Wearing all the hats… how to be an artist!

Being an artist may seem like a cop out to a lot of people.

You just float around in your studio painting or sculpting in your floaty scarf being flaky and irresponsible, a dream life…

Err not exactly. Being an artist consists of moments of joy and wonder at what you created, yes, spending time in your space, be that a studio, spare room, freezing garage, kitchen table, with no boss, no body to have to get along with, no strict schedule, no commuting. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? Well if your an introvert like many artists, yes, it’s great but then there are the other times, like 90% of the time, wondering how you did it, will you ever be able to do it again? Feeling like an imposter, a fraud, like that was just a fluke, I don’t even know how I did that. Producing work that you hate, painting over it or throwing it in the fire (not really we’re not that irresponsible!) Doubting yourself, your sanity, your self worth. No regular paycheck, no job security, no guarantee that anyone will ever buy anything you create ever again.

Feeling like you are wasting your time because no one likes what you do anyway, not even your family. Feeling misunderstood, weird, skint, guilty for spending money on more art materials when you still haven’t sold enough to pay for the last lot of paint, canvas etc.

Then there’s the marketing. Because all artists love marketing, that’s why they became an artist, isn’t it? So they could spend their days and nights and weekends writing emails and blog posts and social media posts. Learning how to make reels, putting yourself in front of the camera, having to listen to your own voice yukkk! Do I really sound like that? Constantly looking for interesting material to talk about. Standing all day at freezing cold art fairs hoping someone will come and chat to them, if only to break the monotony, never mind buy something. At the same time being terrified that someone will come and talk to them, because we’re introverts any way and would rather not talk to complete strangers. What will I say? What if I sound stupid and go red and get all flustered?

How to post your paintings to anywhere in the world, find the cheapest and most reliable courier, how to package them so they arrive in one piece, how to present them in a beautiful way so that underneath all that padding and box it actually feels like it’s something really special for your collector to receive.

Then there’s the tech. Having to learn a whole new set of skills, building websites, learning about SEO because we’d never even heard of SEO before, how to take good images of your work, how to load images, how to resize images so that the website doesn’t take half an hour to load and the SEO police won’t like it, how to make sure the website actually works like you want it to and people can actually buy a painting easily.

Record keeping. Recording all your work with images and keeping it all in a file somewhere that you can actually find when you want to so that you know where that painting is. Is it at home on the wall, at a gallery, did it sell, who bought it, how much did it sell for because when it comes to tax returns we need to know that.

There is so much more but maybe that is for another blog post. Still think being an artist is a cop out?

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