Building A Better Roadmap

When I first began this art thing or whatever you want to call it. I guess it would be selling art or making art professionally. Basically, treating my art like a business. When I first started this, all I had was ideas and a little bit of skill. As I started to create more and think about what I wanted to do with my art, I realized I didn’t have much of a direction. I spent time thinking of a way to make a clear path for my career but I was unsuccessful because I had no reference for a standard. I immediately began to scour the internet for resources. I wanted a black and white “How To”. As I searched the web I also spent time reaching out to other artists, shooting my shot at galleries and potential clients. I came to find that there’s no right way to do it. The art world as a whole is made up of many little individual art worlds, the individual artist’s wold. I found out that it works differently for everyone. Every individual artist needs to do the work for themselves and figure out how their art works in the industry as a whole. It’s based off of your artistic voice. Your voice is determines what your art looks like and what your art is saying. When I realized this I came to understand that there’s no “How To”, no outline, no roadmap. I have to create my own plan and roadmap that works for me. In the building of my roadmap I found these three resources combined, amongst others, to be the staple of my ever evolving roadmap. In combination with other resources, videos and conversations I’ve had. I use these books to create a simple plan that I follow daily.

 This first book that I stumbled into is called “Find Your Artistic Voice” by Lisa Congdon.

As a start I wanted to get a general understanding of what an artistic voice is. I was interested in standing out and understanding my style. Once I got into the reading I gained a lot of insight into how that all works, how you find your voice. I was lead to this book because I felt I needed clarity. We can all agree that the art world can for the most part can be very vague and general. There’s not a lot of clarity for new artists trying to navigate the art world. I think a lot of new artists spend a lot of time making things and trying to figure out what they’re doing. Sometimes, arguably the majority of the time, we procrastinate. We don’t actually make the work because we don’t know what we’re doing, where we’re going, or if it will work. It can easily feel like a waste of time if we create something that doesn’t fit in with all of the other things that we’re creating. Anyway, that was a least my experience and I know a lot of others that can relate to this type of process. I really enjoy this book because of the light it sheds on the process of pinpointing and defining your artistic voice. Really what makes up an artistic voice. Here’s a spoiler. Generally, it’s really a handful of things. It comes down to skill, style, medium and subject matter. Those things can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. It could be as simple as the color red is an amazing vibrant color. Or as complex as American society was created to serve white men. This was a major piece of information that helped me to understand what my artistic voice is. It also helped me to shape my voice and my style. Once I became aware of what I was naturally saying then I could lean in. So I came to find my voice and style but only after the brutal, painstaking process of making what seemed like an endless amount of paintings. This was prompted from a list that Lisa shares in the book. It is 10 steps to building artistic skill. Here it is:

1. Begin
2. Practice 
3. Keep showing up 
4. Practice more
5. Stretch yourself 
6. Practice 
7. Practice 
8. Note your improvement 
9. Practice more
10. Repeat

5 of these 10 steps are practice. This is the real key to finding your artistic voice and building artistic skill.

The next book is “Art, Money, Success” by Maria Brophy

Now it was kind of a natural occurrence or a natural flow of thinking because once I had a good understanding of my voice I need to figure out how and where to sell my work. I went on a quest for resources that would tell me: How to market my work and How to sell my work. By default I think most artists have an idea that you should sell your work in a gallery. Or give your work to someone you can “Take care of that for you”. Well, this book helped give me perspective on how and where I could and should sell my work. It sheds light on different ways to sell your art and ways to make multiple streams of income from selling one painting or art piece. Maria Brophy does a good job of giving the reader a broader perspective on how to sell artwork. It gave me confidence in the fact that I could sell my own art and I didn’t have to depend on some entity, gallery or some kind of backing to successfully sell the art. For me this book has become a really valuable resource because it gives real life examples and suggestions on how an artist can get themselves out of their studios and into the public eye. Most of the principles in this book are rooted in basic sales techniques. I also find this book really helpful because it takes into consideration the idea that not everyone is great at selling and not everyone has the personality to get out there and go talk to hundreds of people. I think there is an art to picking up the phone and calling 500 people. It is not easy. This is understood so, Maria is sensitive to that fact and offers alternative ways to make this option feasible for all artists. She gives examples of thinking outside of the box and creating some kind of system where you could have someone else do it for you. You need to know how to do everything or be able to do everything. You just need to know how to do your job, which is making art. Now, because your art is a business you don’t have to do it alone. You just need to create a plan and start to work the plan and if need be recruit others who can help you to successfully execute the plan. Again, your art is a business! If you don’t treat it like a business, the chance of you growing financially is slim. If that isn’t your goal then sure, you can be successful sharing your work, having your work displayed, you can even win awards. It’s all up to you. I refer to this book every month. Constantly it feels like. I can’t even tell you how many times I refer back to this book, but I’m always reading it and I’m always looking for new ways to adapt what Maria is saying to my art business and my life. “Art, Money, Success” is a really great resource in combination with “Find Your Artistic Voice”.

Lastly, “Aesthetic Intelligence” by Pauline Brown.

Now, I actually found this book by mistake. It was definitely a ‘What you’re looking for will find you’ situation. I was hanging out at a friends house and I need to go to the bathroom. So I’m walking through the house trying to find the bathroom and I ended up walking into a roommates bedroom. Normally if I walked into the wrong room I would just turn around. this time was different. I saw this really cool Mid-Century modern bookshelf and all of these fashion books. Weirdly enough I started to look at these books and I saw this book called “Aesthetic Intelligence”. I thought ‘wow this book sounds really interesting’. I just want all of the information, I want to be smart so anything dealing with intelligence, I’m in. I read the first page and from there I was hooked. I got the book for myself and boom. The icing on the cake. “Aesthetic Intelligence” is the completion of the Holy Art Trinity. For me the combination of these books work so well as a crash course to creating, selling and presenting art in a polished professional way. This a great read because it talks about the art of aesthetics; how the biggest global brands have mastered the aesthetics of what they do and their origin stories. This book helped me to gain a better understanding of what I want my brand to be, what I want my brand to say and how I want the brand to look. It also gave me some insight onto some things that I could do to make my brand stand out and expand the customer experience from initial purchase to opening the package. Pauline Brown drives points on principles rooted in brand image, brand identity and most importantly the little nuances of your customer experience that personally communicates to customers. I highly recommend this book. It continues to be a really helpful resource for me as I start to now build out a bigger, broader and more cohesive roadmap. 

Now, if you know me you know I rant and rave about these books. They seriously changed my life and the direction of my art career. Before I read them, I was making a lot of artwork, but I had no idea what I was doing. I was walking around like a chicken with my head cut off. I had no direction. Therefore, I had nothing to focus on. Just a lot of ambition and a lot of creativity. With that, I will continue to encourage artist who are trying to grow their brand, show and sell their artwork. pick up these books and read them because these resources can really help you to sharpen brand of your artwork to a clear direct point. 

All in all, The Holy Art Trinity of these books have become my have become the base of my roadmap and they have helped me to successfully grow my business, sharpen my skills and tell the origin story of my brand in a clear and direct way. I’ve noticed that as long as I continue to refer back to these materials I can see improvements in my business as a whole every year. 

-Von