When you're training to be an artist, whether that's informal training (on your own or as part of a group) or more formal training (i.e. art school), there are things you need to find out in order to best plan your route from Point A (art as a hobby) to Point B (art as a career). I've come up with twelve questions to start with. There are probably many more questions but these are a few I thought of that are meant to at least get you going in the right direction.
If you've been reading these posts, you know I've answered the first of twelve questions in my last post. Here, we tackle question 2: "How long have you been selling your work professionally?"
The answer to this question can be stuck in the same mental box as the answer to the first question. The answer to the first question I proposed will give you an idea of how long this person has been doing art. The answer to this second question will tell you how long they've been SELLING art. Both questions are background questions. They are meant to orient you as the interviewer to the artist you're speaking to so you know how to weigh what they will share as they answer the rest of the questions. I don't mean this as a rude or "judgemental" exercise. I just mean that if someone has been marketing and selling their work for years, they will probably know more about how to market and sell artwork than someone doing it for eight months. Again, this is just to give you a way to know which answers (when you get conflicting answers from different artists) should be given more weight. That's all.
“…if I was depending entirely on the income from selling my paintings in galleries, I’d be a starving artist”
Personally, I've been selling my artwork for about 25 years now. I started selling in a gallery in Orlando, Florida (where I was living at the time) and it was a heady thing realizing people would actually part with their money in order to purchase one of my paintings. It was awesome. In the beginning, my questions were all about how to get into another gallery. I'll talk more about that later, but I've learned that if I was depending entirely on the income I get from selling my paintings in galleries, I'd be a starving artist. Galleries are helpful because they give you "vacation money" (extra funds you can just look at as fun money) but there are other outlets to tap into for more of a steady income stream. Again, more on that in answer to a later question. For now, just know that getting into a gallery was where I started, and the day I was told they wanted to represent me at the gallery was truly an amazing and exciting day. That's a good start but...it was not the end. More on that to come.
