pepper also provided some neat light reflections.
These are 3 detail images from the 3'x3' pet portrait painting I recently finished. Now that the painting has safely arrived at is destination and is cherished by it's owners I can post them. I did learn a valuable shipping lesson in the shipping process of this painting - namely, never to use "brown" again to ship my artwork. They managed to "misplace" a 3.5' x 3.5' x 3" crate among other complications. I also learned that the extra effort I always put into packaging my paintings was well worth it since the crate arrived with boot prints on it and the painting was unharmed. *huge sigh of relief*
