Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Signs Of Life

I surf the web to find out if artists are selling their work with any frequency. From what I can tell there seems to be some selling going on. I do believe half of what I read about sales in these times. I do believe the daily painters are selling the works that are under one hundred dollars with some regularity. It must be a chore to paint the work, photograph it and upload the image on the web. It would be for me, but there are a lot of artists who are doing it. So in this time any sale is a good one. I'll have to survey some of the art festivals in the area this year to get some idea about art sales. It will be informative.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The Tradeoff

There's a trade off to have any kind of art life/career. One can read about artists in magazines and think how great it would be in their shoes. The problem with that kind of thinking is, while it looks good, it has it's downsides . Often those artists who lives seem to be terrific, have the same relative concerns as the rest of the art world. Art careers require a great deal of maintenance, the more successful the artist is, the more maintenance is required. The artist James Rosenquist recently lost his studio as a result of a wildfire in Florida. I don't know any one who would trade places with Mr. Rosenqiust. Those big studios that are shown in art magazines require a constant influx of cash, an artist has to be selling a lot of art to get that to happen. The trade off comes into play when one decides to be an artist, that's just the way it is.