Now that to me doesn’t seem fair. If you take on a lot of responsibility and have a lot of work in your life already you ought to get a break and be able to kick back and take a load off, but that just isn’t the way fate works.
Have you ever noticed, if you aren’t doing anything and no one is coming around you’ll stay that way, but the minute you start a project, especially if it is something which demands all of your attention and concentration, the phone rings, the doorbell rings, the kids start a fight, the school calls and the cat throws up?
And to an artist this is doubly dangerous because as artists we often denigrate our own work by thinking that it really isn’t as important as all of those others things like family and fiends.
The truth is your art is the most important thing in your life and if you short cut it you are probably short cutting all of the other important things in your life and that isn’t respectful of your own gifts and the people you care most about.
One of the most damaging ways an artist subverts their work is to believe that you can get it all done without money.
Try telling a Congressman that he can have anything he wants but he can’t spend any money to get it and see how long he stays in your neighborhood. Politicians are great at recognizing they have to get reelected to keep the wheels turning and they can’t do that without money.
But ask an artist how they plan to keep the coin coming in and they’ll make a sour face and say that they ever concern themselves with material things. Their world is creativity and they have to keep their minds clear and their souls pure to have the clarity to make all of the wonderful images that they make.
Then they get the hell away from you as fast as they can for fear that you’ll start talking about making that nasty ole money.
But you just have to understand money makes all of the materials you use for your art possible.
Okay, I am a photographer and I use cameras and software and printers and paper and I depend on it for most of what I do and in that respect I am more dependant on the process than a painter or sculptor, but try to paint without pigments and you’ll get the idea. You have to have things and those things cost money and you have to get it to have the things you need to make the art you make, dontcha you see?
So with Halloween a day away and with Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s just a head and then there’s Valentine’s and St Paddy’s Day just over the horizon you have six months of opportunities ahead and you should have already laid your plans to market, market, market your art.
The first and most important part of any marketing plan is you. Yes, your art is what you are marketing but you are the creator and that is more than half of the battle.
Think about the artists everyone knows and everyone sees and everyone hears about and I’ll bet you you know exactly what they look like and what they sound like and how tall they are cause more than likely they have gotten out there and done all of the talk shows and the morning shows and the malls and the cafes and they have made themselves such a public nuisance, that they are well-known.
They didn’t do this cause they wanted their face on People magazine, okay so maybe some of them did, but what they wanted was the exposure. You really believe that all of those twenty somethings leave home without their BVDs cause they need to feel the winds of change blowing?
No, the only thing they feel blowing in that direction is a cold draft, but they know that every camera carrying paparazzi will be out there doing their best to be the very first to prove to the world that you can leave home without it!
And that way they’ll get their picture on the cover and their name on all of the gossip shows and they’ll make a fortune for forgetting their drawers. Or perhaps you think Kim Kardashian is just warm natured and leaves off her Fruit of the Looms to keep cool?
So, you have to market yourself, your talents, as well as your work. Every time you meet a gallery owner or a museum director it’s a chance to get your work out there and become known. Every time you see a use for your art you find another potential revenue stream, every time you take on another task you create an opportunity to get your work where it can be seen and if it is seen it can be purchased and if it gets purchased you get some of that nasty money you need but don’t want to think about.
Have you donated anything to anyone? Sure there are hundreds of charities that would love to have original art and some of them are even willing to split the profits with the artist. But even if they aren’t they get you seen and that is a very good thing especially if they are a deserving charity with a national following. Sure it is self-centered and self-serving and that is just what you should be thinking about.
We’ve just about used up the breast cancer awareness month but that’s a good thing because that means it is the right time to think and plan and get something moving for next year. Breast Cancer is a killer and a nasty, evil thing and should be wiped off the face of the earth and a lot of good people are doing what they can to help. But what have artists done? Of all people artists have the greatest ability to make a dramatic statement and get the attention of the public. So why haven’t they? I think Coos County artists should make 2013 the year that they take a stand to wipe out breast cancer. Artists Abreast of Cancer might do for a working title. That part doesn’t matter but getting the artists of this coastal area motivated and doing something should be the important part.
Are you planning your Halloween cards for next year? Halloween is the second largest cash holiday of the calendar year and you should get a piece of it. Years ago, an actress with just a fright wig and some, okay a whole bunch of whalebone started quietly buying up Halloween themed businesses. Cassandra Peterson now owns thirty-five percent of all Halloween businesses and when she decides to hang up her cleavage, she will have a tidy portfolio to fall back on. Now come-on you’re smarter than Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, or aren’t you?
You can’t wait for money to come to you, you have to go out and find it and you can’t do that without marketing.
And marketing gets easier every day. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I wanted to have a team logo sweatshirt, but the Horn’s logo was so sad that even a rabid St Darrell guy like me couldn’t see wearing it out in public. So I borrowed an image from Bill MacClanahan’s Weekly Predictions: Ungaurenteed and went off in search of a screen printer.
No, I didn’t know nothing about Copyright violations and wanted it for my own personal use so it was a tiny violation and I have amended my ways in the years since but the important part is that screen printing in those bygone days required a negative image of which there were no cameras available to the non-professional public to use, so the image had to be done by hand. I did, well I said it was a long time ago and I had more energy them and I hadn’t spent the last fifty years working on proving the AMA right with all of their warnings so my hand was steadier and I could do it and it got done and I had my sweatshirt, but the process would have made a Llama weep. Today, I would use one of my own images which I hold the Copyright to and send it in to Custom Ink
or Zazzle
And I’d have my shirt in hours instead of weeks and no difficult visualizations and calculations to fight with in the process.
And I’d be ready for the season when next Halloween rolls around.
And if someone as slow as I am can figure all that out what are you doing sitting there?
Get out there and earn some money, raise the cash, beat the bushes, the politicians have wrung every stone and turnip till it bleeds and now they’ll be quiet until the next Presidential election rolls around which gives you four years to get all of the money they missed. Think of it like digging the coins out of the cushions. It doesn’t look like much at the time but if you keep digging at it for four year maybe by the next time the pols come calling they’ll have to get elected by telling their plans and not with infomercials!
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