How to Make Money as an Artist: The 7 Winning Strategies of Successful Fine Artists
160
How to Make Money as an Artist: The 7 Winning Strategies of Successful Fine Artists
160eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781569764442 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Make Money as an Artist
The 7 Winning Strategies of Successful Fine Artists
By Sean Moore
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2000 Sean MooreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-444-2
CHAPTER 1
Strategy 1
Create a Winning Marketing Package
An Impressive Marketing package is the most powerful weapon in your promotional arsenal. If you follow these step-by-step directions, you'll end up creating a ready-made, off-the-shelf missile to fire at galleries, collectors, art representatives, advertising and public relations outlets, and the media. It will be perfect for grant proposals and scholarship/fellowship applications, too.
A winning marketing package contains a number of items. These include
• A biography
• A resume
• Slides and photographs
• Business cards and stationery
• News releases and press clippings
• A portfolio
Additional items include a slide list to go with the slides, and two smaller versions of the portfolio — one for sending out and a pocket-sized version to carry with you at all times.
Your Biography
Your biography should be no longer than one page and 200-300 words total. A short biography will contain much of the same information as your resume, yet it will appeal to those who like to acquire information in prose form. The biography that you add to your marketing package should not be a compressed history of your life. It should include only the information that relates to your evolution as an artist. If you don't have a biography, here are some simple steps to building one.
1. Make notes. Start by jotting down notes quickly and spontaneously. These are words and phrases you come up with by using free association. These notes should include everything you can think of that has anything to do with your experience as an artist and might include lessons, schools, teachers, shows, sales, and prizes. Don't hold back or edit this information at this stage.
2. Outline. Arrange these in some logical order and make a simple list of all these notes. Then edit out the ones that don't seem worthwhile.
3. Write prose. Flesh out each note to form a complete sentence, then organize these sentences into short paragraphs. This should read like a mini-story with a beginning and a middle, and should culminate in your present level of development.
The biography should include relevant education, workshops, courses, and jobs in art. It may include prominent exhibitions, collections, art organizations, and academic institutions from your past or your present. It might include known, distinguished teachers who may have influenced your work. For example, Jackson Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton. While it's hard to see much of Benton's influence in Pollock's painting, Pollock was able to trade on Benton's reputation before he established his own. Your biography needs to include any awards you've received, including scholarships, grants, and show prizes. Here's an illustration from a fictional artist who has pretty good credits.
My new series of blue and green abstract acrylics are inspired by views of the Connecticut coast and sailing on Long Island Sound. I was born in Woodstock, Connecticut, and attended Yale University School of Art and Architecture on an athletic scholarship. While at Yale, I studied design under Josef Albers and won first prize in the Greenwich Arts Festival.
4. Write an artist's statement. Your biography must include a statement of purpose called an artist's statement.
An artist's statement is a brief description of your aesthetic; that is, why you do your art, why you do it in a certain manner, and what it means. An artist's statement is often needed if you want to make money as an artist. For example, it is regularly used by gallery staff to tell customers something about the "why" of your work.
An artist's statement can be difficult for many artists who don't consciously think about purpose. "I just like to draw" doesn't pass for an artist's statement. You need to put clear thinking into this. Your purpose doesn't have to be some grand altruistic humanitarian aspiration, nor does it have to be a deep tortuous psychological excavation. If you think only about formal and technical matters when you work, then say so. They are perfectly valid artistic concerns and may distinguish you more clearly from others' vagaries. Keep in mind that Impressionism, Cubism, Op Art (optical art), and Photo Realism are about no more than such visual artistic matters. If your artistic output is inspired by a save-the-world scheme (the plight of the poor, the national parks, flying saucers, worship of God), the connection should show clearly, so you can be modest about it in your statement.
Whether you're a mechanic or a mystic, put your artist's statement in simple straightforward language. The gallery sales people and the media tend to use sound bites from it. If it's obtuse, quotes out of context will sound foolish or pretentious. Try something like this:
While Albers's Bauhaus-influenced "concentric squares" paintings impressed me at the time, I later found the sterility and lack of feeling in his geometric compositions not suited to my personality and love of brushwork. I feel the same way about his lack of external reference — I want my paintings to be about something. Much as Neil Welliver, influenced by Albers's limited palette and flat areas of color, adapted them to his dense paintings of the Maine woods, I've taken the colors, loosened up the geometry, and added brush strokes. In that aspect my paintings are related to Richard Diebenkorn's California coastal scenes. Though my sketches and drawings of the Connecticut coast are representational, my broadly painted acrylics are intended to evoke rather than portray.
A little highbrow and inappropriate, but you get the idea. The descriptions of the works in the above example give the reader a rough idea of what the works look like even though the paintings are not being seen. The compare-and-contrast technique with three other artists, in turn, sets up a "triangulation" that helps zero in on what your work is like. Note that the reference to Welliver and Diebenkorn, two highly successful contemporary American artists whose works hang in museums, is a valid use of borrowed interest that gives you a leg up by association.
Relevant memberships may be included in the biography as a way to bring in some nonartistic purposes if you have them.
A member of the Cousteau Society and the Sierra Club, I am also active in the National Trust, which works to preserve the natural beauty of our coastlines.
This is enough. Your marketing package isn't the place for a lecture. You're selling your artwork and, to some extent, you as an artist.
5. The hook. Finally, your biography should have a hook, also called a handle. This is something unusual about your background, your art, or yourself that will grab attention and make people remember you.
You might not think there's anything unusual about yourself, but there always is something. Enlist the help of your friends by asking them what they think is unusual about you and/or distinctive about your artwork. It's often something so obvious and taken for granted that you don't notice it. For example, Andy Warhol once worked a boring job as a commercial artist for a shoe company. His graphic design and illustration background showed clearly in the images and techniques of his mature style.
If you're a housewife and mother who fits her sculpting in between the children's school and managing the home, you might think it sounds ordinary, but there's a hook that will make a lot of people say, "Wow, how does she do it?" Here are some things to think about when creating a well-developed biography:
• Maybe you studied abroad or you were born abroad. (My main painting professor in Connecticut, John Gregoropoulos, was born in Athens, Greece. His large white abstracts with pastel silhouettes and gold-leaf suns reflect this.)
• Maybe your artwork is done in a style from the past or even from the future.
• Maybe you're very young or very old.
• You're an expert on some arcane subject.
• You have another present occupation such as a yachtsman, mountain climber, or musician. (A member of my art club is a psychiatrist who produces artwork obsessively and shows in art exhibitions compulsively.)
Your Resume
A resume is a work-related biography in outline form that you use when looking for a job, but an art resume is different. Your artist's resume should include only items that relate to your history as an artist — the idea is to impress art world professionals and potential buyers at a glance. Your resume should be no longer than one or two pages. If you don't think you have enough to fill a resume, you already have the bare bones started when you worked on your biography. You'll be able to fill it out nicely as you move through the following strategies in this book.
Your resume may include most of the following headings:
• Awards and Honors
• Exhibitions
• Collections
• Articles and Reviews
• Publications
• Lectures and Appearances
• Commissions
• Jobs in the Art Field
• Education
• Memberships
Begin by including your name in boldface type at the top. Follow this with your address, telephone number (including area code), fax number, and email address. Immediately under this, include your place of birth (this can be a conversation piece) and your date of birth (optional).
List the most impressive or most recognizable credits first so a hurried reader who's just skimming the headings down the page will see them. The only exception to this rule is under "Jobs in the Art Field" and "Education." Here, place the most recent items first as you would in an employment resume. Lead with your strength.
Awards and Honors. It's exasperating how many artists bury this good stuff at the very end. If you've won some prizes they should be up front to make a strong impression that says, "This artist is a winner."
Exhibitions. Make a straightforward laundry list of all the art exhibitions where your work has been shown. It doesn't matter whether they were juried, by invitation, or something that Bonzo the chimp could get in.
If your credits are longer than an epic poem, or if you don't have many credits under your belt and some are obviously weak, sharpen the list and use the heading "Selected Group Exhibitions."
If you've had a one-man or one-woman show it will look good even if the venue was small. It shows you have a body of work large enough to fill some gallery. In this case, I prefer the heading "Solo Exhibitions." (I like this instead of "One-Man Shows" because it avoids the politically correct gender hassles, covers everybody, and is shorter.) Here's an example:
Solo Exhibitions
Bootstrap Gallery, Cambridge, MA, 1995
Woodstock Public Library, Woodstock, CT, 1992
Yale University School of Art & Architecture, 1990
Selected Group Exhibitions
New Women at Yale, Connecticut College, New London, CT
Ten New Talents, Avant Garde Gallery, New Haven, CT
Visions of the Sea, Rusty Scupper Gallery, Mystic, CT
Fall Show, The Artist's Co-op, Boston, MA
Fort Point Channel Open House, Boston, MA
About Cambridge, The Cambridge Art
Association, Cambridge, MA
Christmas in Connecticut, Woodstock Public
Library, Woodstock, CT
Include the dates of the shows at the end of each line, or even at the beginning if you had one recently and there's a nice chronological flow after that. If these dates are old or you can't remember a date for each exhibition, leave the dates out.
Collections. This should be another linear list. Write down all the private individuals, organizations, and institutions owning one or more pieces of your artwork. It doesn't matter whether they bought the art from you or from someone else, whether you gave it to them as a gift, or whether they received it as stolen property. If they acquired your work and still own it, they go on a list of collections of which you are a part. You can edit this list later if appropriate. (Note: Avoid too many surnames on your roll that are the same as your own. You don't want it to look like only members of your family can stomach your artwork.) Here's an example:
Collections
Biotron Corporation, Inc., Woburn, MA
Bay Bank, Boston, MA
Marriot Hotel, Newton, MA
The Lexington Press, Lexington, MA
Wad sworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT
Yale University, New Haven, CT
Town Hall, Woodstock, CT
The Pomfret School, Pomfret, CT
Mr. & Mrs. Local Art Collectors, Woodstock, CT
Dr. & Mrs. General Practitioner, Woodstock, CT
Mr. & Mrs. Artist's Rich Uncle and Aunt
A number of consultants believe this list should include only museums, corporations, institutions, organizations, and big-name individuals. I think if you're going to be selling to ordinary people some of the time, it can be reassuring to them to see other such names among your collectors — though the big names give them buying confidence by showing that people in the know bought before they did.
Articles and Reviews. This is a list of publications, including catalogs, in which your work is mentioned or reviewed. Include the title of the publication, title of the article, the author's name, and date. Photocopies of actual clippings can be included later in your final marketing package.
Publications. This includes all books, articles, or reviews you've written. For each listing, include the title, publisher, location, and date. If you wrote and published something like Megatrends, or you're the regular art critic for a well-known newspaper or magazine, you might want to place these closer to the top of your resume.
Lectures and Appearances. If you've given lectures aside from those in a regular teaching position, list these according to the name of the organization or other location, what they were about, where, and when. These items show you're serious about your art and that other people think so, too. If you've been on television, radio, or in a video, list these here and include where, when, and what it was about. These show you're promotionally minded.
Commissions. These are contract jobs where you've been commissioned (hired) to create some work of art, such as a public sculpture for the park or mural for a corporate cafeteria. Here you should name each project, medium, client, place, and date. You may include volunteer projects under the heading, too. For example, maybe you helped make one of those quilts that stretch across the country. If so, this is worth mentioning. This will be especially important to mention if your volunteerism relates to what you're doing now — if, for example, your artwork is now large in size or you're a textile artist.
Jobs in the Art Field. This should include only jobs that relate to your development as an artist, from summer jobs and Christmas help to fully-realized professions. Teaching art is probably the best job to list. But if you've worked in the art department of an advertising agency, a design studio, or an in-house graphics department, that's OK. The fine-arts crowd tends to look down their noses at these commercial debasements of art, but if you can be convincing about how they contributed to your particular artistic development, like Warhol, you may include them. James Rosenquist, painter of mural-sized Pop Art works, was a billboard painter.
Education. Recent college graduates put their degrees right up top. It's a dead giveaway they don't have much else going on, and graduating college is the biggest thing they've done. Putting it later highlights that you've had achievements in the art world since graduation. And if you don't have a lot of formal education, it's best buried near the end, too. Gallery owners and other art professionals are often well educated and are more comfortable dealing with people like themselves. And whatever lip service they might pay to "natural talent" and "primitives," they really believe that more sophisticated people create better art.
Any degrees are good, but the BFA is the one gallery owners and collectors long to see. An MFA is even better. A degree in art shows you're serious about it and have been all along. (They like consistency.) If you don't have a degree in art, that's OK. Many successful artists, like Winslow Homer, were mostly self-taught. Mention any college or high school courses of note here, also.
If you don't have a degree in art and, for that matter, even if you do and have studied further, list courses, workshops, art colonies, seminars, tutoring, lessons, or independent study work as well. Also, name any instructors of note. Put a positive spin on these activities. If all you can think of is arts and crafts at summer camp, maybe it would be fair to describe it as a workshop or even tutoring. Keep in mind that everything in your resume must be true. Describe briefly what you did in these courses. Make it sound rigorous, serious, and special. (Notice how many of these items relate to the biography section, and vice versa. This is the way it should be. When you get one perfected, use it to improve the other.)
Memberships. Include all the arts organizations to which you belong. Be sure to include any volunteer activities or positions held. (See Strategy 3 for more details.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Make Money as an Artist by Sean Moore. Copyright © 2000 Sean Moore. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,1 Create a Winning Marketing Package,
2 Get a Gallery,
3 Join Art Clubs, Associations, and Organizations,
4 Get Into Juried Shows,
5 Advertise for Free or Very Cheaply,
6 Get An Art Representative to Work For You,
7 Making Prints and Other Ways to Leverage Your Work,
Conclusion,
Marketing Resources for the Fine Artist,
Index,