If you want to be successful, you have to not only be an impressive artist but also an innovative entrepreneur, treating your work as a small business. At the second annual Arts Business Summit April 6–7 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working artists will take a deep dive into the business side of their career practice as a visual artist.…
Anjali Srinivasan was first seduced by the medium of hot glass during an internship at a crystal company as part of her formal education at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, a design school in Delhi. Drawn to the “magical, fluid, molten glow of glass,” she went on to study glass and digital media at Rhode Island School of Design…
No matter your artistic vision, preferred subject matter and style, when it comes to hanging your art in a booth at an art show, less is more. Conventional wisdom might suggest that the more artwork you display, the more likely you are to make a sale; however, the opposite can be true. Hanging too many pieces on the walls or…
Have patience with all things unresolved and learn to love the questions themselves. – Rainier Maria Rilke Artists are endlessly curious. But in life, we spend a lot of our time running away from questions. We want to know everything right now. Yet it’s only by following the questions that we find where the true answers lie. Artists are often…
When I was in college, I had a favorite professor, who taught art history. He’d started out as a photographer, a career that had been his lifelong dream since mixing his own chemicals in a makeshift darkroom under his parents’ stairway. As a young man, he’d had an opportunity to show his portfolio to an established and highly celebrated photographer…
Artists struggle with self-confidence all the time. Do you? Seriously, as an artist, you are putting the most personal and vulnerable parts of yourself forward. Everybody has an opinion on your work and thinks they know better—and it’s easy to listen to them. It’s certainly much easier than keeping the faith. I know a photographer who recently showed his work…
Kris Gebhardt, a mixed-media impressionist painter, is adrenalized because he and his wife, Angela—who is an abstract artist in her own right, as well as Kris’s business partner—are front-row spectators as the stale, over-sanctioned industry of last century collides with the vibrating new way to buy and sell art. Like today’s authors who write and sell books without publishers, or…
“I used to have a band,” he told me. He had played lead guitar and sang. It was the 1980s, and he worked hard, touring the country and gaining a small following. But he never broke through. When he turned 30, he got a chance to play one of the biggest music festivals in Great Britain. His brother ran the…
Art is more than just pretty pictures. The best art explores ideas, and ideas need time to develop and to grow. In fact, they demand it. Respect the process and give yourself permission to take time for your work. Schedule it—or, better yet, make it a part of your daily routine. Each day I take an hour or so to…
Any artist worth his or her salt is part of a larger arts community. Other artists are not your competition; other artists are your colleagues—and, I think you’ll find, your best friends. I once lived in a town with lots of artists but no community. Everyone worked in their own frustrated little bubble. I tried to begin a monthly get-together,…
