Here at
FineArtViews, my favorite discussions involve art, marketing, inspiration and fine living. In practice, however, most of the discussions center around the specifics of
marketing art. There's a reason for that: You, dear artists, know how to
produce your art and since I'm not an artist, I can't really help you in the technique department anyway.
However, with my gallery background, I do know how to
market art. And that marketing knowledge is what I try to share with you.
Sometimes, however, the best marketing strategy, in the short term, is to simply do nothing and forget marketing altogether.
Let me explain.
Creative work takes energy...lots of it. Your primary job is to produce great art. Once you get into "the zone" or the state known as "flow", you will produce your best work. At that point, you should....no, you
must go with it: take advantage of that higher level of creativity and productivity, to the exclusion of other activities, including marketing.
That's actually what I've been doing for the last couple of months.
I consider myself a creative "code artist" who works in program code to produce web applications for artists . . . specifically our sister site,
FineArtStudioOnline. As I shared with you in early August, we've been revamping all of our systems and as we've been in the "programming zone," there hasn't been time or energy to continue a lot of our regular marketing activities.....including this newsletter.
Now some "marketing gurus" would take me to task for letting these marketing activities slide. After all, you've been promised a free almost daily newsletter, but haven't seen one for several weeks. I haven't even updated my blog! Oh no! But I think we've made the right choice, because now we have an even better product to offer you, our artist customers. (By the way, you can
click here to read about the improvements we've made to FineArtStudioOnline).
The good news is that we have now completed and tested all of our changes and are officially now restarting the FineArtViews newsletter, although I am considering lowering the frequency from daily to 2 or 3 times a week. So, for now, let's just say it will be "almost" daily.
The bottom line is that we all have an extremely limited amount of productive time. Since it will not always be possible for you to do everything you want, there will be times that you must sacrifice something for the greater good, at least in the short term.
I suggest that when faced with limited time,
make sure your art ALWAYS comes first. Sacrifice your marketing, your chores, or just about anything else but don't let your art suffer, after all, if you don't produce your very best artwork, you won't really have anything worth marketing anyway!
Sincerely,
Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic
PS - Your artistic talent is one of your unique gifts. You have a
responsibility to art collectors (like me), art lovers and the world to make the most of that ability. I shudder to think of a masterpiece being lost because an artist ignored a moment of inspiration and instead took care of "other responsibilities."
Nancy Leigh Hillis wrote:
I agree wholeheartedly with you. The most important thing for an artist is to get into the studio and make art. Master painters say: "cover yards and yards of canvas". <br />
<br />
The way to make contact with "the zone" of creativity is to get into the studio every day as well as to carry a drawing pad with you everywhere, so that when inspiration strikes, you can write it, draw it, think about it, and not lose the idea.
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