How Artists Can Sell To Tourists, Part 2

Artists can and should actively market to tourists. In the creative tourism model that I’m describing, individual artists and collections of artists dream up public, interactive experiences meant to reach tourists while local officials, local businesses, tourism...

How Artists Can Sell to Tourists, Part 1

Artists who hope to make money need customers. The tens of millions of tourists who travel annually comprise one category of customer. Some tourists come to a given locale like Santa Fe, Provincetown, or Carmel for the art; others include gallery hopping in a New...

When Your Gallery Owner Cools to You

Sometimes a marketplace player cools to us because we haven’t been selling well. This happens all the time. A gallery owner who loved your last suite of paintings is completely cold to your new paintings, even though in your estimation they are better, for no other...

Handling the Weight of Individuality

It is a creative person’s individuality that defines her. Most people are conventional and prize conformity; some people prize their individuality. Even if she trains herself to hold her tongue, an individual who prizes her individuality will already know as a young...

The Journey from Artistic Child to Retirement

It can prove a very long journey from artistic child to a genuine opportunity to pursue one’s art. Sometimes a whole “day job” or “raising family” work life intervenes and it is only during retirement that art making has a chance flourish. Here is one such story: “I...

What Sort of Art Child Were You?

How do you picture your childhood artistic life? Was art the place of sanity for you, the place where you got to remove yourself from the turmoil and the dramas around you and retreat into your imagination? Or do you think that your art-making activities isolated you...