A vicious circle. Now I'm uploading it, it looks quite restful. Reminds me of the sea

It’s been a while since my last post and the reason for that is the increasing pace of my Digital Arts MA. We’ll be putting up the final show in pretty much exactly one month. This raises one of the main problems we all face as artists. Time. There’s never enough of it. That’s reason one of why this post is called ‘The Vicious Circle’. I’m no expert on time management but one piece of advice I keep on hearing is that you should get the rubbish stuff in your day done first. I’m not a fan of that approach as it means I spend all of my time doing rubbish stuff. Disaster! So balance is required. As I say, I’m no expert on time management at all. Any hard earned wisdom here would be gratefully received, by myself and no doubt a few others.

The MA finishes in July and I’ll be let loose on the outside world for real. I’ve been thinking about art on an abstract and intellectual level for a long time and very soon I will have to think about art at the business and presentation end. I don’t think I can recall meeting one artist who has really relished this element of being an artist. One thing I’m waking up to is the clear fact that I need to be able to market myself.

Expanding on a theme I took up last post, this has led me to think more about the photographs I should be taking in order to sell. I’m really looking at using my photography as a complement to my more conceptual art and writing, using it to supplement my income and also get insights in to the nuts and bolts of the art scene on a more general level. This means I don’t mind taking photographs for the sake of selling, so long as I don’t actively dislike them. My heart and brain’s need for excitement and/or verbosity is covered in other areas. I can approach my photography relatively coldly, if it will help me to sell pictures.

I start pondering this, though. For one, is there a danger of chasing my tail, trying to figure out what will sell and, as a result, making work that doesn’t quite feel authentic? And also, I want to make photographs because I love taking photographs, not because I want to satisfy market criteria. This is an age-old issue for artists isn’t it? We all like to eat and have a roof over our heads and we’d all like to reach those ends doing something we love. At what point does that something we love become a chore? So we’re coming back to another kind of vicious circle. How are we going to shake the pesky little critter off?

The really basic questions I have to ask are: Am I selling for collectors or am I selling to people who want something to hang in their houses? What kind of art would I want to buy and why? One thing I learned at the Affordable Art Fair was that the most obvious ingredient of work that sells really well is that it’s pretty direct. There’s a clarity about it.

Thinking about it, I’m much more interested in making pictures for people who saw something in it that they wanted to spend a bit of quality time with. The whole art collectors scene doesn’t excite me. Looking further in to that, I need to ask some questions about what kind of work people want to put in their homes, and why. I could probably do a phd researching that question though! Is there a sweet spot where all of this dovetails?

One photographer I like a lot is a guy called Dave Beckerman. He has a section on his website dedicated to customer favourites. Looking at these is quite helpful. It’s inspiring and will no doubt help me next time I’m out taking pictures. My earlier point about clarity seems to stand up, too. Most of those photographs have really clear reference points and seem to know exactly what they’re about. Some of them are successful because they tell stories about the movements of people without having any people in them. Some of them simply have great geometry. This is quite a useful exercise, I think. I’d like to make a suggestion. If anyone knows of any similar pages (even on your own sites), could you please paste the link into the comments section below. It would be great to get a little overview of work that generally sells well, or what is currently in vogue.

Beyond that, I have questions. What do you think sells? Is there a formula? Or should we make the work we dream of making? Is there a middle road? I gather some of you are already on this roundabout of ‘making work to sell to enable one to make work…’ and have commented about it (Thanks! Comments are always good) How is that? Is it doable and do you have any tips?

A month or so ago I went to The Affordable Art Fair. I hadn’t been expecting to enjoy it. I’ve been to the fair before, and felt annoyed. About 60% of the work seemed to fit into a few categories. There were the flat colour paintings of dead rock stars, there were lots of paintings of the sea (I love the sea by the way. If you make sea paintings, I’m not taking a dig at you. Anyway, my website has tons of sea photographs), and there were even more abstract paintings that seemed to have been made in factories to a narrowly set process.

This year I was surprised, though. I enjoyed myself. Quite simply, there was more variety. The sea paintings were still out in force, but most of the work seemed to have been made by individual artists who were genuinely engaged with their work. So often at these places I get the feeling I’m looking at pieces that have been designed to match market criteria. That feels quite hollow. It’s difficult not to feel a bit depressed by that. This spectacle raises questions, however. Why do people paint on that basis? I guess the obvious answer is that they sell.

I’d like to make it absolutely clear right now that if you are such a painter (or art buyer), I don’t have any special gripe with you. The point of this blog is to look at ways of making a living as an artist. There’s a point where commercial realities have to collide with artistic idealism. How do we deal with that? Many of us will inevitably deal with it by making work we know we can sell. Which is fair enough, really.

In fact, maybe splitting your artistic output in half between commercial work and the things you really care for is a sensible path to take. Is anyone out there already doing this? How do you find it? Perhaps you even find the commercial work feeds in to your works of passion in unexpected ways.

At the fair, I saw three pieces or stands that caught my attention for different reasons. One was by an

Klari Reis sold well with her bright, simple and well realised works in resin and ink

artist called Klari Reis at the Cynthia Corbett Gallery, who made sets of resin discs with marbled pigments inside. Very simple, immediately eye catching and quite beautiful. It’s easy to see why they were doing well. I spoke to one of the gallery staff who told me she usually makes sets of a hundred and fifty discs and has installed them in people’s houses in many different ways: around corners, arranged around other household objects and so on. She also commented that Reis had reduced the number of discs to fifty to make them more affordable.

I then spoke to some people at theBill Philip gallery who told me a very wide angle photograph of Cowcross Street in the City in London had sold very well indeed. Most of the people who had bought it had either lived in or worked near the area. They had a personal connection with it.

Further on in to the fair I saw a photography stand run by the Drugstore Gallery. These guys were

Plenty of orange stickers here

doing very well. I felt there were quite simple reasons why too. The pictures that were selling well looked like they belonged in people’s homes, as part of people’s lives. I think the photograph of the pile of books is a great example here. When I spoke to Barry Cawston and Soraya Schofield, the photographers who ran the gallery, they told me a little more about the wide ranging interests that inform their work. In most of the photographs we talked about there was a strong sociological backdrop informing the content, with a particular emphasis on the visual impact of industrialisation on previously unspoilt and/or historically rich landscapes. I sometimes feel the work at these events can lack substance. It was good to see someone earning success with work that had another level.

Did anyone else go to the fair? Did you enjoy it?

I have another website called Hammerhead Rabbits that I use to air different experiments. It also houses the blog I write for the MA I’m currently doing in Digital Arts. My site on The Artists Web is intended as more of a commercial outlet. I want to use it specifically to press forward with my photography. I’ve loved taking photographs for a long time and would like to develop that by using them to supplement my other income. You might ask why I don’t do this on my other site. This is where the wider infrastructure of The Artists Web comes in. How can it help me in ways my individual website can’t?

Dan Fone - The Flat Sea

On the way I’ll build up a good list of the basic things that will raise our profile online and look to start getting consistent sales in the process. In short, I’ll be researching how to get the most out of the internet as an artist. I might be slow in getting started. At the moment I’m not too much better informed than anyone else.

I’m also planning on investigating a few other things on the side, which will feed into my wider project. I’ve got developing obsessions arising from my MA, mainly connected to the way the art scene will be affected by the internet; because of that I’ll be looking at how people sold work ten years ago in order to gauge the differences and the way we can take advantage of any changes in the industry.

I don’t want to offer bullet pointed advice here. You can already find that elsewhere on The Artists Web and at sites like the very comprehensive emptyeasel.com. I’ll be writing about the personal end of trying to get all of these different things working and possibly ranting my frustrations out here as well.

Dan Fone - Hillside 1

The first thing I ask myself is, what are the obstacles I face stopping me from selling my work? In my case, I think I’m my own worst enemy. I tend to be very timid regarding things I’ve done. I’m not saying this to beat myself up. I get the impression a lot of freelancers and artists have exactly the same problem. I think I’m going to have to keep an eye on this tendency. The only way I can see of addressing it it is that for every time I get shy about my photography, I must do something to overcome it. And pointedly. Does anyone here have similar problems? How have you dealt with it? Or are you reading this thinking you need to do something about it yourself? Whatever your viewpoint, I’d love to hear about it.

PS – if anyone has something they’d like to see looked at in more depth, do leave a comment below.