Marketing your Art

You work hard at your art. Your really passionate about it and spend every spare moment thinking and planning your next work. You devour every article, program, TV Documentary on the subject you can find. You have a stack of those varying flavors of art magazines with the pretty flowers on the front, and as for net-working, you’d attend the opening of an envelope if it was anywhere art related and had the possibility of leading to contact with like-minded people. You’re doing everything right, but none of your work is selling! So what do you do?

The simple answer is you keep painting. The complex answer is you keep painting. That’s all that matters at the end of the day, in relation to your work, that you keep producing it.

A lot of the art related world is driven by egos and appearances, and that’s not a bitter criticism on my part, it’s an observation. Like everything else, appearances are very important. Perception (so I’m told) is “everything”. You need to play the game, learn the rules and if you’re good you’ll be rewarded.

Which is fair enough, that’s the way most things in the world work, that’s how we as a society can dredge our way through the innumerable possibilities that we encounter each waking day, we judge largely be appearances, because we have to, for expediency sake if nothing else.

But that is only one way to look at things, and a rather negative way at that. Its part of the truth but not all of it. So what’s the alternative?

Art speaks on many different levels. Its also created on many levels. By level I’m referring to what the artist puts into the work. How much of the artist is in the work? A little? A lot? Do we know or care?

To go beyond your immediate reaction to a painting is similar to going beyond your immediate reaction to a person. Its takes time and respect to wait for a painting to truly reveal itself, again similar to how you interact with another person. It involves listening, which at times, is as much as a gift as an acquired skill. All this takes time. The time to care or in other words a reason to take time to care. Your work might not appear to be a good enough reason. There’s no point in me saying this ‘is not personal’ when clearly it is.

Marketing your Work
There are, fortunately, a lot of great sites out there with a plethora of marketing tips, which I for one, need to implement, because all ideas are worthless until their implemented. You’re probably in the same boat. I can say that with all confidence, because marketing your work is an ongoing activity and no one has it done and completed, neatly package away as a task successfully implemented.

It’s another of those good habits, right attitudes that you have to make a very conscious decision to acquire, because no matter how good you think you are, your work is not going to sell itself, and it no good pawning the responsibility unto your galleries. You’re the primary person responsible for all your marketing activities and you need to make it part of your weekly art making schedule.

How much time
Some commentators would suggest you need to set aside up to fifty percent of your allotted time to just marketing. By marketing I mean making new contacts, building your mailing listing, (deciding to have a mailing list in the first place!). If you think that the dirty work of marketing is beneath you, and that your primary goal is just to create works of art, your probably right in your self assessment. Your clearly not ready to get out there and roll your sleeves up. You probably will be ready, when you find yourself, painting over perfectly good works, since your running out of storage space….and funds! Then you’ll b ready to dip your toe into the heady world of the ever evolving monster we call the fine art market.

Till then enjoy your painting, and keep at it. You’ll be ready when you decide your ready. Its different for different people, but rest assured your work will not sell in any great quantity until you take on that challenge.