A drawing of my granddaughter on her first birthday. I gave her a pink ruffled bonnet, and she spent the next few minutes trying to get it off. I did manage a few photos before she succeeded. I followed this drawing up with an oil painting, but failed to take a photo of it before it got away from me.
“It takes money to make money.” You’ve probably heard this saying all of your life, and it’s true; even in the blogosphere. To get your blog noticed, you sometimes have to join a site and pay for more publicity. To get your art noticed, you have to enter contests, join web sites, and definitely paint something unique and different.
Canvases cost, paint costs, and all the mediums and additives that create beauty are going up in cost. As artists, we’re also competing with reproductions, and warehouse artwork where a photographic print is spruced up with some dashes of oil paint to give it the illusion of an original oil painting. The cost: $45 to $75 compared to an original work of art anywhere from $300 to $1,000. Given this economy, which would you buy?
Still it’s in our bones, our guts. To stop painting would be to deny that “high” we get when paint flows, artistic vision meets reality and magic happens. This rush of passion and emotion is what keeps an artist painting even when demand is dried up. If we’re lucky, someone will like what we do. We may win a juried contest. A collector may see our potential and the money reverses from outlay to income.
In the meantime, we stack our paintings in closets, under beds, in a few stores and hotels who will have us and hope for the best. If we sell a few prints or cards, we feel lucky.
Carol, I love the drawing! And yes, the hat does make her look suitably chubby!
ReplyDeleteThe rest of your post links in very well with the documentary I saw on Sunday on TV about the life of Van Gogh, told through his own words in his letters to Theo. Sad though his life was, there was much there to keep us going in spite of all the difficulties!
That's so true!! The sketches you do are very real...from life, it's etched! That's what I really liked here...And join me in too to one of those clubs who work on creating art for stowing it beneath our beds!!;)
ReplyDeleteThank you, friends! Judy, I watched that same PBS presentation of Van Gogh. I thought it was marvelous. Sadly, he never knew in life how wonderful he was.
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