Here’s what we know:about half of Americansconsider themselves artistic and creative,so selling art online is a dream fora whole lot people. However,even as theart markethas become more and more competitive,a significant number of creators rarely know where to begin.
Luckily, there are some fundamental, and actionable, steps you can take to grow the business side of your art career so you can sell art online. Check out the following three, commonsense recommendations.
No. 1: Only Your Best Work
A simple, yet profound truth: Every artist is unique, and the work they createis irreplaceable. However, even the best artists’ work is a mix of practice pieces, pieces that don’t work at all, and pieces that fulfill the artist’s vision. When it comes to selling art online, it’s critical to know the difference and select those top pieces that represent your talent at its best.
Whether you are an emerging, mid-career, or establishedartist, you want to showcase only the work that defines you; the work with your unique,artistic fingerprint.
Which pieces are most compelling for you?
Think about those, then check in and ask a handful of people you trust for their most honest responses. Chances are high that people who buy your genre of art online will find these pieces equally appealing.
Be careful that you focus on pieces with a consistent artistic fingerprint that identifies you, and only you, as the artist. Jumping around withmultiple mediumsto discover where your artistic passion truly lies, is perfect when you are in the experimental stage of your art business.
But once you have moved into the emerging artist stage, and you are ready to sell art online, make sure you have identified the medium and style that immediately tellsyour online art buyers thatthis is your best work.
No. 2: SellYour Art on Multiple Platforms
You can explore the various websitesdesigned for artists who are launchingan art business.Or, you can create your own webpage and develop different strategies to market your work.
Set up an Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok page to display your work. Think about who might buy your kind of art. If it’s landscapes, maybe businesses with outdoor sports. If it’s lyrical and abstract, maybe interior designers. Then, be sure to follow those people on social media, anduse appropriate tags to reach the oneswho mightbe most interested.
Another option for selling your artwould be easily searchable, well-known platforms like Etsy and Redbubble.Millions of people like to peruse these websites, and yourartwork will automatically go under predetermined search wordsso it’seasy for people to find them.
No. 3: PriceYour Artwork Competitively
Whilemany artists, along with their loved ones, considertheir art priceless, it’s important to pay attention to the market.No matter how established you may eventually be, with a fan club of art lovers, at any art career stage your prices need to be in line withyourart career level.That means setting prices for your art that people will actually be willing to pay to a beginner.
Research what otheremerging, mid-career, or establishedartists,who work with your mediumand at your scale,are charging. Look across multiple sales platforms and social media sites to giveyou a well-rounded view of averagemarketprices so you can set competitive rates.
When You Are Ready, Start Selling Art Online the Right Way
With these three foundational recommendations, you canturn your creative dreams into a selling-art-online reality: Only your best work, Sell on multiple platforms, and Price your artwork competitively.
Ariane Goodwin, Ph.D. is an artist ally who leans into the mantra of Truth, Power, and Art when working with emerging, mid-career, and established artists.She has several options to help artists accelerate the business side of their art careers. DownloadherWriting the Artist StatementeBookandAmbitious Bundleso you cantake actionand keep your eye onfulfilling your artistic dream.
Because we are all hardwired for visual and word languages, believing one is more powerful or important than the other burns down one of the most powerful bonds you can have with your viewers. Full stop.
Artistic Fingerprint:
Weed pulling… what it’s not.
It’s not your artistic voice(unless you’re planning an Off Broadway review).
It’s not your artistic style (unless you’re planning a runway collaboration during Fashion Week.) (Or you want to know where your work is on the historical art stylesspectrum).
Planting…
You Artistic Fingerprint is what distinguishes you from the thousands of other artists all vying for visibility. It’s the X factor in every, single piece you create that tells anyone that you, and you alone, made this.
And like your literal fingerprint, no one else can truly duplicate what you do.
Besides the fact that most artists create their work, in some aspect or other, with their hands, a finger’s fingerprint is also a visual clue—not auditory, or kinesthetic, but physically visual.
The Artist Statement Half of… The Ultimate Power Couplefor Selling Your Art
Here are two, little-understood, artist statement secrets: About Them and About You.
Secret #1 About Them: the people who see your art, who are moved by your art, and then immediately experience a very human desire to want more.
And the more they want is …
Secret #2 About You: the artist who gave them this moving emotional, aesthetic experience.
Sure, they can stand there, shifting from one foot to the other (or move their cursor around), and stare some more. Maybe even strike up a conversation with someone next to them about what they are seeing and feeling and thinking: Honey, come look at this. What do you think?
Sure, you can leave it up to them to wander into this never-never land of your art and take what from it what they will, until they move onto the next piece (maybe one of yours, maybe not).
Alternately, you could give them a killer artist statement that keeps them right there, next to your work, contemplating it even more. Spending more time with the experience your work has triggered for them.
Because, when you capture that next layer of insight and awareness – without detracting from your viewer’s perspective – you have built a psychological bridge between you (the artist) and your potential buyer.
Ah, you may be thinking, but how do I write an artist statement that doesn’t interfere with what my viewer is experiencing? Isn’t putting my spin on my work already inserting myself into their experience?
As it turns out, many artists I’ve worked don’t bother with the open-ended curiosity of a question, but go right for the declaration:I won’t write my artist statement because… I want my viewer to draw their own conclusions. I don’t want to interfere or impose on their interpretation or experience.
I totally get it. This resistance to writing an artist statement feels utterly reasonable, especially to those of us who already worry about inconveniencing or “bothering” someone else.
However, this misplaced concern completely misses the point of an artist statement, which is not an explanation of what your work means, or a roadmap to what someone should be experiencing when they see it.
It’s letting your viewer in on some aspects of your private relationship to your work, which, when done well, brings your viewer closer to the piece they are experiencing because they feel closer to you, the artist.
At the Core of Artist Statement Secret #1: About Them
… lies an uncomplicated truth: an effective statement creates a personal connection to your artwork because it stimulates our human thirst for story.
This, in turn, triggers longer memory storage about you and your work by immersing the viewer in not just one, but two languages essential to our human experience: visual and linguistic.
At The Core Of Artist Statement Secret #2: About You
This secret is a bit sneaky because it’s not at all what people think an artist statement is for.
Besides the art patrons, gallery owners, residencies (and a dozen other applications), your artist statement is for you. Not the marketing-business you, but you the artist.
Writing an artist statement gives you another way to reflect on your work. When you dare to climb this small, professional Mt. Everest, a surprising view of your own work awaits you at the top.
The very effort of searching for words that truly, authentically reflect your relationship to your art increases your creative flow.
This is true whenever we engage in a form of self-expression that pushes us out of our comfort zone. Like sweat from physical exertion, the very struggle gets our creative juices flowing.
One of the great keys of creativity is to shake things up, get out of familiar mindsets, work against the grain. Sometimes it is hard for an artist — whose artwork is based on uniqueness — to realize how easy it is for any pattern to become familiar.
Writing your artist statement — the what, how, and why of your work — will draw art buyers closer to your work even as it deepens your own awareness.
As another sculptor, Norbert Ohnmacht,learned:
Writing my artist statement gave me a chance to focus on myself. It opened up more creative juice and self-expression than I had experienced in a long time. Taming my internal critic, and the roadblocks to my inner mind, gave me new skills to express my heartfelt emotions to others.
Working on my statement gave me the opportunity to delve into my inner soul and reflect on the science of “me.” When I took the time to evaluate what, how and why I do what I do, it refined my work and gave me a fresh, determined self-confidence that I had lacked before.
The Other Half of…
The Ultimate Power Couplefor Selling Your Art: Your Artistic Fingerprint
We are all deeply familiar with the sensation that we are unique; there is only one of me, and only one of you.
And yet, even though we live in a culture that elevates individualism over the collective, celebrating our uniqueness is discouraged by a whole host of admonishments:
It’s not polite to brag.
Who do you think you are?
So, you think you’re better than others…
There’s always someone more talented than you.
You’re stuck up.
You sure do have a high opinion of yourself!
And then there’s the disparity between women being confidently themselves and men:
You’re too loud.
You’re a bitch.
You’re too dramatic.
You talk too much.
Don’t step on anyone’s toes.
Don’t be a (fill in the blank)… slut, loudmouth, and so on…
Our rational minds may have learned to compensate for, or overcome, this pervasive, persuasive cultural negativity to the point where we truly believe we are free of its subconscious undertow.
And yet, for a whole host of artists, this cultural mindset has poisoned the well of their Original Uniqueness of their Original Selves—some more so, some less.
The result is either a fuzzy, incomplete, or completely missing artistic fingerprint because the uniqueness of who we are and the uniqueness of our artwork are intimately, and forever, entwined.
When an artist is highly skilled, talented even, and yet it’s impossible to tell their artwork apart from dozens of equally skilled artists with similar work, that’s what the world of card sharks would call “a tell.”
Often these artists have settled for the ohhs and ahhs of family and friends; or the creative high that goes hand-in-hand with the skillful execution of a piece. All the while denying the world a true slice of their unique soul.
As I’ve said before, and it bears repeating, repeating, repeating:
Artistic fingerprints are the soft underbelly of our creative ArtLife. The direct flow between your work and your creative soul depends upon the willingness and courage to be raw and vulnerable.
And this, in large part, needs the appropriate personal boundaries and safeguards in place so vulnerability becomes risky enough to break through old patterns, but safe enough to stay real.
Every artist I’ve ever met has told me of the moments where they felt elevated they had entered a timeless, seamless flow where there was no distinction between themselves, the piece they were working on, and the process of creating. It was all One.
The universality of this experience goes unquestioned. And yet, each artist’s creative efforts have pulled from this realm a piece that looks unlike any other piece anywhere. Creative paradox.
Like the fingerprints on your fingers, your Artistic fingerprint holds this intriguing, creative paradox: it is at once unique and universal–always a fingerprint… yet never the same.
Creative Magic: when you give yourself permission to mine the depths for that which is truly yours, you lead the way for others to know themselves in equal measure.
Whether or not they take you up on that is their business. Yours is to always shine the light on your Original True Self.
A Case Study For The Ultimate Selling Your Art Power Couple:
Your Artist Statement & Artistic Fingerprint
When one of my private clients held a solo exhibition of his sculpture, he followed my suggestion to display each, singular art statement, about an individual piece, alongside the artwork.
The typed statements were mounted at the top of thin, metal poles rising out of a stand to shoulder-height, so you could walk right up and read it. And because the font size was large enough, anyone else peering over someone’s shoulder could also read it.
I arrived at the opening early and made a point to be a fly on the wall. And what I saw truly surprised me. The oft-quoted truism—a picture is worth a thousand words—had all the air knocked out of it that night.
All evening, with its 200 plus guests, I watched the same scene unfold.
Someone would approach one of the sculptures, glance briefly at the piece, then immediately turn and read the entire art statement; some that were two or three paragraphs.
Then they would turn back, with an appreciative nod or smile, and really look at the sculpture, walk around it, talk about it, walk around it some more.
I could see on their faces how their brains first registered, and then organized, the words they read with the images they saw. I could literally see how the combination kept them engaged with each piece, and how it sparked conversations between the guests.
The result of that night was a selling-your-art success…
…and a triumph for the ultimate Power Couple for Selling Your Art:
Your Artistic Fingerprint and Your Artist Statement.
How do you create a mindset for selling your art? It’s really not important if you want to create great art, good art, or just-for-the-heck-of-it art. The last thing I want to imply in my previous “Great Art” blog is that great art is automatically the goal.
Maybe yes, maybe, no—either way it’s not a judgment, it’s a description of one art career possibility, which may or may not be how you roll.
Some artists find great satisfaction in creating for the sake of creating. For others, the joy is in knowing that other people also find their work a distinct pleasure. While for most, selling art is the high point, the ultimate happy dance in their ArtLife.
However, if making great art is a deep, closely-held yearning inside you, I want to make sure you don’t think of it as a futile exercise in subjective reality or the coveted stamp of approval from others.
There are steps you can take (See: What Makes Great Art Great ). And while the markers of complexity, mystery, and mastery won’t assure you of greatness, at the very least they will give you a place to lean into.
If you want your work to make an impact, there is one other, inescapable requirement you can’t ignore: Your Artistic Fingerprint, aka voice (except you don’t sing), style (except you aren’t walking a runway), etc.
And discovering your Artistic Fingerprint is the beginning of a creative mindset that will impact everything connected with selling your art.
Your Creative Mindset: The Irreplaceable You Behind Selling Your Art
All of us carry a deep-seated awareness that we are unique. As Mr. Rodgers slid in or out of his sweater, he liked to remind all of us that “you’re special just the way you are.”
And yet, for a whole host of artists, intentionally, consciously connecting the dots between the uniqueness of their artwork, and the uniqueness of who they are, seems to be a uniquely challenging mindset-hill to climb.
While for many other artists, it seems almost impossible to grasp the difference between the skillful execution of a piece, with its accompanying creative high, and offering the world a you-and-only-you, slice of your soul.
How many still-life fruit platters have you seen that could have been painted by any of a hundred different artists?
How many barnyards? Or rolling hills?
How many have you seen that could have been painted by only one?
And which do you remember long after the curtain has closed?
In 2024, with the 24/7, online presence of so many artists, there’s a cornucopia of artists who have an established artistic fingerprint. David Hockney is one, whose folding screen, Caribbean Tea Time (1987), offers the shape of his piece as uniquely his, along with his painterly execution. And then there is one of my favorites, Christina Quarles, who uses digital and hands-on techniques to give us content that challenges our sense of self.
The biggest-ticket deal took place in the first hours, with a, selling for €580,000 (about $616,00) via Galerie Lelong & Co.
What does it take to bring the irreplaceable you into your art?
What is the creative mindset you need to…
Recognize, and name, your artistic fingerprint so it becomes part of your overall artist identity?
Be open to where you are developmentally as an artist, and where on that path your artistic fingerprint is…
The Battle For Creative License
For some artists, their fingerprint has always been with them, from the beginning. They know it and others see it. It’s as if these artists have a direct lifeline to their creative soul that doesn’t waver.
For others, an artistic fingerprint is not so obvious.
I remember one woman coming up to gallery owner,in a workshop he was leading, to ask if she had a “distinctive style.” I was peeking over her shoulder where she was flipping through image after image in her portfolio; each one indelibly hers. I found it puzzling that she couldn’t see the visual evidence right in front of her.
For other artists, one look at the dozens of pieces on their website and you’ll see an artist all over the place: different techniques, different styles, with little or nothing connecting them to the artist.
These artists, I’ve discovered, are fairly prickly when you talk about an artistic fingerprint. Immediately, they start defending their right to creative freedom, as if you’ve just told them they have to paint the same 3 pears, arranged in the same way in a chipped blue bowl, for the rest of their lives.
For other artists, their creativity is on an indulgent roll with sculpture vying for space in their buyers heads with the oil paintings vying for space with the silkscreens vying for space with the jewelry… you get the idea.
And in the majority of these cases, it’s not that there’s a problem with what they are doing, only with what the artist assumes can happen with what they are doing: sustainable, long-term, commercial success.
Not going to happen.
What might happen is sporadic sales and lots of ohhs and ahhs from friends and family, which only strengthen the artist’s resolve to keep what they see as a right to unshackled creative freedom.
Then there are artists who do want that artistic fingerprint (aka signature style, aka artistvoice) and do want their work to have an impact, and their vision to have a following, only they aren’t sure how to go about it.
What if you don’t know if you have a fingerprint and you want one to help sell your art?
Or you think you have a fingerprint, but aren’t confident about it?
This is exactly the predicament one of my private clients had when she first came to me.
She had been painting for years with a solid handle on technique. But she felt stuck and unsure about what she was painting. It was as if her creative soul was knock, knock, knocking on a closed door, and she knew it.
Once we delved into coaching, she was savvy enough to recognize that the missing piece for selling her art and expanding her career was a clear and conscious artistic fingerprint.
And she was genuinely confused about what her artistic fingerprint might be.
Here are the five steps of her artistic fingerprint journey that we discovered together. Notice how each step builds on the previous one, and where her creative mindset came into play:
Step 1. We studied her work to identify areas that drew a consistent response from her viewers. Where were people moved? What did they say that stayed with her? Where was she moved? What stayed with her after leaving the studio?
Step 2. Once those areas were identified, we isolated them from the rest of the painting, and then lined these up so we could see them individually and as a group. What were the common elements in areas of color, technique, subject matter, perspective, etc.
Step 3. After identifying, and most critically naming the common elements, this artist began the hard work of asking herself “What does it mean to me when I do X?” For example, she had multiple areas in multiple paintings where she used her palette knife to create spider-web lines between areas on the canvass.
Step 4. Asking “What does it mean?” included writing exercises, keeping a dream journal beside her bed, and an art journal beside her in the studio. First, she set up the direct intention to understand her artistic fingerprint, and then used the exercises and journals to help her pay attention to what her sub-conscious was revealing.
Step 5. A key practice, which helps create conscious awareness, was digging for the specific words or phrases that accurately described the recurring elements in her work that might relate to a common theme… which, surprise, surprise, they did!
Each of these five steps was incorporated into our coaching dialogue, which is critical to the Artistic Fingerprint Discovery. Without a dialogue, you are asking the eye to see the eye.
And, yes, not everyone has an art career coach, I understand. But this process can work quite well without a coach in your corner.
If you don’t have a coach, choose someone in your community whose artistic sensibilities you trust and who will understand what you are going for. Someone who will be a sounding board for your own developing awareness. Stay clear of anyone who might use this as an opportunity to show off or become a critic.
Artistic fingerprints are the soft underbelly of our creative ArtLife. The direct flow between your work and your creative soul depends upon the willingness and courage to be raw and vulnerable. And this, in large part, needs the appropriate personal boundaries and safeguards in place so vulnerability becomes risky enough to break through old patterns, but safe enough to stay real.
When you step into the artistic fingerprint mindset, you’ll find your fingerprint is already a seamless part of all that you know, in your heart, to be true about you and your work.
Your Artistic Fingerprint Embodies All That Is Spiritual in Selling Your Art
I know that selling your art does not lend itself very well to the philosophical, esoteric, or spiritual. But in human reality, the philosophical, esoteric, and spiritual are always humming in the background.
Here’s an excerpt from one artist coaching session that illustrates this perfectly, where the act of painting becomes a kind of prayer to All That Is:
Artist: The paint is telling me what it wants to express. And then I look at it and realize, “Oh, this is the message that was coming through for me.”
For example, in one of my seascapes what’s attracting me to a particular scene with its colors and light is a message about the human experience throughout the web of life. How we are connected with each other, and with the source of universal energy that energizes us and gives us strength, and this in turn gives us our sense of purpose in life.
Every artist I’ve ever met has told me that, at some point in their creative practice, they experienced moments where they felt elevated, expansive, as if their very being had entered a timeless, seamless flow where there was literally no difference between themselves, the piece they were working on, and the process of creating. It was all One.
The universality of this experience goes unquestioned. And yet, each artist’s creative efforts have pulled from this realm a piece that looks unlike any other piece anywhere. Creative paradox.
Artistic fingerprints, aka your artist voice, also hold this intriguing, creative paradox: like the fingerprints on our fingers, they are at once unique and universal–always a fingerprint yet never the same.
They also represent one of the creative responsibilities of choosing to be an artist—“responsibility,” not as duty or code for the British stiff-upper-lip, but responsibility to share our truth, as only we can know and experience.
What’s magical is: when you give yourself permission to mine your own depths for authenticity and that which is truly yours, you lead the way for others to know themselves in equal measure.
Whether or not they take you up on that is their business. Yours is to always shine the light on your Original True Self.
————————————————–
I’d love to know what challenges have come from your journey with your artistic fingerprint…
Does the artist statement help you in selling your art? Besides vibingon Instagram, your artist statement improves the process for selling your art in 20 other places.
When I stumbled upon artist statements it was 1992. The Internet was barely off breast feeding. Twitter didn’t exist, much less its decadent descendent.
In 2002, when my artist statement book first came out, the art world reserved career for an artist who had died (and were “given” a career retrospective), or a famous, old, alive artist also being “given” a career retrospective.
At that time in our culture, the collective perspective of artists was moving away from the maverick outsider to the more accepted, business person, albeit one with a flair. At that same time, the artist statement was an elusive element in an artist’s portfolio that no one considered overly consequential (including artists), much less worthy of a whole book.
In 2002, all that changed with the first edition of Writing the Artist Statement: Revealing the True Spirit of Your Work, where I uncovered the logical, practical, and reversible flaws in the artist statement resistance movement. You know the one… where artists proclaim with bravado that they have nothing to say that someone can’t already see in the work.
Never mind that this was silly on its face since what the artist sees and what a viewer sees, in spite of any overlap, is essentially a deeply personal “seeing” that arises out of the unique experiences of each individual.
Spin forward into 2007, when I realized that, for artists, the concept of selling your art had zero professional support. So, I created and produced held the first smARTist Telesummit conference for visual artists. Over the next six years, thousands of artists from 16 countries and over 40 US states, attended the first ever, annual, online, 7-day, art-career conference.
At the time, art, artist, and career were culturally clipped by a perceived incompatibility because career was reserved for a certain class made up of doctors, lawyers, educators, etc.
The collective WE had already concluded that Artists were too… flaky, too creative (i.e., not dependable), independent (i.e., not stable), marched to the tune of their own drummer (i.e., not reliable)…starving (by definition)…and certifiably crazy (you know, the Van-Gogh-minus-one-ear syndrome)… you get the vibe.
The sad part back then in 2007?
Artists got the same vibe. And so, as self-fulfilling prophecies always go, artists failed to considered themselves career viable. A business, yes, as artists began wrestling with the idea that they could at least sell their art if they had the right venue, usually galleries or local art fairs.
Now, in 2024, all of this has changed. Search online for “art career coaches,” and they are everywhere. In 2007, there were only a handful of us.
Search online for art career and you’ll come up with a plethora. Back in 2007, all you would find is one or two “art career retrospectives,” or art as a career in other fields: design, education, cartoons, etc.
But now, in 2024, Instagram has turned visual fine art into a financially viable career with coach after coach focused on selling your art to the exclusion of anything else that might, or might not, be part of your viable art career.
Some argue, now, that the artist statement is no longer needed. It’s passé. Some galleries don’t even require it. Well, that’s not new. Some galleries, even before Instagram, resisted and questioned the need for artist statements—a standpoint I logically wrestle to the ground in my book.
Here’s what you need to know: Artist statements deliver a fundamental function that impacts how well you are selling your art, which the current naysayers are thoughtlessly ignoring.
A unique-to-only-youartist statement can never go out of style in the same way your art isn’t going out of style. Fashion… style… trends… these come and go. But the language of your soul remains as authentic and engaging today as it will 500 years from now in 2524.
The trick is to understand how to use your artist statement in any venue.
Let’s take Instagram for starters, and answer this question:
Here’s three:
It lets you vibe with your social media followers so the word-language of your Original Self becomes as consistent and strong as the visual-language of your art.
It gives you a signature-language bond between art, artist, and audience that encourages more engagement because it reveals the true spirit of your work.
Once written, it can be repurposed, expanded or miniaturized, and adapted for multiple channels.
Even on Instagram, it’s a rare artist who throws up an image, but says nothing below it, right?
An artist statement, like your art, establishes who you are in a sea of other artists.
But its usefulness goes even further.
Here’s an excerpt from the “just released” 3rd edition of my book:
Personal power is the power emerging from our deepest connections to life: of feeling, embracing, creating, and celebrating.
The only way to expand our personal power is to embrace ourselves exactly as we are; neither more nor less, but as someone in a state of constantly changing grace.
When you have your own encounter with your own artist statement, then you will come face to face with your personal power…
PART 1 – What Makes Great Art Great?So Selling Your Art Comes With Confidence Baked In…
Over my six years of the smARTist Telesummit (now smARTist Revival Podcasts) , I asked hundreds of artists how they define success through the unique Vision Questionnaire that participants filled out.
And as surprising as it was to me, a very small percentage of the over 2,500 artists defined success as “producing great art.” For 87%, success was the annual amount of art income– ranging from $20,000 to $500,000 a year.
Maybe it’s because great art is associated with historical figures, museum retrospectives, and the millions thrown down on the auction block. Maybe great feels like shoes too big to fill.
Or maybe it comes tagged with the age-old response that great is in the eye of the beholder—too subjective to pin down.
Or, for women artists, the persistent patriarchal overlay on great means it’s an exercise in futility; while for men great is a challenge that might best them even when they do their best.
I wonder what would change for selling your art if great was not only definable, but also achievable?
Daniel Grant, an arts writer and presenter at the smARTist Telesummit in 2011, once wrote, “I define an artist’s importance by three criteria. How much he or she captures the soul of a moment, how much he or she influences subsequent generations of painters, and how much he or she expresses an individual style.”
This begs the question: Can you produce great art but not be an “important” artist?
For certainly great art is produced all the time without the artist being considered “important” in terms of Grant’s three criteria.
Even if you do not have a burning desire to produce great art, I know in your heart that you want your art to Wow! people, to cause a significant enough response that someone wants to own a piece no matter what.
And this only happens when, in the eyes of the viewer in that moment, your art is great.
I don’t remember the exact moment I realized that great art was easily identifiable. I know it was in a coaching session with one of my artist when I heard myself calmly,confidently define great art as if it was the single most obvious thing in the world.
Since then, I’ve looked carefully to see how well my definition stands up.
What I love the most about this definition is that it puts you, the artist, in control of selling your art. You do not have to “guess” what the “soul of the moment” is or how you will be perceived by the future, you simply have to fulfill one of three requirements.
This part has been repeated so much I’m sure you can say it in your sleep. And even though it screams common sense, you’d be surprised at how many artists neglect the basics:
Skillful competence with your materials
Skillful competence with your execution of mark making, sculpting or crafting
A signature, artistic fingerprint that is repeatedly recognizable as yours across multiple pieces of your work
Producing enough to meet the demand
With this foundation in the studio, and a similar foundation in career administration, you can build a sustainable career without producing great art.
But if you yearn for more, try this.
With Great Art Complexity Rules… Even When It’s Simple
For most of my life I’ve understood that one attribute of greatness is the ability to take something complex and make it easy to understand, make it accessible, especially when dealing with intellectual concepts.
The result is how complexity seems to melt away in the elegance of a simple distillation. When this happens, we disremember the layered, multi-faceted richness that gave birth to the satisfaction of what we can now understand.
I remember watching a movie on Picasso that started with him drawing a simple line on a piece of glass. It took less than two seconds, and yet that one line echoed like a giant bell with the layers and complexity of years of art making.
If you want to make great art, then start with one or more levels of complexity:
Complexity of technique
Complexity of subject matter
Complexity of message
When you create complexity, you hold the viewer longer. When you layer in complexities in technique and subject matter and message, you invite your viewers inside their own brains and challenge them to expand their lived experience.
Since a viewer is often captured by the art (under your control) plus some personal trigger (not under your control), offering an experience that is not easily dismissed or walked away from is key.
It’s the layers and complexity that hold the viewer captive long enough for them to feel they cannot walk away from whatever soul siren your art is singing to them.
Part 2 – What Makes Great Art Great?
Are You Hiding Behind Beauty?
Whether you’re in the studio, attending an opening gala, or selling your art online, there’s a lot that comes with being an artist to stoke the ego fires:
Admiration
The ultimate badge of specialness
Cascading down the river of Creativity Flow
Rampant self-expression
The delight of watching what’s around the corner coming towards you
(or you towards it)
An unbridled thrill of a purpose-driven life
Merging with forces that are bigger than the ego (a bit of irony, that one)
The ability to create beauty (as in “the eye of the beholder”)
Only, before I continue, a couple of clarifications…
The Ego
I have never been at peace with ego bashing and the popular idea that our ego is a function of The Self that either gets in our way, or presents some hurdle to a more authentic or spiritual self. Or that its core essence is narcissistic and infantile.
I experience Ego as a state of being that provides us with essential survival tools for our psyches, even as it allows us to experience pleasure.
It gives us a framework to understand our own personalities. It provides the template for self-reflection. It gives us a sense of wholeness, so the disparate selves we all experience (who are we out with our friends vs. with our mother?) don’t scatter into a pile of disconnected parts.
And Ego gives us a framework to understand our own maturation process. Through the Ego we can sense when we are maturing out of an infantile state.
And, yes, some of us settle for narcissism or fail to mature. And some of us use the Ego to bolster neurosis, bore our friends, and batter our colleagues.
But this is not, de facto, the Ego’s fault. The Whole Self has responsibility here. What the Ego most clearly gives us, or withholds, is our ability to be confident (earned or not). While it is maturity, not the Ego, which can measure what we’ve rightfully earned (or not).
When You Are Selling Your Art, Your Ego Can Help Or Hinder.
Here’s a short list to make sure your Ego is serving you and not the other way around when selling your art. Feel free to add other options:
Have you asked a trusted art mentor or successful artist you trust to critique your work?
Are your prices in line with similar work in other galleries?
Are you prepared, ahead of time, to hold a conversation that is about your viewer’s reactions and questions, or might you end up on a rant about yourself?
Do you feel viewers are innately gracious or critical?
Are you feeling open or defensive when questioned about your work?
When viewing other artists’ work, do you compare yourself to them or lean into experiencing what they have to offer?
It’s Not All A Bed of Roses
The partial list of artist ego-pleasures, above, does not discount the raft of challenges—from how to maintain integrity and put food on the table, to how to endure a fund raising event when you’d rather be in the studio—which are also part of your ArtLife.
The Siren’s Call to “Beauty Above All” When Selling Your Art
The real trick is allowing our Ego fires to be stoked without following the Siren’s call away from how we shine the light on our true self.
For what great art does not, at some level, do that? Shine the light on the true self?
And the strongest Siren’s call for artists, I’ve found, is the Siren’s Call to Beauty.
I am not suggesting that you do not make beautiful art, if that’s what compels you to get up in the morning.
But don’t stop at that destination unless you are 100% sure that your beautiful art is simultaneously shining the light on your true self—all the time, in all kinds of weather.
Far too often, I see artists stopping by the lake to admire the seductive reflection of Beauty without diving in to see what treasures linger below, in the Dark of the Deep.
Far too often, I watch artists skillfully ruled by fear (which can go by many names: stubborn, resistant, it’s just who I am, beauty is my soul, it sells so well, people love it… ) as they simultaneously hide the light of their true self behind the beauty.
As you read this, notice where in your body some feeling is beginning to arise: a light tingle of recognition in the throat, a small clutch of fear in the stomach, a slight tightness across your shoulders… you’ll know it when you feel it.
This is the clue your deepest Self is offering you to pay attention, to stay open to the possibility that you are unwittingly listening to the Siren’s Call For Beauty to avoid the challenge of creating from a place of discomfort and discovery.
Remember, what you creatively explore does not necessarily have to be unveiled. You can work in the dark, and decide whether or not what you are doing is asking to be in the world at large as is, or in another, more advanced iteration, or what piece truly wants is to remain in your private collection as process for your creative self.
