Dennis Brady Studios

Marketing your art is at least 80% of what makes an artist successful.  I know a bunch of extremely talented artists that probably will always fall into the "starving artist" category.  Brilliant composition and color use, strong presentation of what they are trying to convey they're art means to them and most importantly very saleable.  The reason these artists fail (monetarily speaking anyway) is that they don't or won't, market themselves.

Beautiful artwork sitting in their studio probably won't get seen by potential buyers.  No matter how fabulous the piece is, it if isn't seen it isn't sold.  Google the term "art marketing" and you could spend months going through the links exposing the secrets to becoming a successful artist.  "How to get gallery owners to beg you to show with them."  "How in 15 minutes you can build a website that will have buyers flooding your PayPal account with enough income to support yourself."  "How to paint yourself to a fortune."  These are real sites trying to make you believe it's easy to make a living as an artist.  The problem as I see it is that 99.9% of these so called "art marketing gurus" are just scammers.  Or at very least they are using obsolete techniques that won't work in today's market.

Let me save you some time.  Want to make it as an artist?  Take your art to where the buyers are.  Simple isn't it?  I'm not saying you can't make money showing in galleries, you can, but most don't.  You can also make art dollars online and in fact, if you aren't willing to join this social revolution and promote yourself through places like Twitter, FaceBook and your own blog, you'll be missing one of the greatest ways to promote your art ever invented.  The problem here is that you most likely won't take the time to embrace these new social media communication companies.  "I don't use computers, I'm a painter."  I don't have the time to spend hanging out on FaceBook, I need to be in the studio not on my computer."  I could go on and on with these outdated excuses why artists are not embracing these new tools, but the bottom line is that these all take time and especially if you're not computer literate, seem so foreign to you that you'd rather dis them than use them.

Hit the art festival circuit (another hardass way to market your art) open up a Twitter, FaceBook and blog account, use them all and stop complaining on why you can't make it as an artist.  Sorry, sometimes the truth hurts.