Helping Artists: Learn to sell your art
Are you an artist? Creating art is a powerful, life-affirming, joyful way to express your innate human creativity. You may have put years of effort into developing your techniques. You feel happy when you are creating. Perhaps you are pleased with the new piece of work. (If you don’t like it or you aren’t pleased, it probably isn’t finished yet.)
Most of the time artists learn from other artists by taking a class. We see work that we love and we take a class from that artist to learn the technique. It isn’t that we want our work to look like their work. It IS that they are doing something we haven’t been able to do…or their work has a quality we would like to see in ours.
Why do artists feel like their art should sell itself, even when no one can see it?
Art that doesn’t leave the artist’s studio (where only the artist and friends enter) doesn’t have any opportunity to sell itself. It has NO prospective purchasers. But when nothing sells, the artist begins to feel rejected and to doubt the value of the work.
One of the great secrets in life is recognizing when you need help and graciously accepting it.
Do you need help?
Are you selling the art you create?
Or just wishing you could sell it?
Do you know how to price it?
Or have you been giving it away?
Selling anything is a business, intrinsically different from creating the items.
Selling requires a different set of skills and activities from creating.
Selling art is different from selling other types of items. Art appeals to the emotions more than the intellect. There is seldom a logical reason to buy a specific work of art.
If the prospective purchaser (potential collector) is not emotionally involved in the particular work, no sale will take place. (Unless, perhaps, the price is less than the price of a similar size manufactured item offered in a store.)
Most artists don’t know how to begin selling what they create.
They think a gallery provides the answer.
But they don’t know how to find a gallery.
Sometimes an artist will muster enough courage to load paintings in the car and take them to a gallery, unannounced. This artist will probably be turned away, without the opportunity to show the work.
Even if the gallery owner, or perhaps the gallery salesperson, is too kind to turn the artist away, and so agrees to view the work, there is NO CHANCE that the artist will be accepted into the gallery.
This is absolutely the wrong way to approach a gallery. It marks the artist as an amateur and proves that the artist doesn’t understand how to work with a gallery.
Are you willing to accept the help you need?
I teach a Business of Art class for artists. Most of the active artists in Houston are aware that I teach this class. Many of them have taken the class. Some have applied what I teach. Others have decided it is too difficult or too much trouble.
What value to you place on your success?
“We tend to minimize the things we can do, the goals we can accomplish, and for some equally strange reason we think other people can accomplish things that we cannot. I want you to understand that that is not true. You have deep reservoirs of talent and ability within you that you can bring to the surface and achieve all that you desire.“ ~Earl Nightingale
If you get the information so you know what to do, you can sell your art effectively, whether or not your work is in a gallery.
However, many artists just want to know how to get in a gallery. Although they consider this the ticket to success, they are unwilling to spend 3 hours of their time and $75 of their money to take my class, which teaches them multiple ways to sell their art.
Instead, they expect me to answer (for free) this one question for them when they encounter me at an event.
What value do you place on the information you need to sell your art yourself, pricing it right? Or to get in the right gallery? The more you know, the better your chance of success!
I am teaching my Business of Art class at Art Supply on Main on Saturday, August 1, 1-4 pm. To register for the class, call Art Supply at 713-652-5028 artsuply@swbell.net
To get details of the class, visit http://www.annbell.net/artbusinessclass.htm
If you cannot attend, but want to purchase the CDs, call me at 281-330-3827.
Ann Bell