Over the past couple years I have been working on various art projects. I am a decent print maker, and I have gotten pretty good with oil and soft pastels. My photography is pretty good as well, but has stagnated some. I have completed enough projects to recognize that I do have the potential to make some good art. Yesterday I decided that I want to be a good artist...at least known locally as an artist. Even more, I want to be able to make art that is good enough to sell. I don't want to sell my art to make money (although the money will be nice), but because I have noticed that most people are very complimentary whenever I show them any of my art, however no one has ever asked me to buy any of my art (with the exception of a couple of my photos which were sold at the cost of having them printed). In short, I think the true measure as to whether I am producing good art is when people are willing to actually give me money to hang the art in their house. Compliments are nice, but if people do not want my art enough to actually pay money to own it, then my art is really not that good.
As I decided yesterday that I want to really start taking my art seriously, I also decided that I needed to find a way to hold myself responsible for making art frequently. Work is very busy right now, and I don't have a lot of down time. I have noticed that when I do have down time, I read art books, but rarely actually work on any projects. I have a huge list of art project ideas, but are not checking any of them off the list as attempted. Having this growing list of art projects is starting to get in the way. I'm all over the place as to what I want to try, and start thinking of something new before I get a chance to try what has already been added to the list. This is part of the reason I am starting this blog. I plan to document my journey to make art worth selling. As a means to hold myself responsible, I will write something each day in this blog. It might end up being a description of projects as I am working on them. It might be a list of ideas. It might end up being posts about the business side of things. But the point is that I will be doing something art related everyday, even if it is just writing in this blog.
Finally, I have decided to thrown away the list of projects I have been keeping and concentrate on painting. There is simply no money in photography anymore. In the world of art, original paintings are the way to go when it comes to selling. No one in the world will argue that painting is not a form of art, and the vast majority of people out there would rather pay for a painting than to try and learn how to paint. I tried painting a couple summers ago, but quickly gave up. Luckily I did keep a journal of my attempts, including the small paintings I completed. At the time I felt they were complete trash (which is why I gave up). I looked at the journal a couple weeks ago. The paintings were better than I remembered, but more importantly, there was obvious positive progress from painting to painting. I could clearly see what I had been trying to improve upon with each painting. Someday I'll get back to print making, but that is going to have to wait until I'm living somewhere with more space as print making requires a couple large tables and places to put things like my drying rack. So painting it is. I know I have the ability to paint. I have the room to paint. Paintings sell (or at least have a better potential to sell).
Tomorrow I'm going to talk about the style of painting I would like too do, but here is the artist I think most closely produces the style I want to create:
https://www.erinhanson.com/portfolio
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