I paint everyday for roughly 8 hours, because I am so god damn determined to make a career out of it. Here’s my latest. “Inevitable” oil on canvas

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image showing I paint everyday for roughly 8 hours, because I am so god damn determined to make a career out of it. Here’s my latest. “Inevitable” oil on canvas

theantagonists on March 20th, 2019 at 12:02 UTC »

I don't know. That looks like water not oil to me.

NoBSforGma on March 20th, 2019 at 12:36 UTC »

I once lived in a small coastal town where a lot of artists lived. What I saw was that they did a "mix" of "This is what I want to paint" and "This is what sells."

One year, the decorating trend was to "soft" watercolors of flowers so one artists friend painted a shitload of those to sell. Then she painted what she wanted to or painted to adjust her style or do something new. It can't always be "I will paint exactly what I want to and the world will beat a path to my door." Most of these artists, in addition to having small galleries at their homes, participated in quite a few art shows around the country or at least, around the state. Of course, it can depend on where you live. Not everywhere is conducive to selling art! And they all had a variety of "sidelines" that could include greeting cards or prints of their original work and calendars.

If you want it to be a business, you will have to approach it as a business.

I do like this painting, though. I'm a little conflicted about all the dark -- the wave seems to have some light coming from somewhere but the rest of the painting is totally dark. Is this supposed to be some kind of symbolism that I totally missed?

Anyway, proud of you for working hard!

NorthStarZero on March 20th, 2019 at 13:08 UTC »

Hey there OP, I want to echo the observations of at least one other poster on this thread:

You've got 2 things going on here - your desire to practice and improve your craft, and your desire to translate the skillset you are building into a viable career.

You have to understand that, as an artist, skill does not translate into sales. In fact, once you get past a certain skill threshold (a threshold that you already appear to have surpassed) sales and success are completely unrelated to talent level. The world is full of talented people; talent on its own does not build careers.

You basically have a couple of options for a business model - you can be a "service provider" where you paint commissions (the painting version of a wedding photographer or a stock photo photographer) or you can be a "rock star", where you try and develop your own vision and hope what you do catches the zeitgeist. (and to a degree, you can do both)

You need to start working the economics of this plan. Go meet some working artists and find out how they do it. Figure out a strategy that puts your work in front of potential customers and translates that into actual sales. Determine what the threshold is where you can switch to art full time, and work towards getting there.

The artistic raw materials are there, but I question the business acumen and drive to hustle. Of the two skills, it is the business side that makes your plan work, not the artistic side. Time to work on that.

Good luck!