We have another post today by Eugene Terekhin, the man and the mind behind the publication Philosophy of Language.

Eugene is a regular contributing writer to The FASO Way.

This article will be locked in two days for paying members only.

Feature Article:

When the Artist Vanishes, Art Appears

What surprises me the most about great people is that they are usually unaware that they are great.

I remember watching an interview with J.R.R. Tolkien about The Lord of the Rings and thinking, “Goodness, he looks, behaves, and speaks just like my grandfather.”

There wasn’t the slightest hint of pretense, not a trace of, “I am the author of the greatest book of the twentieth century.”

He was simply a man who had seen something and wanted to share it with others, thereby deepening his own joy.

True artists aren’t necessarily aware of what they are doing.

As Rupert Sheldrake says in one of his interviews, when you look at ancient cave paintings, you don’t think, “What a great artist!”

Instead, you think, “Whoever painted this buffalo being chased by hunters truly captured the spirit of the hunt.”

Above all, cave paintings invite us to enter the scene, not to admire the artist.

According to Rupert Sheldrake, somewhere during the Renaissance, a shift happened in our understanding of what art is.

Ancient art was not about the artist. It was not about a separate individual depicting objective scenes from life while remaining a detached observer.

It was about expressing the experience of being one with the Spirit embodied in the painting. It invited the viewer to participate in something greater than themselves.

Great art calls us to participate in the greatness it depicts.

Poor art is all about the skill of the artist.

As Rupert Sheldrake points out, when you walk through the halls of the British Museum, you hear people admiring the artists but rarely worshiping the sacred.

They speak of exquisite technique, masterful composition, brilliant color, and distinctive style, yet rarely—if ever—do you see them dance with the Muses.

Modern consciousness simply does not allow for that. Somewhere in the distant part, a chasm was fixed between the observer and the observed. A chasm of non-participation.

As a result, we no longer experience a painting as a doorway into a temple where we join the dance of the Muses by dancing with them. We simply observe from the outside and comment on the technical excellence of the piece.

In true art, the artist isn’t aware that they are doing art. The word “art” itself comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *ar-, which means “to fit together,” “harmonize.”

In fact, the word “harmonize” comes from the same ancient root – *ar.

The artist is a harmonizer—someone who catches and expresses harmonies between heaven and earth.

They are not pursuing self-expression. The self is too small to draw art out of us. The artist pursues the dance of the invisible Spirit behind the Alpine meadows, mountains, rivers, and faces they portray.

Therefore, when we see their art, we perceive the harmony between heaven and earth, and we are moved to worship: take off our hats, take off our shoes, fall into silent meditation. We write a poem, sing a song, weep, or, like King David, dance the dance of joy before the Ark of God.

True museums are temples – places where you engage with the sacred, experience harmony between heaven and earth, and perform some form of joyous dance before the Revelation of Divine Presence.

PS — Note from Clint: One of the reasons I built FASO is because I believe art is important, artists are important, and the work you’re called to create deserves to be taken seriously. We are all sharing “miracles of existence” through our art.

Yes, at FASO, we build professional artist websites. Yes, we talk about marketing. Yes, we give artists tools to present their work, tell their stories, reach collectors, and sell more art.

But that is the how.

The why is that we love art, and we want to push back against a world that too often treats art like content and artists like algorithms. The modern world denigrates Beauty in preference of profit and efficiency. At FASO, we hold Beauty sacred.

So we don’t just host artist websites. We promote artists. We feature their work. We try, in our own small way, to help more art find the people who need it. And that informs everything we do and build.

If that resonates with you, we’d be honored to have you join us.

Get Started with FASO for Free

PPS — If you’re not ready to look at FASO, you can support our mission by simply clicking the heart icon at the top or bottom of this article. That helps us reach more artists and art lovers and helps us spread Beauty to a world that is desperate for it.
—Clint

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To start off the season, we sat down with fine artist and former software developer Maureen Dunlap. Maureen shares how a childhood immersed in traditional oil painting, guided by mentor Arthur Maynard, eventually wound its way through typography, photo typesetting, and front-end development before circling back to a full-time art career. Maureen talks about rebuilding her painting practice after years away, moving from fast alla prima pieces to highly detailed, indirect paintings that draw on Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Pre-Raphaelite, and Baroque influences. She describes her richly layered seascapes, lace-draped still lifes, and narrative figurative works that often live in ornate vintage or trompe l’oeil frames, all infused with her whimsical titles and maximalist sensibility. Maureen also opens up about the realities of being a full-time artist later in life, balancing joy and financial stability, diversifying income with small works and jewelry, navigating social media and online sales, and her growing desire to teach the next generation of painters.

Maureen’s FASO site:
maureendunlap.com/

Maureen’s Social Media:
facebook.com/profile.php?id=100083217888057
instagram.com/maureenjdunlap

Maureen’s Jewelry Store:
instagram.com/the.wonder.cabinet

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Transcript:

Maureen Dunlap: 0:00

You have to set yourself apart in some way, because there you’re right now, you’re like a drop in the ocean of artists. You look, just look on Instagram, but yeah, I mean, I love the academic style, but there’s a lot of people doing it, but you got to make yours different. I like to make mine somewhat different in some way, so you got to figure that out.

Laura Arango Baier: 0:27

Welcome to the FASO podcast, where we believe that Fortune favors a bold brush. My name is Laura Baier, and I’m your host. For those of you who are new to the podcast, we are a podcast that covers art marketing techniques and all sorts of business tips, specifically to help artists learn to better sell their work. We interview artists at all stages of their careers, as well as others who are in careers tied to the art world, in order to hear their advice and insights. To start off the season, we sat down with fine artist and former software developer Maureen Dunlap. Maureen shares how a childhood immersed in traditional oil painting, guided by mentor Arthur Maynard eventually wound its way through typography, phototypesetting, and front-end development before circling back to a full-time art career. Maureen talks about rebuilding her painting practice after years away, moving from fast alla prima pieces to highly detailed indirect paintings that draw on Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Pre-Raphaelite, and Baroque influences, she describes her richly layered seascapes, lace-draped still lives, and narrative figurative works that often live in ornate vintage or trompe l’oeil frames, all infused with her whimsical titles and maximalist sensibility. Maureen also opens up about the realities of being a full-time artist later in life, balancing joy and financial stability, diversifying income with small works and jewelry, navigating social media and online sales, and her growing desire to teach the next generation of painters, reminding us all to set yourself apart as an artist. Finally, Maureen tells us about her upcoming group show in the main hallway of Golden Belt Arts in Durham, North Carolina, running October through December. Welcome, Maureen, to the FASO podcast. How are you today?

Maureen Dunlap: 2:06

I’m very good. Thank you very much for having me.

Laura Arango Baier: 2:09

Yeah, I’m excited to have you, because the first thing, of course, that I notice when I see your work is how absolutely gorgeous it is. I love your reinterpretation of that Art Nouveau style, and just, it just feels like you have a very whimsical personality.

Maureen Dunlap: 2:26

I do. My friends will tell you that,

Laura Arango Baier: 2:29

yeah. And I love that so much. So, I’m excited to talk to you about that, because maybe there’s someone out there who feels a little bit shy, and it’s okay to be whimsical. It’s totally okay to be whimsical. Oh, yeah, let it out in your work, because you know there’s more to life. Be free, but yeah, so before we talk more about your gorgeous work, do you mind telling us a bit more about who you are and what you do?

Maureen Dunlap: 2:53

Okay, well, first I was an artist at age 10, then I became a mom, then I became a software developer, then an artist and crafter. So, those are the steps. There was a period in my life of maybe 15 years when I didn’t even pick up a brush, but yeah, so that was a little challenging. I like you said, I like to be whimsical. I have a good sense of humor. I usually let it out at the most inappropriate times, and I really enjoy doing that with when I name my paintings. I try to think of something different to name them, you know, just you have to try to set yourself apart, you know. So, anyway, yeah, I can. I’ll do that. I’ll show you some of my work, because I have my iPad. I can reverse it and show you around the room. I’m in my studio right now. Let’s see, so I began my journey when, like I said, I was 10 years old. My mother sent me to book - I lived in New Jersey. She took me to the Ridgewood Art Association, which is now called the Ridgewood Art Institute, and I started taking young people’s lessons, mostly learning still life, learning how to use oil paints, and they had a very set curriculum or methodology of teaching art, because the founder of the Art Institute Art Association at the time, it was called the Barn, because it was actually in a big barn, and the upstairs of the barn had, you know, the gabled roof, and also skylights on the north side, so my that man that started it, his name was Arthur Maynard, he later became my teacher, as when I was a young. Adult after high school, he studied with Frank Vincent Du Monde of the Art Institute of the Art Students League in New York, so truly prestigious guy, but he basically taught me everything I know. His main focus was not how to paint, but why, like, why are we painting something a certain way? He was a big proponent of natural light, prismatic palette. He would basically talk about the way light hits an object, and why it looks a certain way. In other words, you’re not painting this apple, you’re painting the light that’s hitting the apple. And it was very, very scientific in a way, which I, it appealed to me. So I started, you know, doing a lot of still lifes, and also a lot of portraits when I became, you know, a teenager, and after high school I studied there for three years before moving on to art, art school, college, and during those three years it was portraits, how to do portraits, and I became a portrait painter. I really enjoyed doing that. I still love doing portraits, and I became pretty good at it. I mean, I was able to start doing commissions in my 20s, so you know that was fun. It was.. I started thinking, like, why doesn’t everybody do this? This is like really easy for me, because I already know the scientific reason for why things look a certain way. I know that you know there’s more blood in the nose and the and the cheeks than there is in the chin and the forehead. I mean, there’s this all this stuff that’s so interesting. So then I went to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which is in Philadelphia, and when I got there, it started out very classical. We would, we didn’t even start painting the first semester, it was cast drawing, going into these rooms full of these statues and trying to draw those exactly right, but when it came to painting, they would just put up a model and turn on all the fluorescent lights. I was horrified. I’m like, what? What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Nobody said anything. I was like, nobody’s noticing this. No, I was just like in my own world there. So you’re like, okay, I’ll do my best, and that became a challenge, and then during critiques, the teachers were just not interested in teaching traditional painting, they, it was the age of abstract expressionism, this is back in the 70s and so I kind of got disillusioned there and decided I need to go get some other skills where I can get a job. There was the Art Institute of Philadelphia, right down the street from where the academy was, and I enrolled there for illustration, typography, graphic design, layout, all those kind of things that were used, like in print shops and magazines, newspapers, things that you know is also creative, and I thought this is fine. I mean, I can still paint my own stuff in my own way, but I can also get a job. So, I did do that. I became actually a photo typesetter back in that day, that it was before, you know, WYSIWYG, and you know, the internet was even, was not even there, and so I was learning typesetting at the time was a ginormous machine, the size of the room, and a black, a black screen, no WYSIWYG, it was like typing in code, and I thought, oh, this is cool, because I always like puzzles, I like, you know, anything that you could have to try to figure out, and those typesetting machines were really complex, as far as they had a lot of keys on the keyboard for letting secondary leading style justification, all this stuff, and you had to type the code, and when it prints out, you say, “Okay, I did something wrong here, and you go back and fix the code. So that became the impetus for me in the 90s to learn how to code for the internet. I thought, “This is a piece of cake, because I was looking at those, the internet code, the HTML. Yeah, and I thought this is so easy. I started my own little web design business at that time. I had kids, and I thought, you know, I’m really going like in a totally different direction here, but it’s still kind of similar. It’s adjacent to what I like to do, but I like doing that too. So, eventually I got better at doing that. Cut to the year 2000 I got hired at Cisco Systems here in North Carolina to work on their intranet, and that was like a huge experience, a huge company with a lot of people and very complex systems, and that was a challenge again, another big challenge. So that I stayed there for 11 years, and then there was a layoff, because you know, you always get caught up in these layoffs, so I had to go to another small company, and after that it was like two or three small companies, which were really sweet and nice and comfortable with like five or six people in the company, you know. I love that, as opposed to 70,000 people worldwide, so I got hired as a front-end developer, which is basically writing code on the back end to make the front end look good. So, in other words, it’s like making art on the front of a computer. Another very complicated, not too complicated, really, but very creative endeavor. so all in all, I was doing that kind of work for about 20 years, and then in 2018 I get laid off from my final company, and I was already like 65 or 63 something like that, and my boyfriend and I took a trip to Europe for a couple weeks, when I came back, suddenly Covid hit, so I thought, well, I’ll just go in my spare bedroom at home and paint, got nothing else to do, I joined Daily Paint Works. I sold a bunch of little tiny, you know, ocean paintings. I started doing my own still lifes. I would.. I didn’t have a good window. Let me take a drink, so I would set up these still lives and buy a bunch of silk flowers, because I, we didn’t have any real flowers, and I didn’t want to, you know, you can reuse the silk flowers and just paint them to look real, so I would do that, and then I would take that photo and bring it into a photo editing app on my computer because I’m very tech savvy now, and like, if I had two or three peonies, I could copy and paste and make seven or eight peonies, so I could do a background of something that wasn’t really there, and I, you know, a shadow, and I would just really compose the picture pixel perfect, and then use that as my reference for a bunch of my still lifes. And about that time I did sign up with FASO, and I actually started selling my work. I don’t know how people found me, but they would, few people like out in Colorado and around the country would purchase these flower paintings, and I also had a bunch of friends on Facebook that became a very good selling opportunity for me, because I’m just post my paintings and I’d get these messages, how much do you want for it, and I’d sell it, sell those paintings. So I think this is awesome, but I kind of got tired of being in my own little room, and so I had found out about this studio space that I, where I work now, which is Golden Belt Arts, and it’s in Durham, North Carolina, in the downtown area, and we have 25 different art studios, most of them are this size, which is 12 by 12, not very big, but still you’re working with other artists, but even though that’s the case, they didn’t have very many people here because of Covid, so they were just like a skeleton crew, kind of, and I felt like safe there, because there’s hardly anyone here. I’m in my own little room, everybody was trying to like prevent from getting COVID, COVID, and so there was this place has a lot of a few studios that are the prime studios with skylights and a. Been tops, and there there was one available, and I was able to move into this one. Now that’s, you know, it’s all different now. People like battling to get these, and I was really lucky that that happened at that time. So, anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this long rambling question that you asked me, but basically that’s where I am now. As far as the my style, I kind of got a little tired of the flower paint, not tired, but I wanted to do something else, and I began to do a lot of seascapes, ocean paintings, you might have seen them on my website. I sold so many of those, and I just.. I really wanted to make it so realistic that the person felt like they were in the water, so I would find these pictures online of ocean waves with, like, the sun coming through the water, and I just really ham it up with my paintings, and I wanted, you know, usually didn’t put a beach, I would put it like just the wave, and those I had hosts, my whole studio was full of waves at that time, so that was that was a fun period for me. Then I decided, let me try something else, and I thought, what is it that will set me apart? What can I do that other people aren’t doing? I mean, that’s that’s a challenge for artists that are trying to promote their work. I can still do still lifes, and I do. I started getting portrait commissions, which are really excellent, but I thought, let me, let me back up a little bit. When I first came in here and started oil painting again, I was really rusty at first, after years and years of not painting, and the paintings were just not good. I’m like, oh my god, I’ve lost my touch. So I took me a little while, eventually I was back on the saddle, as they say, and I realized that when I was first taught to paint, we would always paint all of Prima, and I love that style - it’s fresh and easy, and just really can be very beautiful. However, I ended up accumulating a lot of work because I was fast, and I could do a painting a day, and I thought, this is this is not sustainable, because I got to buy more canvas, more paint. Let me slow down, see how far can I take it. And I started doing research about indirect painting, doing it under painting, doing, you know, the next layer, the next layer, and I thought, okay, this is something new and different, and I decided to challenge myself to see how far can I take a painting, like I can do this vase on a tablecloth with the flowers, but let me put a lace tablecloth and really try to get into those details, and I’ve just decided this is this is it. I’m in the zone. I could be here all day, and it would just be so much fun trying to make everything picture perfect. And people started really commenting, like, “Wow, you know, they’ll come in here and say everything just pops, the colors, and that that’s because I, I try to first of all, I use the full value range, I stay in the middle range at first, you know, block in with just a very mid tone of everything, then you know, I started adding more darks and more lights, and just building out the form the way I was taught by Arthur Maynard, and I would start putting in really, really dark darks and really bright brights, and see, and the colors, I said, how intense can I make this red dress, or this, whatever the color was, and so I would push it as high as I could to really make it like a form, so it’s the contrast and the vibrancy of the colors that really makes things pop, and I have to explain that some people, they say, “How do you do it? How do you do it? Well, it’s not that hard. It’s just you got to get out of that middle zone. I see a lot of painting painters that I feel like they’re kind of afraid to use black on their palette, which a lot of people say, “Oh, never use black on. Palette, but that’s like one of my main colors to make something go back and make something come forward, and that’s for indoor paint, not for outdoors, because when you go back, you have to do gray things out, but so that’s it, and I started deciding I love these nostalgic art movements, like Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Mookup, Maxfield Parish, Sargent, and the Baroque period, where it was all this gold stuff, the Pre-Raphaelites. I mean, I just started taking ideas from those things, and that’s that’s been a big, very popular thing for me. I try to find these ornate picture frames to go with them. That’s really hard to find, but I, you know, I find some of them on Facebook Marketplace, which usually they’re mirrors. I have to knock the mirror out and take the frame, but yeah, people comment on that all the time, like those frames. I love the frame, so I’ve just loved this environment. I’m a maximalist, I’m not a minimalist person. My house is like that too, you know? I overdo everything. It’s like, why do when you can overdo? Right. In fact, one of my paintings is called Too Much Is Never Enough. I just have fun with it. This, I’m starting a new series right now, which is based on the Pre-Raphaelites. It’s, it’s a series of four paintings, and it’s going to be the women doing serene activities, like reading a book, and it’s all with a lot of flowers around it, and of course, I like to do flowers too, to do people, so that’s kind of a thing I’m working on. I, I did one series a couple years ago of based on Mooka. I did my own interpretation of like the four seasons, so I did a winter one, which was basically the Snow Queen, and then spring, summer, fall, and I had all four of them in a grid on my wall, and somebody bought all four of them. That was like my biggest.. I was like, oh my god, I was so excited. So I really liked the idea of having one painting talk to the next and creating an environment like that,

Laura Arango Baier: 22:44

yeah, yeah, and that can happen where someone sees the set and they’re like, I can’t separate the set, that would be awful, you got to take all of them, you know, girls got to stay together, yes, they have to stick together, yeah, and then you mentioned, you know, when you got back into painting, and you said that you know it’s kind of tough at first, because you kind of, you know, we’re rusty. What, what, what’s something you did that really helped you get back into the zone?

Maureen Dunlap: 23:12

I made a lot of mistakes, a lot of bad paintings, started really focusing on my compositions better. and again slowing down, because the first pass of a painting can look horrible. I mean, you know, you can, you can block in a painting, and it, and a lot of people think, well, that’s it. I guess I’m not a good painter, because it looks like a kid did this well. Yes, it does, but that’s you got to have that under layer, that’s your under painting. So you pretty much, I mean, if you have decent composition, you can save a lot of, a lot of work that you think is no good.

Laura Arango Baier: 23:56

Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, and I have struggled with that too, where it’s like you have like four things down, it’s like this is the worst thing I’ve ever

Maureen Dunlap: 24:05

done. I know,

Laura Arango Baier: 24:06

yeah, because you haven’t finished, right? You haven’t developed it exactly. I like that you mentioned that, because that also invites a little bit more of like empathy with yourself and slowing down that hyper criticism, which is something that most artists tend to have, we tend to be very, very critical of our work. We tend to hold ourselves to, like, a standard that’s like so extreme that sometimes I’m like, who even reaches that standard? I know, and

Maureen Dunlap: 24:32

it’s like, can I save this? I want to have this painting done, but what do I have to do? You know, you really have to contemplate it. Sometimes you put it down for a while, start something else.

Laura Arango Baier: 24:42

Yeah, yeah, and be kind to yourself about it too, because it’s not worth breaking yourself down, because then you’re not going to want to paint ever again. And even,

Maureen Dunlap: 24:50

you know, some paintings that I have spent a lot of time on, still I don’t like them, so doesn’t happen that often, but you know, you don’t, you don’t have. Do every one of them be not everyone’s going to be a masterpiece.

Laura Arango Baier: 25:04

Yes, yeah, and that’s that’s the reality, I think. A lot of painters, majority of painters, have like the either a burn pile or, you know, paintings that we set aside to look at later to see if they can recycle the canvas or maybe continue on it, because those are some options, but yeah, then I wanted to ask you also, since you did software development, is there anything specific from software development, like maybe like the procedure that you did, or anything that you find yourself kind of reflecting a bit when you work on your creative work, or is it totally different, is there? Like, no, it’s not

Maureen Dunlap: 25:42

totally different. The coding, of course, probably doesn’t really translate, but I did also do quite a bit of like photo editing, video editing, so in that respect, you know, social media, of course, the bane of everyone’s existence, trying to, trying to, you know, have, find the time to make these reels and these photos, so for me that’s once I do get into doing that, I really enjoy that too, like I’ll make some videos and really enjoy it, but then that’s like a day I spent doing that, so but but that’s easier for me than it is for other people, especially people my age, that just like, oh, I don’t know how to use a computer, I don’t know, can you help me figure this out, you know, I’m always happy to help people, but yeah, those kind of things, maybe the persistence, because I would have to make sure I got the job done of what was I was trying to make work to have to do a lot of research and redoing and that kind of thing made me be, you know, a very attention to detail, which is critical in software development, and I find that I’m very detail-oriented now in my painting.

Laura Arango Baier: 27:15

If you’ve been enjoying the podcast and also want to ask our guest live questions, then you might want to join our monthly webinar, The FASO Show, where our guest artists discuss marketing tips, share inspiring stories, and answer your burning questions in real time. Whether you’re a seasoned painter or just starting your creative journey, this is your chance to connect, learn, and spark new ideas. And whether you’re stuck on a canvas or building your creative business, this is where breakthroughs happen. Don’t miss out, ignite your passion and transform your art practice by joining us. Our next FASO show webinar is coming up on the 16th of July with our special guest, Vladislav Yelisaev. You can find a sign-up link in the show notes. Yeah, because I mean, if you have to hunt down a tiny mistake in code, yeah, really, really specific, yeah. And it’s good that I mean, with painting, it’s definitely a lot of, you know, general to specific, and it’s some specific things that can make or break a painting sometimes, or just improve it. And it’s those tiny improvements over time that make it even better.

Maureen Dunlap: 28:18

Yes, and you learn every time you’re going.. oh, this is something I did last time. Don’t make that mistake again. So, yeah, I do like experimenting a lot with, you know, these different styles, and you know, I started using a couple of things like gold leaf, but can I show you some of these pictures. Let’s see if I can get this. So I started doing these two. This is like my interpretation of tablecloths, and so this is a lace tablecloth, obviously. And it took me a long, long time to do this painting, which is really time consuming to do all these little tiny lace things. Then I decided to do tablecloth. Oh, and these tablecloths are all vintage, so this one was one that my mother had. The tablecloth is really red, not blue, but I changed the color on the computer to blue just for difference, and this is called Hungover, and I actually, I put these little knobs on the ends of the of the curtain rod and the wainscoting, I built these little things on the side,

Laura Arango Baier: 29:37

looks so this is

Maureen Dunlap: 29:40

called crumpled, and it has some others, but I needed wall space, so I had to take some down. This is a recent one, and again I found this frame, which I love, the Art Deco style of that. Then I, this is another recent one called Molten. Sunlight, and I know you could see these in the background, but the two women at the top, again, would love for someone to buy those both. These are my another set of frames that I got, but I wanted to make paintings to go in them. Here’s my, my Mooka tapestry idea. I put a rod at the top with the tassels hanging down. This pink one is called Party Girl, and it’s one of my favorites, and you know, I just really love the color. Then I did this one, it was called Rendezvous, which I like to make up these stories of like these birds got into the house somehow, and have a secret rendezvous, I don’t know, and they’re of course fantasy. I took regular birds and changed the colors. Here’s another experiment I did with her. I tried doing like a collage background and painted her on top of it, which I like the painting, but if you look close, you can see all the seams in the paper, and I’m not sure I love that, but it is what it is. Here’s a magnolia, which one of my favorite flowers. Oh my god, the smell and fragrance. I did a lot of magnolias, a series of them. Just whenever I don’t have anything to paint, I’ll do a magnolia. This is another woman that’s kind of made up with the Mooka theme. Now, on this one, all those leaves at the top of her head, I had a hard time trying to figure out where to place them, so I cut out paper and kind of tacked them on there, and then took each one off and painted it, and I actually tried to make them look like paper, because I thought that was kind of cool. This painting is called Blessed Be the Hair Volume, because I really, I was really trying to do the study of that blonde hair. There’s another Mooka-esque muca-esque one called the Age of Wonder, and this is where I use some gold leaf around the border. Not easy to handle that stuff. Have you ever tried it?

Laura Arango Baier: 32:34

I have. It’s tough.

Maureen Dunlap: 32:36

It is tough. And again, here’s another rose, kind of like a d popping out of the of the oval. I didn’t have a frame, so I painted a frame on the side of the canvas. Here’s one of my ocean scapes, and this here is my latest series I’m working on that I mentioned, which is going to be called the dreaming season. This one here is pretty much done, and this one is kind of done, but this one and that one are still to be completed, so you know that’s that’s given me something to do for a while, and then I have some family portraits here, my my two daughters, this is my son, who sadly passed away, and that’s my boyfriend, Daniel, so that’s my studio.

Laura Arango Baier: 33:47

Beautiful work, beautiful. I really love the dreaming ladies. Yeah, that’s

Maureen Dunlap: 33:53

gonna be fun.

Laura Arango Baier: 33:54

Yeah, and the painted frame on the pink flowers, like I would have thought it was a real frame. You’re very good, the trompe l’oeil style, which is, yeah, I love

Maureen Dunlap: 34:05

doing that. You don’t have one, just make it up.

Laura Arango Baier: 34:08

Yeah, might as well. I mean, you got the power of creation in your hands, why not?

Maureen Dunlap: 34:13

Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 34:14

yeah, awesome, yeah. And then I also wanted to ask you a bit about what it was like for you when you decided to just go full time as an artist, like, what was that experience like for you?

Maureen Dunlap: 34:28

Well, it was exciting, but also a little scary. Luckily for me, I was able to collect, start collecting social security. I’m an old lady, so I, I had like a couple years where I was like trying to make ends meet, but then that kicked in, and I, I was all good. I also, you know, had 401 k and stuff, so I feel a little bit financially secure. I say a little bit, you never know what’s going to happen, but yeah, so I’m sorry. What was the question about

Laura Arango Baier: 35:11

what the experience was like when it became a full-time? Oh, yeah,

Maureen Dunlap: 35:13

so very scary, but also very freeing, because I’m like, now I mean I’m retired, I can do whatever I want. I don’t even have to come here if I don’t want to, but of course I want to. I want to stay. I’m busy every second. So, aside from this, I also have a home studio where I do a lot of crafting, because you know what’s funny, once you become a full-time painter, suddenly it becomes a job, and you’re like, I gotta take a day off, you know? I feel obligated to do this, even though I love it. So, if it’s kind of hard, you have to make time, like, for work-life balance, you know? I want to spend time at home with my boyfriend. We also have two parrots that need attention, so I gotta be home with those guys. Yeah, so I’m very busy. I also, you know, belong to a Spanish group, because we meet every Friday. We’ve been doing Spanish for about 15 years, my boyfriend and I, so that’s fun, you know. Go to the gym sometimes, but it’s.. I don’t know what other people do when they aren’t working anymore. I mean, I have a lot of friends from high school that I guess I don’t know what they do. I mean, maybe they go out to lunch or read a book or so very relaxing kind of lifestyle, which you know sounds nice, so maybe that’s great for them, wouldn’t be good for me. I feel like I feel constantly like I’m battling against time, like I have to believe a legacy, but then again, what am I gonna do with all this stuff at the end? I mean, I think about that stuff. I don’t mean to be morbid, but you know, I guess doesn’t matter. It’ll be what it is.

Laura Arango Baier: 37:12

Yeah, I think a lot of people, as they, you know, as they age and they grow in their career, I think we start thinking about those things and I think I could probably confidently say that it touches someone, and that’s what matters, you know. Yeah, it’s.. it is kind of morbid to think about, though. It’s like, oh man, what am I.. that’s life, you know? I mean, yeah,

Maureen Dunlap: 37:38

it’s. you can’t take them with you.

Laura Arango Baier: 37:42

No,

Maureen Dunlap: 37:44

I think I’m going to start doing more oceans again pretty soon, as soon as soon as I finish this series. So be on the lookout for that.

Laura Arango Baier: 37:55

Yeah, no, and I think it’s it’s also one of those things where the moment you kind of start, because you mentioned you know you make jewelry as well, but I feel like also the moment that you start opening yourself up to more creative things, suddenly you start seeing it everywhere.

Maureen Dunlap: 38:12

Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 38:12

like you’re like, “Oh my god, now I want to try this craft over here, because I’m

Maureen Dunlap: 38:17

always, always thinking about the next thing I’m going to make. I see something beautiful, and I need to recreate it in some form, like I have this idea, like even this art deco necklace. I just finished this, actually, this morning, and I have a website I just set up for my jewelry, and I can give you that URL if you want. Later, I’ll send it to you. But, yeah, I just love working with my hands. I also fix a lot of things around the house. I do gardening. I’ve got this. It’s like you could work every second and never get everything done,

Laura Arango Baier: 39:02

yeah. pretty much. That’s like there’s never enough time sometimes. That’s

Maureen Dunlap: 39:08

not it. Your time is our enemy,

Laura Arango Baier: 39:10

yeah, yeah. And then I also wanted to ask, because you know there are a lot of aspects of being an artist that can be pretty challenging, but for you, what has been the hardest thing about being a full-time artist that you haven’t really heard mentioned?

Maureen Dunlap: 39:26

Well, like I said, it’s the thing I’m worried about is just having too much stuff, and where am I going to put it? I mean, this sounds a little silly, but my, my house is full, this place is full, you know, I mean, I again, I slow down, and I go home, and I start making small things. I even started making little tiny paintings, thinking, well, they’re not going to take up a lot of room, you got to be practical, and you know that that’s another thing too with. Of sales, it’s good to have things at various price points. I mean, people don’t usually come in with $1,000 in their pocket to buy a big painting, so you know, make some $20 items, or you know, that’s, and I would say that’s true for even people working at their home studios, you know, you, the daily paint works that I used to do was really good for me, I every painting I put on there for a while was selling, then it dried up, so I thought, never mind, but you know, you again, you have to set yourself apart in some way, because there you’re right now, you’re like a drop in the ocean of artists, you look, just look on Instagram or Pinter, Pinterest, I get a lot of really cool ideas from looking at Pinterest inspiration, but yeah, I mean, I love the academic style, but there’s a lot of people doing it, but you gotta make yours different. I like to make mine somewhat different in some way, so that’s you gotta figure that out.

Laura Arango Baier: 41:18

Yeah, yes, you know what makes you you, which is, I feel like that’s another life journey that just changes over time.

Maureen Dunlap: 41:27

Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 41:28

yeah, yeah. And then I also wanted to ask, because you have, you know, taken on commissions and you’ve sold some work in the past, how did you find those first, you know, buyers or collectors, was it word of mouth, was it?

Maureen Dunlap: 41:43

So, as I said, well, Facebook, Facebook was a gold mine for me for a while, till like the economy got kind of bad, but FASO at first was good. I don’t really know how, how you guys do it, but people were finding my work. Basically, it was mostly my flower still life, so maybe I should go back to that. Those would be snapped up quite often, so I, you know, I would get that person, and then word of mouth. I also had some work at the North Carolina Museum of Art when they had a, they have an annual flower show, Art in Bloom, and I put some stuff in their gift shop and sold them, so you gotta find kind of like these places, I don’t want to be in a gallery, really. That’s something we should never talk about, but I don’t want to give 50% of my money to a gallery, or you know, you would have to double your price, or whatever, which then makes it unreachable for some people. Now that could change, I say that, but I also don’t want to really be beholden to a place that even if I’m here, I have to charge what they would charge because of the contracting that they use, unless they’re really far away. What else? Oh yeah, so people come in here, not as many as we would like, but a few times a person would come in and just randomly just buy a painting, so that course is great. I’ve had some work in restaurants that you know rotate the artwork on their walls. Those are good ways to sell. No, I don’t know how else. I mean, I guess obviously Instagram, social media, which is so hard. I mean, it really

Laura Arango Baier: 44:00

is. Yeah, yeah, I think that’s something that’s changing a lot as well. I think there are less people on social media. I think a lot of people are appreciating much more the in real life experiences. I think a lot of people are probably going much more to like out, like outside of their house places. We’re all getting a little bit tired of the internet.

Maureen Dunlap: 44:22

Yes, right, exactly. I did an art festival, outdoor festival, where you set up a tent and all this. That was a lot of work for paintings like this, like to just let them all over there and hang them up on a grid, and and take them all home, because nobody bought them, so you know, I think the crafting is probably the way that you can make a little more small increments of money if you come up with your own groove on those things, but it’s it’s. A battle, I’m not gonna lie, it’s not easy.

Laura Arango Baier: 45:04

No, yeah, yeah, I mean, being a, an artist is like being an entrepreneur, but it’s also like a little different, because you don’t, you don’t have like one singular product to sell to people, you make very unique products, nothing is the same unless you literally make the same painting, but as prints, that’s like the only exception.

Maureen Dunlap: 45:28

Yes, that’s another thing I don’t have a lot of luck selling prints. I did sell prints of my, my four Mucha women, but the issue I have with doing prints is like a lot of my work is when it’s shrunken down to a print, it looks kind of like a photo of something, and doesn’t accept why would you buy that, you know, like I have a friend who is a wildlife painter, and he’ll paint like certain animals that that people like, so they buy his prints a lot, so that’s, you know, you have to have a niche that’s suitable for prints.

Laura Arango Baier: 46:08

Yeah, I agree. I think selling prints can be really hard, unless it’s like a painting that’s just really beloved. Yeah, Becky, like, oh my gosh, I could have sold this like 50 times, type of painting. Yeah, and that’s the other hard part, which I think that’s one of the conveniences of, like, if you do sell prints, just not having them pre-printed and having, like, a buy to print type of situation, I think is also a little bit more convenient, yeah, and then I also wanted to ask if you have any final advice for someone who wants to become a full-time artist.

Maureen Dunlap: 46:49

Good luck, you need to have.. I think I don’t know that you can jump in right away and assume you can make a living, you better have another source of income, and start slowly, but you know, again, set yourself apart in some way, try to have a subject matter or a style that is different, and then join FASO, that’s really been a good, good thing for me, and, and your social media, but again, it’s, I don’t know, it’s a dirt drop in the ocean, these artists are, that’s how I feel, it’s, it’s, I love, love, love doing it, and so I do it for love, not for money, so it’s I would do it anyway. I would pay to do it, actually. I do pay to do it. I, I have to pay for all this stuff in this room, but yeah, I, I love to see like a young artist that’s, or a young person that wants to learn and do this, I’m considering teaching, possibly have never done that, but it’s on my radar. I might do some videos, something like that. Yeah, you got to think of other ways to get money to live,

Laura Arango Baier: 48:22

yeah, especially as an artist, yeah, it’s like you got to wear all the hats, diversify that income, and you know, level out that economic support and stability, because if you don’t, yeah,

Unknown: 48:37

it

Laura Arango Baier: 48:37

can really, I mean, probably not for everyone out there. I think some people really thrive in stressful situations, but I know in my case I don’t think I’d be able to focus on painting if I was constantly worried about I can’t pay my bills this month.

Maureen Dunlap: 48:53

Right, right, right. Yeah, that can be so stressful, and that’s going to show it. Excuse me, showing your work, so you want to get to a point where it’s you’re doing it with joy and you’re in the zone and you don’t care if your place is a huge mess because you’re in the flow state, so that’s kind of me, my home, my home craft studio, it’s like a bomb went off in there and I don’t care, that’s how I, that’s how I work, I clean it up in between, but it’s, it’s just the way it is. It’s nature, the beast.

Laura Arango Baier: 49:31

Yes, the art bomb, yes, the creating bum. Yeah, I totally relate. It’s like I can’t focus on cleaning, I gotta, I gotta go fix this person’s face on my painting really quick. Exactly. yeah, like, and then it gets cleaned up. I mean, it gives you something to, like, do after you’re done, almost like it’s almost like a cleansing ritual afterward. We’re like, okay, now I can clear out the old energy of this painting, and then have a fresh start. Yeah, yeah. And I also wanted to ask you, if someone wants to see your work in person, or if they want to see more of your work, where can they come?

Maureen Dunlap: 50:09

So, if they’re local to North Carolina, they can come to Durham to this, my studio in the Golden Belt Arts Building from Studio Nine, I can I let’s see, I mean, outside of in person, I’ve got all the different socials, some of them I don’t use for painting, so I, you know, it’s more just ranting and raving, so, but my Instagram, I have two Instagram sites now, and my Facebook page, which really I don’t post a lot of my art anymore on Facebook, since I’ve got the Instagram and the and the FASO. So also we’re having a group show here in the main hallway of this complex between October and December, so that’s another thing. I don’t really have anything else planned at the moment.

Laura Arango Baier: 51:16

Okay, yeah, but I’m guessing you know someone can go to your website, which absolutely do you mind telling us what your website is?

Maureen Dunlap: 51:23

Maureen dunlap.com perfect. And also, I have the Wonder Cabinet, which is my jewelry store. It’s brand new, so it’s Wonder hyphen cabinet, and I’m still working on that, put you know, every time I make something, I put it up, so there’s that, and I’m, I’ve been battling the technology to try to get my Instagram page for that to show the product, so people can shop on Instagram, I mean, some people do it, but my God, it’s so hard, it’s so hard to get to get all these things in Meta working and approved, and I spent weeks with that still not working right.

Laura Arango Baier: 52:12

Yeah, it’s one of those things with the way that the landscape of how social media has changed, because I think before it was so much easier to shop from Instagram yet than now. Now it it feels like you got to pay more, or you got to become like a, like, you got to just do all this verification stuff that

Maureen Dunlap: 52:30

you’ll get the check mark on.

Laura Arango Baier: 52:31

Yeah, which I understand, because you know there’s scammers out there, but people are still getting scammed anyway. Like, I

Maureen Dunlap: 52:36

know it makes no sense. This doesn’t mean you’re not a scammer, you just have to pay $15 a month to have a check mark.

Laura Arango Baier: 52:42

Oh, yeah. No, but I mean, like, people who do, like, they get the check mark, but they’re actually scammers, like that’s what I’m

Maureen Dunlap: 52:47

saying. It just costs money, that’s all you can.

Laura Arango Baier: 52:50

Oh, yeah,

Maureen Dunlap: 52:51

they’re scamming you. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 52:53

no, it’s yeah, I

Maureen Dunlap: 52:55

know it’s there. I have that on my art on my Maureen J. Dunlap is my Instagram painting site, and I do have the check mark there. I don’t know that it does anything.

Laura Arango Baier: 53:11

We try what we can. I know you gotta try all these

Maureen Dunlap: 53:14

things.

Laura Arango Baier: 53:15

Yes. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Maureen, for the very whimsical conversation. Thank you

Maureen Dunlap: 53:23

so much. I’m really, I was looking forward to this.

Laura Arango Baier: 53:25

Yeah, me too. And I do hope you consider teaching, because I think you would probably be a very fun teacher to learn from.

Maureen Dunlap: 53:32

Yeah, I would love to do that. I love sometimes I get young people, like 20 year old young adults, coming in asking me questions, and I love explaining the technical aspects of how to do this, so I’m really thinking about taking on some students. Heck, yeah! Why not? Why not? Yeah. Well, thank you, Laura. I really, really enjoyed this conversation.

Laura Arango Baier: 53:58

Me too. Thank you to everyone out there for listening to the podcast. Your continued support means a lot to us. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or leave us a comment on YouTube. This helps us reach others who might also benefit from the excellent advice that our guests provide. Thank you.

Last week I asked What if Your Artist Website was as easy to update as Instagram? You may read that article here.

But, being easy to update is only part of a true artist website. Over the years, I have heard some version of the following lament from countless artists: “My website didn’t sell anything.”

Usually, when I ask what they did after launching their website, the answer is, “I put my art on it.”

And then? They waited. Now, being easy to update helps, because most non-FASO artist websites are never updated, and updates are often what generate sales. But updates alone are not enough.

That is not a failure of the artist. It is a failure of the typical passive website model.

I find that most artist websites are little more than digital brochures. They display the artwork, but they do almost nothing to help a potential collector discover it, remember it, follow it, or return when the artist adds new art—new art that would appeal that very collector!

Most websites are designed to sell products—not art. But, I’ve said for years that you can’t sell art the same way Amazon sells sneakers. Art is not merely a “product.” But hardly anyone seems to understand this. At FASO, we’ve organized our whole offering around this idea.

What people don’t seem to comprehend is that art is rarely sold in one dramatic moment.

Someone may discover your work today, read your story next month, join your list later, and finally see the painting she cannot stop thinking about a year from now. When I was a gallery director, I once followed up with a prospective client nearly every month for three years before he went on to buy multiple paintings. If you’re not selling well, I can almost guarantee your giving up on prospects too soon. But some of this follow up can now be automated…

Art sells due to sustained attention, repetition, resonance, trust, timing, and a real human relationship. Your website should help that relationship grow. Most websites don’t.

This truth about the way art sells is why FASO includes a marketing system built specifically around the rhythm of an artist’s life.

Here’s The FASO Marketing System:

• Art Alerts notify your collectors and prospects automatically when you add new art to your site. They also encourage collectors to like, comment, or inquire about the piece.

• Built-in email newsletters empower you to communicate directly with your collectors. You don’t need to pay separately for Mailchimp, Kit, or Constant Contact.

• The DailyArtStream amplifies your efforts and provides an opportunity for your work to reach art lovers beyond your existing audience.

• Promote Mode resurfaces older pieces via Art Alerts, because, at FASO, we believe that beautiful art does not have an expiration date.

• FASO Exhibitions (formerly The BoldBrush Contest) give you the regular opportunity to show, and sell, your art in our online exhibitions.

The idea is simple: Add your artwork once. Let FASO help carry the message.

Here’s an example of a FASO Art Alert:

Tell me, have you noticed that the modern world as envisioned by big tech continually tries to turn artists into exhausted content factories?

They expect you to make the painting, photograph the painting, write the post, make the video, and most importantly—to them—feed the algorithm. Oh yeah, and then they expect you to do it all again tomorrow because today’s post has already disappeared into the abyss and the algorithm always hungers for more. Then, to add insult to injury, with each image you post, they train their AI on your hard work. I can safely assume that you didn’t sign up with social media to train your replacement.

About social media one artist recently lamented to us, “I am sobbing daily because I can get no one to help me with my social media and I post every once in a while so I can get some attention from the outside world and then I start doom scrolling. I have had enough!”

That is not artistic sovereignty.

FASO is designed to free you from that treadmill. We don’t treat beauty as optional, art as entertainment, or creativity as content. To us, beauty, art and creativity (along with truth, goodness and humanity) are sacred.

Technology should support you by protecting your creative white space. And it should reduce the burden of the business and marketing that surrounds the work so you can return to the work itself.

We’re not saying social media can’t be useful, but please realize that a follower you cannot reliably reach is not truly your follower.

Your website, your mailing list, and your direct relationships with collectors are owned media—they belong to you. So please, do not spend your life building someone else’s platform while neglecting your own.

Technology should put human artists first and, at FASO, that’s exactly what we do.

Get Started with FASO for Free

Free for 30 days
No credit card required
Keep your existing site while you build

Creatively,

Clint Watson
FASO Founder and Art Fanatic

PS—A FASO website is not designed merely to showcase your art. It is designed to help you remain connected to the people who care about it.

Artists often assume that disappointing sales indicate a marketing problem. According to artist and veteran art marketing writer Lori Woodward, the real explanation is usually more complicated. Sustainable sales depend on the quality and consistency of the work, the market in which it is offered, the artist’s production capacity, and the relationships built around it.

Woodward’s advice is encouraging precisely because it is realistic. Artists do not need to become international stars, master every social platform, or pursue the same career model. They do, however, need to understand what buyers want and prepare themselves to meet that demand.

1. The art market is changing, but it is not disappearing.

Economic uncertainty can make artists fear that people have stopped buying art. Woodward distinguishes the current market from the collapse that followed the 2008 financial crisis, when collectors flooded the secondary market with recently purchased art and drove down prices for many living artists.

Today’s market is more varied. Woodward sees younger collectors entering the Western art market, crowded gallery openings returning, and buyers showing renewed interest in experiencing art in person. Some geographic and stylistic markets are stronger than others, but that does not mean opportunity has vanished.

Artists should therefore avoid treating “the art market” as one uniform entity. A traditional landscape painter in New England, a contemporary Western artist in Arizona, and a local painter selling through a tourist-area gallery are participating in different markets with different buyers, price expectations, and opportunities.

2. Better marketing cannot compensate for artwork that is not ready.

Woodward’s central argument is also the episode’s hardest truth: Marketing can attract attention, but it cannot force someone to want a painting.

She states the principle directly:

“All the marketing in the world, and all the techniques in the world will not sell a piece of art if nobody wants it. It’s got to compete in the marketplace, whichever marketplace that you choose to sell to.”

When work does not sell, artists should evaluate more than their promotional strategy. They should compare their work honestly with other art selling in the same venue and price range. They should also ask whether the paintings create the beauty, meaning, or emotional connection that motivates people to bring art into their homes.

Unsold work is not necessarily evidence of failure. It may simply indicate that the artist needs additional time, instruction, experimentation, or a market better suited to the work.

3. A professional career requires a cohesive and renewable body of work.

A few successful paintings can reveal potential, but they cannot sustain a career. Woodward recommends preparing approximately 20 strong works before making a serious market debut. The collection should appear continuous, cohesive, and recognizably connected.

The paintings do not all need to depict the same subject. Cohesion can come from a consistent palette, handling, atmosphere, point of view, or visual sensibility. The presentation should also feel unified. Consistent framing makes a booth or exhibition look intentional, while mismatched frames can make the same work resemble a patchwork collection.

Woodward learned the importance of inventory after selling almost every painting in a show and discovering that she had nothing available to replace them. Artists must be ready not only to create demand but also to respond when that demand appears.

Woodward summarizes what the market requires:

“You have to be consistent, you have to be prolific, and you have to have a continuous, cohesive, recognizable body of work.”

Production expectations increase when galleries become involved. Woodward recalls a gallery owner who would not consider an artist producing fewer than 75 works a year. That number is not a universal rule, but it demonstrates how much inventory several gallery relationships can require.

4. An authentic artistic voice develops through repetition and experimentation.

Artists sometimes approach “finding a voice” as a branding exercise. They identify a successful painter, imitate the visible characteristics of that work, and hope that a recognizable style will appear.

Woodward argues that voice develops through a more organic process. Artists find it by painting frequently, conducting studies, testing ideas, making mistakes, and noticing which decisions they want to repeat. A recognizable voice is the accumulated result of sustained choices rather than a style selected in advance.

Woodward explains:

“Don’t try to paint like somebody else just because they’re successful, and the only way that you’re going to get to find your voice is to paint all the time, do a bunch of studies, find out what works.”

This process requires a willingness to produce paintings that may never be exhibited. Experiments reduce the pressure attached to any single canvas and allow artists to strengthen weak areas deliberately. Over time, recurring preferences become a visual identity that collectors can recognize across different subjects.

5. The right venue matters because every venue attracts a different buyer.

Artists should not assume that strong work will sell equally well everywhere. Woodward emphasizes that galleries, outdoor shows, frame shops, antique stores, regional exhibitions, and direct online sales attract different audiences.

Outdoor shows can be useful, but artists should research them carefully. Woodward recommends events with a history of returning art buyers and a clear emphasis on two-dimensional fine art. A large crowd does not guarantee sales if the audience primarily came for crafts, entertainment, or children’s activities.

Galleries offer something artists may struggle to build independently: access to established collectors. Buyers often trust a longstanding gallery to evaluate the work, provide context, and protect the transaction. The gallery’s commission pays for more than wall space; it buys access to relationships and credibility that may have taken decades to establish.

The gallery’s primary question is practical: Will its clients buy the artist’s work? Artists seeking representation should therefore identify galleries where their quality, subject matter, price range, and production capacity fit the existing business.

6. Genuine relationships are becoming more valuable than constant social-media activity.

Woodward is skeptical of advice that tells artists to post continuously, chase engagement, and reorganize their lives around changing algorithms. Social media can provide visibility, but it can also consume studio time and create the false impression that every other artist is advancing faster.

She sees renewed interest in openings, exhibitions, print publications, and real-world experiences. Buyers want to meet artists, hear talks, visit galleries, and participate in the excitement of an event. Digital tools remain useful, but they work best when they support relationships rather than replace them.

When speaking with potential buyers, Woodward recommends making the conversation about them. Artists can ask what brought someone to the show, where the person is from, or what attracted them to a particular painting. They should avoid immediately explaining what the painting means, because the buyer may already have formed a more personal interpretation.

Woodward describes her approach this way:

“I don’t try to sell them; I try to give them confidence in their decision to like my artwork, because I’m not forcing them to like something about it.”

An email list becomes especially valuable after that relationship begins. Someone who has purchased a painting or connected with an artist at an event has a reason to remain interested. Email allows the artist to maintain that connection without relying entirely on a social platform to deliver the message.

7. Prices should reflect costs, venue, and proven demand.

Artists cannot establish credible prices by choosing impressive numbers or copying more famous painters. Woodward says pricing depends heavily on where the art is sold and whether buyers have already demonstrated a willingness to pay that amount.

At a minimum, artists must calculate the costs of materials, framing, exhibition fees, and commissions. Woodward recommends that emerging artists recover those costs and make a profit, even while they are still developing their skill and reputation. Gallery commissions must also be incorporated into the retail price rather than absorbed as an unexpected loss.

Artists should maintain consistent retail prices across venues. Undercutting a gallery or offering the same work elsewhere for less can damage the artist’s relationships and disrespect collectors who previously paid the full price.

Prices can rise when consistent sales prove that demand supports an increase. Woodward suggests testing moderate increases, such as 10 percent, rather than making dramatic jumps. Artists who raise prices too quickly can remove themselves from the market before their reputation is strong enough to justify the change.

8. A sustainable career must fit the artist’s actual personality and capacity.

Woodward rejects the idea that every serious artist must pursue national recognition or full-time gallery representation. Different careers require different combinations of production, teaching, travel, direct sales, gallery relationships, writing, and public interaction.

Some artists can produce hundreds of paintings annually and keep several galleries supplied. Others create only a few major works each year. Some thrive while meeting collectors at outdoor shows, while others prefer galleries to handle every sale. A smaller career can still be artistically meaningful and financially successful.

Woodward acknowledges that she does not want the pressure associated with maintaining multiple galleries. She continues to sell her work through selected opportunities, but she has chosen a scale that leaves room for writing, research, relationships, and other interests.

Artists should create a specific vision for the next year or two rather than measuring success against someone else’s career. That vision might involve securing a first regional gallery, completing a 20-piece portfolio, establishing profitable prices, developing an email list, or becoming a respected local artist.

The right career is not necessarily the largest one an artist can imagine. It is the one the artist can sustain while continuing to make work, improve, and enjoy the life surrounding the art.

The word “yet” matters.

Woodward’s message is not that building an art career is simple. It is that the process is understandable and, with patience, manageable. Artists can strengthen their work, create a cohesive portfolio, choose appropriate venues, price responsibly, and build genuine relationships one decision at a time.

No artist can control the economy, a gallery’s response, or the next change to a social-media algorithm. Artists can control how consistently they work, how honestly they assess their progress, and how thoughtfully they introduce their art to the world.

If your art is not selling yet, do not treat that word as a verdict. Treat it as an invitation to keep painting, keep learning, and keep building a career that both your work and your life can sustain.

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PS — Note from Clint: One of the reasons I built FASO is because I believe art is important, artists are important, and the work you’re called to create deserves to be taken seriously. We are all sharing “miracles of existence” through our art.

Yes, at FASO, we build professional artist websites. Yes, we talk about marketing. Yes, we give artists tools to present their work, tell their stories, reach collectors, and sell more art.

But that is the how.

The why is that we love art, and we want to push back against a world that too often treats art like content and artists like algorithms. The modern world denigrates Beauty in preference of profit and efficiency. At FASO, we hold Beauty sacred.

So we don’t just host artist websites. We promote artists. We feature their work. We try, in our own small way, to help more art find the people who need it. And that informs everything we do and build.

If that resonates with you, we’d be honored to have you join us.

Get Started with FASO for Free

PPS — If you’re not ready to look at FASO, you can support our mission by simply clicking the heart icon at the top or bottom of this article. That helps us reach more artists and art lovers and helps us spread Beauty to a world that is desperate for it.

—Clint

Our use of AI in this article: Our team worked with AI to help generate this summary and from there we manually edited it. Our beef with AI is primarily when it is used in a way that reduces opportunities for artists. Our goal, in the places we do utilize AI, is to use it in a way that supports human artists. And we believe this use case supports rather than harms.

At FASO, we do not train AI on your artwork for the purposes of using it to generate alternative images. We do use AI to protect your artwork from scrapers (including other AI bots) and to detect and block spam. And we are exploring the use of AI in ways that send more art lovers and collectors to our customers.

As always, The FASO Way is an open forum, so we’d love to know what your opinion of such AI use is in the comments. And, please, as we always request, all comments must be dignified and respectful of us and of your fellow artist colleagues who may have differing points of view. We are in this together, so discussion, and even debate, is important. But hateful or threatening comments will be blocked.

J.F. Martel wrote that sentence in his 2015 book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. And while his book predated the rise of AI in the form of LLMs, he already intuited something important: What makes a work of art a classic, isn’t mere technical skill.

If classic status depended solely upon skill, then AI used for the final output might pose a problem for Art. But AI used in this way doesn’t “fight to break through Consensus to produce the New.” If anything, AI, at least the LLM versions of it, accelerates the “Consensus.”

AI polishes everything it touches technically. It makes everything the same while making nothing New. It produces mountains of “technically good” while producing no works that “do not conform to the conventional picture of the world.” It is pure techne with no poesis. There are use cases where this works well. But, when it comes to true art, we humans seem prefer the “New,” even when “uneven” and “amateurish.”

Consider what Hyde said in his review of jazz in the context of the song Nardis:

[With AI] if your ultimate goal is to be entertained, you can subsist on content-slop until your belly is full and your brain overstimulated. There’s no question of personal taste, since slop makes everything different the same.

Jazz on the other hand makes the same different. It is a contrafact art. It takes “standards”, popular tunes or songs that are already familiar, and transfigures them during every performance. In doing so, they become “lead” and the artist the alchemist that transmutes it and themselves into philosophical gold. —Hyde, Nardis

The “Classic” that J.F. Martel speaks of and the “philosophical gold” that Hyde praises in jazz musicians point to the same thing: resonance.

This resonance between humans represents communication of non-verbal Truth between humans—what we call Art. Resonance is more important than technical mastery because resonance is the point.

Through art, love is sent to strangers the artist may never meet in a way that mirrors the intimate love that occurs between soulmates and their creator. Because this resonance consists of love and truth, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Paul Klee said that art does not reproduce the visible, but rather it makes visible. Technical proficiency, mastery, can only share the what of your creation. Resonance shares the why. And the why is what sells. The why is the truth you are making visible.

Because resonance is the point, mining your unique deep truths, style, vibe, and energies will be the most valuable time you spend. If art were purchased simply based on proficiency, then everybody would want the “best” artist in each genre and medium. Fortunately, most buyers are more interested in unique resonance than pure technical proficiency.

It’s very difficult to be “the best” in any field, but you are already unique in some way. The goal is to reflect that unique vibe in your Art. Push yourself until it does.

Rather than being “stuck in the pack” of sameness, it’s far more rewarding (and easier) in the long run, to mine your own uniqueness, vibe and energy. But reflecting it in your art does take time and experimentation.

Because of the time required, it’s important, before you “productize” your art, that you truly develop your vibe, your energy, and your style. Figure out and utilize what makes you truly unique. Do not blame the economy, your day job, your web host, your fans, the Instagram algorithm, a lack of marketing knowledge, or anything else for a lack of sales until you’ve nailed your own inspired uniqueness.

One way to do this, ironically, is to lean into your imperfections and weaknesses. Instead of trying to “stamp out” your imperfections, figure out how to make them work for you as strengths in a way that makes your art special. This is the idea J.F. Martel said could come across as “even amateurish” in classic works.

When I played guitar, I had trouble with some chords, so I compensated by figuring out my own work arounds and, to my surprise, those “hacks” often led to compliments from listeners and other players. My buddies would often stop and say, “wait a minute, dude, what’s that chord you just played?”

You can turn your weird quirks and weaknesses into your biggest strengths. Just don’t let this advice turn into an excuse to abdicate your responsibility to truly master your craft. It’s one thing to develop your quirks, but it’s quite another to neglect fundamentals.

So, master the fundamentals, yes, but please don’t neglect your weirdness, because your wyrd, a word that means fate, is the doorway that only you can walk through. And through that doorway you’ll find the key to the resonance that will inspire us by making the same different.

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PS — These are the kinds of ideas I explore in my forthcoming book The Sovereign Artist. It went to the editor this week, so publication is finally moving closer. If you’re interested, please join the waitlist.

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For our season 14 finale, we sat down with artist and veteran art-marketing writer, Lori Woodward. Lori shares how she went from burnout after art school to rebuilding her skills through workshops, portrait commissions, and writing for major magazines and art organizations. She explains how learning directly from successful peers, mentors, and collectors shaped her understanding of how the art market really works, which is very different from generic marketing advice. Lori breaks down the impact of the 2008 recession, why so many galleries and careers collapsed, and why today’s market, despite economic anxiety, is fundamentally healthier and full of new, younger collectors. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes that no amount of marketing can replace a cohesive, competitive body of work, consistent production, and a recognizable voice that develops only through years of painting, experimenting, and failing forward. She gives practical guidance on pricing, working with galleries, outdoor shows, email lists, and social media, stressing that real relationships and in‑person experiences now matter more than chasing algorithms. Ultimately, Lori encourages artists to build a realistic vision, move slowly but steadily, and design a career that fits their personality—whether that means becoming a local favorite, a gallery regular, or a small‑scale, part‑time professional who still sells meaningful work.

Sign up for Lori’s Newsletter:
loriwoodward.com/email-newsletter

Lori’s FASO Site:
loriwoodward.com/

Lori’s Social Media:
instagram.com/woodwardartist/

Lori’s Article about Pricing:
https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/how-to-price-consistently-for-art-sales-success

Lori’s Blog:
loriwoodward.com/blog

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Transcript:

Lori Woodward: 0:00

All the marketing in the world, and all the techniques in the world will not sell a piece of art if nobody wants it. It’s got to compete in the marketplace, whichever marketplace that you choose to sell to.

Laura Arango Baier: 0:19

Welcome to the Faso podcast, where we believe that fortune favors a bold brush. My name is Laura Baier, and I’m your host. For those of you who are new to the podcast, we are a podcast that covers art marketing techniques and all sorts of business tips, specifically to help artists learn to better sell their work. We interview artists at all stages of their careers, as well as others who are in careers tied to the art world in order to hear their advice and insights. For our season 14 finale, we sat down with artist and veteran art marketing writer Lori Woodward. Lori shares how she went from burnout after art school to rebuilding her skills through workshops, portrait commissions, and writing for major magazines and art organizations. She explains how learning directly from successful peers, mentors, and collectors shaped her understanding of how the art market really works, which is very different from generic marketing advice. Laurie breaks down the impact of the 2008 recession, why so many galleries and careers collapsed, and why today’s market, despite economic anxiety, is fundamentally healthier and full of new, younger collectors. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes that no amount of marketing can replace a cohesive, competitive body of work, consistent production, and a recognizable voice that develops only through years of painting, experimenting, and failing forward. She gives practical guidance on pricing, working with galleries, outdoor shows, email lists, and social media, stressing that real relationships and in-person experiences now matter more than chasing algorithms. Ultimately, Laurie encourages artists to build a realistic vision, move slowly but steadily, and design a career that fits their personality, whether that means becoming a local favorite, gallery regular, or a small-scale part-time professional who still sells meaningful work. Welcome, Lori, to the FASO Podcast. How are you today? I’m doing very well, and I’m so happy to be here. Yeah, and I’m so happy and excited to have you, because you have so much experience with art marketing. You’re also an artist, so you’re not just like on one end of, oh well, this is what works. It’s like, no, you’ve actually experienced this yourself, you have, you know, this, the ability to see something that works, and to be able to actually do it. So, I think this is going to be an excellent episode for all our listeners who have tons of questions about the new world we’re in, in terms of art

Unknown: 2:39

marketing,

Laura Arango Baier: 2:40

because things are changing as you always do, so I’m excited to have you for that reason. So, thank you for being too. Yeah, of course. But before we dive into all the delicious, wonderful information about today’s marketing world, do you mind telling us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Lori Woodward: 2:59

Okay, well, I’ve done a lot of different things over the years, of course, like you know, most all the artists on your podcast. I started out drawing as a young child, and I’ll just tell you a little story. We won’t get into all the details, but I was probably about four years old, and my mom had some little original oil paintings, they were, they were miniatures, and I had taken my crayons and I drew on the walls, like a lot of kids will do at that age, and no, that didn’t go over well, don’t draw on the walls, so I got a bright idea to improve on these little oil paintings with my crayons, and I believe that some of the crayon is there till my sister has the paintings, I think it’s still there, but you know, I think kids that that are going to be artists that just have that innate curiosity and willingness to do it, they just, they can’t help but not do it, and there are some artists who, you know, started later in life, but they’re generally creative people you know when, when they find that, so I started out. We’ll get into some of your questions. I think that I will, you’ll learn more about me as we go, but I did have a fine art education major at the U of A, and like most universities, I never saw a demo. They wanted abstract work, they wanted something. I was so silly that I kept drawing the model or painting the model. I had one really good. Teacher, but he retired while I was there, and I could not get anything above a C or a B to save my life, but I was on a scholarship, a four year scholarship, so I needed to see it through, so I saw it through, and then I went back to nursing for a year, I said, well, I gotta get a job here, and I was going to teach high school, but those kids were going to kill me, I think. I, I kept the teachers kept asking me for a pass on one of our field trips, so, so then I, I got married. We moved back east to New Hampshire, and I worked at a computer company testing software for 10 years, and I absolutely love that job, and I didn’t do any - I was totally burnt out on art after college, so I didn’t do any art at all. And you’ve heard this story from many artists, you know? I think Matt Smith, he’s one of my mentors, he describes almost the same thing, and I went down to the university. It’s nothing’s changed there, nothing’s changed as far as what I never saw the professor’s work. Sometimes they didn’t even show up. So anyway, I saw it through, and then in the 90s workshops were exploding everywhere, so I started taking workshops, and that didn’t happen in previous years. That opened me up to learning and seeing demonstrations, and it was mostly watercolor, because watercolor was huge back then, and so I took a lot of watercolor workshops, and then I studied with Sandra Freckleton and Jack Beal at an invitational summer workshop for six summers, and she taught me how to control watercolor. She was German, so there was never any mistakes to be made. There were no happy accidents, and I liked that, because I was able to learn how to methodically paint with watercolor, and my expectations. I met my expectations. There wasn’t any. It was all planning, and it was really cool. I really enjoyed it, and then, and then I, after that, I started taking oil lessons with some local teachers and stuff, and, and in about the, you know, 2001 2002 I started getting into art marketing, and I’ll, I’ll tell that separately as we go through the questions, and I was selling it, my work, my watercolors at outdoor shows locally in Maine and New Hampshire, and I just loved that once I was set up and meeting the people, and, and I just thought that gave me a real education, and about how to sell art, and my colleagues, which were local artists at our art association, we met for breakfast on Wednesdays, and we talked business, and, and I learned everything from them, and some of them were extremely successful, and sold, and outdoor shows, the galleries, and made some of them, made a one of them, which I’ll discuss later, made $100,000 a year after gallery commissions and fees, and she mentored me in business. So, later on, I, I got hooked up with.. I went down to the port. I was just doing a ton of portrait commissions in both water, mostly watercolor, a few in oil, and I went down to the Portrait Society of America’s, I think it was their first or second convention, it was down in Reston, Virginia, and somehow I ended up offering my writing. I was writing for Watercolor magazine about other artists at the time, and I started writing their newsletter and editing their newsletter. I met a guy named Calvin Goodman, and at the time he mentored some of the most famous portrait artists, other artists. He was the guy who was the art marketing expert. He was featured in magazine articles, and he started mentoring me, he. And after a while he realized I was very interested in art marketing, and I was learning so much from him that he asked me. He says, “Well, I’m coming out with my latest edition from my art marketing handbook, but I don’t know a thing about websites, because I’m he’s in his mid to late 70s, I don’t know, and he said you seem to be pretty comfortable with this stuff, my husband was a soft software engineer, he was creating my website at the time, and so I said, well, yeah, why not? Why don’t I write a chapter on websites? I already write. I’ll do some research. My husband will work with me, and I, what I did was, I, I had heard that Kevin McPherson had this cool new website where he could upload and maintain on his own, and I thought, well, that’s the future. So I contacted Kevin. I don’t remember how, probably through his website, I don’t know, and, and so Kevin and I had a phone call interview, and he said, you know what, why don’t you, why don’t I give you Clint Watson’s telephone number, because he’s the guy who created my website, and I’d already been following the gallery that Clint was writing a website for. He designed websites, and so I called Clint, and Clint and I had a great interview. His name and Kevin’s name are both in the book, but you can’t find the book anymore, because this was like 2001 and when Calvin passed away, the book kind of passed away with him, and everything had changed. Websites were pretty archaic back then. You had, you had to make sure the images were small, because they wouldn’t upload, and stuff like that, you know, so that’s how I got started with Clint Watson, and then I continued to write for Watercolor Magazine. Eventually, when my art was good enough, and it wasn’t good enough, I wrote about other artists for a long time in 2007 working very hard to improve my work. Steve Doherty, the editor in chief, said, I said, is my work good enough to start doing an instructional column? He said, Yes, it’s stunning. So I always ask, and I’m never insulted if they say no, and so I started my own column, column, then, so that kept me very busy for a long while, and at about that time I had a FASO website, and as soon as I got that up and running, my husband’s like, you know, what, I don’t want to, I don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t have time. He was still working, and I said, and I don’t want to bug you, I want one of these websites, and they’re so reasonably priced, and and I started blogging right away on my website, and somehow Clint Watson noticed my blog, and this had to be years after the interview. I don’t know how he came upon it, but he said, I think I know her, and he, he subscribed to my blog, or what was it back then, RSS, like I can’t remember, but he, he contacted me and asked me to, he was the only one writing the daily newsletter back then, and he asked me to start contributing to their, their what they called Fine Art Views, now I think it’s THE FASO Way.

Laura Arango Baier: 14:23

The FASO Way, yeah.

Lori Woodward: 14:23

Okay, he asked me to start contributing, and I contributed weekly for nearly a decade, and that allowed me to do a lot of research interviews. I just meet people naturally, I meet people, and I also started writing interviews with collectors that I met through Richard Schmidt’s Putney painters and shows a lot of artists as I gained. Um, oh, what’s the word, not a reputation, but as, as people became familiar with my blog, and artists, full-time career artists became familiar with my blog, when I called them to interview or contact, they were happy to give me answers, then I started emailing them, and after the recession, and saying, which didn’t hit art until 2010 It took a while, but, but those artists were more than happy to tell me exactly what was going on, and I didn’t always mention their names, unless they wanted me to, but I gathered a lot of statistics and real-life experiences for what was going on. That’s what went into my blog, was not theories. I wasn’t that kind of art marketer that that says, oh, here’s the protocol, and you should do this, and this, and this, and this, because I found that a lot of times they weren’t artists, they didn’t really, they were marketers, but they didn’t understand how the art market is completely different than every other market, and every venue and every level and every type of buyer or collector can be completely different from another type of buyer collector, so I wanted to get real life stories from artists from all levels, and I’ve, I learned a lot, and I want to get back into that now, because I, I just, you know, being, I just turned 70 this year, and I’m thinking it’s time for me to contribute, because I’ve done a lot through the years, and I just want to, you know, I don’t need the money anymore, I want to contribute, so that’s a long nutshell, but that’s pretty much how I got into all this art marketing. So, let’s see anything else that you want to know.

Laura Arango Baier: 17:11

I mean, yeah, there’s there’s a ton that I want to know. I think it’s very interesting that it seems like you got into art marketing almost by, by chance, like almost like a side thing, instead of directly, like, oh, well, this is something I’m interested in. It was, I’m sure, it came from, like, necessity to some extent, right? Being an artist, actually,

Lori Woodward: 17:34

actually, it wasn’t necessity, because I’m curious, and I notice things and patterns of artists. I think the interest in art marketing outweighs my interest to paint, and always has. I worked at a computer company. I, you know, I just like.. I’m a little bit, you know, I love to write and interview people, and I’m a little bit, you know, those tests where you see if you’re left or right brained, I’m right down the middle, so I could go either way, and most of my art was produced as a result of teaching workshops and step-by-step articles. I had to have an article ready for every issue of Watercolor, which was quarterly, and I wrote for other magazines too. Workshop magazine, I went to the workshops, and I loved that. And I have to be honest with you, this will work into the marketing talk, because it takes a certain kind of person to make a living at art, and I’m not one of them. I cannot spend 40 to 50 hours or more alone in the studio. I feel like I’m in jail. I have to have an outside reason to create a piece of artwork which involves other people. I actually love going to art openings, even if I’m not at in the show. I just love meeting the artist and and the people and the collectors and I’ve no, I’ve known some gallery owners for 25 years, and whenever I see them, they’re always like, here’s a new thing we’re doing, and you know, this is how marketing’s working, so you know, I just love that, but I do produce artwork, and I have sold most everything that I’ve produced in one way or another, but I’m a people person, so.. so let’s see, what else did you want to know here?

Laura Arango Baier: 19:53

Um, well, I kind of want to circle back a little to the recession, okay? Doesn’t he? Recession, because I think today we’re in a very similar situation. I think a lot of people are feeling tons of economic pressure, and it’s very, very reminiscent to the 2008 recession. I’ve actually interviewed quite a few artists who survived through it, which is amazing to be right. I was not at the age where I was worried about my income when it happened, so it’s interesting to hear about it, but I also want to know, we are in a similar situation today, but not entirely, because, of course, there’s the internet. What would you say is, you know, compared to the market crash of 2008 is totally different for artists today who want to sell their work and try to make a living today.

Lori Woodward: 20:49

I think the the 2008 situation was unique, and it hasn’t happened again. There’s always been recessions, the 2008 2008 recession really wiped out a lot of artists who were making very good livings, and galleries closed left and right because it was connected to the housing market, which was everybody was investing in the housing market, and what happened that really hurt living artists is that there were big collectors before 2008 I went to, you know, I painted in Richard Schmidt’s group, and he invited me and the runner of Village Arts and Putney to go with him and Nancy Guzik out to Denver to the governor’s show and and I met avid collectors, I mean 250 paintings, I I know a couple that put a wing on their house for their extra Schmidts and stuff, his his market was never hurt, actually, but what happened was with the 2008 is that people lost with the stock market, including us, we were pretty young, but we lost half of our life savings in our 401 k overnight, and, and that was okay, because we weren’t near retirement age, but a lot of the collectors at that point were people 50 and older, and they lost a lot of their investments, so you know, in the markets, and they thought, “Oh, bright idea, here we go. I’m going to sell my art collection on a secondary market and make some money back, but the problem was that a lot of collectors decided to do that, and they absolutely saturated the market with secondary works of living artists that they bought recently, and I can think of artists, not only did they not make money, but it just brought down the price of all the artworks, except the long dead ones, pretty pretty quickly. It started about 2010 and I know one artist who, I mean, the art market was so hot before that he was a New England artist. I won’t mention his name, but he was selling at several galleries, and this happened with other artists that I knew. They’d have a wall full of art, and a collector would come in and buy the entire. these were expensive paintings for the time. Buy the entire wall of art at once. And so this artist was making $40,000 a month. And then he went after the the recession hit the art market, he went from that to not selling any paintings for 18 months, and he had a wife and two kids in college. Well, he didn’t, couldn’t have the money for college. Fortunately, he prepared financially for bad times, and the best artists, the artists who are older now, who were, you know, probably in their 40s and 50s back then, they survived because they prepared, they had six to 12 months living expenses in the bank for bad times, and as they put money away. Times were good because they lived long enough to see that it could happen, and then other artists out west quit their jobs and got other jobs. They quit art because it was just sitting there, and they needed to feed a family, so they, one of them, went back to school and got a degree for a job that he knew he could have. Now he’s painting again, you know. After the recession happened, I don’t think we’ll, we have returned to anywhere near that kind of situation in the art world. I think that I actually think that the art market I’m I know a lot of artists that are doing very, very well that have been painting all along, and I think the art market is actually doing extremely well, because it’s not the same kind of buyers, for instance, I mean, there’s several layers, but at a recent auction, I think it was Jackson Hole auction, I was listening to podcasts with the guy who runs it, he says there are there are collect new collectors in their 30s and 40s, and one of them bought a Remington watercolor, and he was young. I looked at the results, it was $790,000 He says, “We’re getting new collectors who, who had the means, who were buying, who are getting into collecting. I see a lot of new people, especially, you know, in their 50s, 40s, getting into art collecting, and this has never happened before, is at least in my lifetime. It’s always been older folks, but these are.. I mean, it is.. it is a hot market, the Western market, no doubt about it. The Eastern market is completely different. The Western markets, all it’s getting more and more contemporary. The new West, the auctions, the museum shows, and I know that I know of artists that recently came from out of nowhere, but because of the quality and the of their work, they just went to the top right away, and they’re one of them is in the Prix de West, and five years ago no one knew who she was, Rachel Brownlee, and you know she’s young, I mean it, it’s exploding now. I think most of the art markets are in the East Coast, in the West. The New York market is not doing all that well. People want the younger, the younger collectors want more contemporary, and I think that they like that on a lot of levels. There’s still very much room for traditional type of art and and the Eastern Galleries, it’s a calmer market, it’s old money. Richard Schmid used to say it’s old money back there, and they’re more, their homes don’t have soaring ceilings, and you know, so they’re, it’s a more intimate type of art. They love landscapes back there, especially of where they have second homes and in tourist areas that are seasonal, and, and in the West. In the West, it’s sort of a different crowd. In the West, I’ve heard two to one collector, one art gallery owner, and Scott Steele say that people actually do and always have bought these high-priced artworks by living artists or dead to flip, they, they buy them, and they few years later they put them back in another auction, hope to make profit. They’re not truly, they’re investors, but there are still a lot of really art lovers out there, and so people like me and my friends, and I, you know, I know some of the great artists and great collectors, but I’m never going to be a superstar, and I don’t want to be a superstar, and I’ll tell you why before we answer one of your other important questions about how does an artist get into the market and move towards making a living at art. I don’t want to be a superstar because I’m not willing to do what’s required. To stay there even if I could, even if my art were, you know, spectacular enough to to gain that kind of visibility, and where galleries, gallerists were calling me up and saying, we want your art, we want your art, because I’m already selling, you know, it, and that’s not going to happen for me, but I know even more artists personally who have made a living who are selling pretty much everything they paint, even if they’ve got another job, no matter where they live, and there’s a protocol that needs to be followed to get there on any level in any place, and it takes a long time, and I think the internet, and especially watching people, you know, the cameras sped up and everything. Our brains begin to think that we should be painting a lot faster, when in reality, slower is faster. You will gain more expertise and control over your work if you just slow down and just give yourself six months to to a year to create a body of work, which is something that I want to talk about in depth, because marketing, all the marketing in the world, and all the techniques in the world will not sell a piece of art if nobody wants it, it’s got to compete in the marketplace, whichever marketplace that you choose to sell to, so, so I want to talk a lot about body of work, and I think you asked a question here. You wanted to talk about how artists can prepare and begin to make a living at art. Well, Calvin Goodman told me that this was, you know, around the year 2001 2002 that make over 10 net over 10,000 a year profit is point oh 1% Yeah, now I personally know artists who make a heck of a lot more than that, but there is no shame in making for an artist to be a local celebrity making 20 netting, I’m talking about profit, $20,000 a year. How many of you out there listening would be happy with that, I think. When you’re actually doing it, it, it creates real happiness. Now, some artists are going to go on to make a lot more of that. You have to be consistent, you have to be prolific, and you have to have a continuous, cohesive, recognizable body of work, and what happened to me, I mean, I made all the mistakes early on, is I was showing in a local, it was a frame shop, and back then they sold prints from print companies, but she also sold originals from local artists, she had, she was in an affluent community, and that’s almost a requirement, and people were in there all the time to get their artwork framed, so she had a solo show. I probably put up about 15 paintings that I had done in watercolor. I’d probably taken five years. I don’t, I don’t remember. Took me a long time to create that body of work. Well, a couple came in and bought almost all of them, and and then I sold every single painting in that show, and the show wasn’t supposed to be over yet, and she said, Well, what do you got, you know? And I learned my lesson the hard way, I said I don’t have anything, I don’t, I don’t have any work for you, so being productive with a developed style, and I’ll talk about that a little bit, because that can be very loose and. I know I can use examples of artists who, who do a lot of different subject matter, but it’s, you know, it’s that artist’s work, so you have to be the kind of personality that can pull this off, just can pull off creating that body of work consistently, consistently learning, improving, focusing on at least maybe work in a series for a while, you can change, you can change what you paint, but get started with something you know that’s going to be cohesive, make at least just, just don’t, don’t be posting everything before you’re ready. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard it, and other artists have heard it, even artists who are making a full-time living now. That when they first approached the galleries, the gallerist said, “Yeah, you’re good, you’re on your way, but you’re not ready yet. And I heard that too. I was ready and selling it outdoor shows, I was doing well, but I wasn’t ready for a commercial gallery, and you might ask why. It’s not because I wasn’t consistent, it’s because my skill level wasn’t there yet to compete with the other works they had on the wall, and in some cases, what they had on the wall was nationally known artists, and so I went to the resort areas in New England. I did end up working with some galleries. You wouldn’t know who they were. They sold my work. I didn’t have any replacements because I was too busy writing and doing other things, but I could have made it. I absolutely could have made it. So, so you have to have that body of work. 20 works would be ideal. Frame them all with the same frame, because if you end up doing outdoor shows or art in the park or other shows in your booth, you don’t want it to look like a patchwork quilt. You don’t want it to look like, please don’t buy used frames at antique shops and fix them up and make them all different. You want to look like a professional, even you fake it till you make it. You’ve heard that so, so much. You want to give people the impression that you’re in this for the long run, so that when they purchase your work, they have something to brag about. They love to brag, or a conversation piece in their home. And I learned a lot of these things from a woman named Monique Sakalarius, and she lived in New Hampshire. She’s in her 80s now. I don’t really know how active she is, but she is the one that made over $100,000 consistently every year, and I think she painted about 200 paintings a year. She taught me everything about getting into galleries there and showing it, outdoor shows, how to talk to people. Oh, she was amazing. She’d be people would come up, they knew who she was, because she ended up being a local celebrity, and people would come up to her booth, and she wouldn’t be just sitting there reading a book, she’d be standing there, or she’d sit on their eye level, because it’s about communication. If you don’t know how to talk to people, just smile, ask them where they’re from, or what brought them to the show, just start a conversation, and she would, before you knew it, I just watched her. She’s taken a painting off the wall that they love, and she’s putting it in their hands. They haven’t even said they’re going to buy it yet, but then she’s wrapping it up, you know. Anyway, I was never like that. It worked for her, but she worked in, oh, maybe six or seven gallery commercial galleries too. She sold it outdoor shows that were juried in New England. She’d come home with $10,000 cash in her pocket. I mean, she was the perfect example, and I know artists who are still doing outdoor shows. They’re doing them. I know most of them are in New England, and they’re smaller, they’re more internet. They do the same show every year, and sometimes when you’re new to the show, you don’t get noticed, because people know who they’re going to buy from before they get. Baer never do a show that has crafts or children’s activities. It doesn’t bring out art buyers. It has to be because the it has to be fine craft, but it can’t be something that you could go home and make because that’s a different crowd. You want, ideally, you want it to be even if it’s not Jude, you want it to be two-dimensional art. You want to know that other artists have been doing that show for the number of years, and you want to know what their sales are, and it brings out the same people every year. So, I’ve actually gotten into galleries by doing shows like that, because a new gallery, what they go in Maine or Cape Cod or something, they’ll go to the local show to find artists, and I got invited into a gallery that way. You have to be open to opportunities, you have to be friendly, but your work has to sell. They, I’ll tell you, it’s not a secret, and Monique used to say to this, this to me, she said, gallery gallery owners only care about one thing, will their clients buy your art, because if they don’t, they’re going to go out of business, they do you know that even back I don’t know what they are now, but like the the rental fees on on Main Street in Scottsdale, Arizona, used to be between 40 and $60,000 a month, and they had a staff and they had lighting. Can you imagine what would happen if they had a couple bad months of sales, they, and that’s why during the recession it was like a ghost town, there only the gal, the galleries that stayed open that had been open multi-generational, like Trailside and Legacy, they stayed open, but they carried a different set of artists, and a lot of the other galleries did, so, so let’s get back to the difference now today, and I thought about this, and today I see a huge move of people who are, we’ll talk about collectors, and there aren’t many collectors or patrons anymore. There are art buyers, but they’re tired of spending time online. They don’t go to Instagram, although I found that if somebody says what kind of art do you do, and I’m in a social setting, you know, line dance or whatever, I will just pull up the first page of my Instagram, you know, which has like nine images on it, and I’ll say they’re like, oh, wow, you know, they’re they’re not art collectors, they look like photographs, you know, that’s what they say, that’s a compliment, that’s all they know to say, and and so I say, well, if you’d like one, just click on it, you’ll get a bigger view, then they click on it and I leave it at that, and then we go on, and we just do other stuff, because I don’t - I have learned over the years not to tie anyone down talking to them, because they don’t know how to excuse themselves, and if you’re an outdoor show, you know how they will excuse themselves, is they will ask for your card, it’s an exit strategy for them, so sometimes, yeah, it’s usually an exit strategy. So you want to make relationships, and the best way to make relationships in any opening setting is to not promote your art, not don’t just start talking about your art, talk about their favorite subject, them. I learned this from Jack White, he was a great marketer, he used to write for fine art views too, and it really works. It’s so easy to talk to other people. Where are you from? You know. Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ve been there, always in that beautiful, you know, great. What brings you here? Second home, you know? Just be interested in that. Then you’ll get some people who want to just talk forever. So, what you do is you invite them to go look at the artwork, and then you just leave them alone. If they’re interested in something, you will find that, and I’m just talking in a non-gallery shows setting, if they’re interested in something. Me, you will see them staring at it for a while. If they leave and say, well, we’re, we’ll come back, they never come back, they never come back. But when you see them staring at something, you don’t try. I don’t try to sell them, I try to give them confidence in my, in their decision to like my artwork, because I’m not forcing them to like something about it, but maybe I’ll say, well, you know, what is it? Why, why are you looking at this? Is it, does it remind you of something? Do you collect that thing? I’ve, you know, I’ve gotten yes from different answers, and you find out, well, what is it about this painting that they like, and, and you just really concentrate on that one painting, and you tell them a little bit, don’t tell them, oh, this painting had great meaning for me, and I, I have had artist friends do that, and the people walk away because your meaning for them isn’t their meaning for them, and they actually don’t want you to ruin it for them, so it’s all about them, so you want to always make it about them, they connected somehow to your artwork, and sometimes you know you do shows one year and people connect, and the next year same show nobody connects, or it happens, it’s it happens, it’s you never know what will happen, but you have to be prepared to to communicate and engage with people who seem to like your work, I remember doing outdoor shows where, where I’d be, you know, people come in. I don’t force people to come in my booth. I’ve seen people who do that, and they’ll be polite, but they can’t wait to get back out. They don’t want any pressure sales pressure at all? You sell things by making a relationship, so they come in to looking at around. I said, I don’t. I’m not trying to talk you into buying things, but I’m always interested to see it every show I do. What is grabbing people’s attention, and I said, if I were to say, “Okay, I’m going to give you one a painting in my booth today, which one would you choose? And I’m not going to tell you what everybody else chose, but this is just information for me to see what’s connecting, and they will engage them. It makes a memory for them, and if they come back next year, they’ll probably stop by my booth. And when I’m first started out, I needed to do a lot of that, because nobody was interested in buying mine, because they, they were buying Monique’s or Harriet’s, or, you know, they came all prepared to this year. I want a Monique, you know, or, or whatever. They didn’t know me or see me, and there there was a little competition within the shows, so I’d bring my painting a lot of times I, I won second or third place in a category, and of course I could display that ribbon early on, and I almost always sold that painting. Social proof, social proof is really important. So that’s the outdoor show circuit, it can be a lot of fun. It takes some time to build up a clientele. Everything takes some time. The internet, you know, we watch these.. we watch people like Mark Magior. He was broke for so long, we forget that Bill Anton, who’s. who’s a great Western painter at Legacy Gallery and other galleries, that he didn’t have a lot of money when he first started out. His wife had to have a job, you know. This is the reality of it. So, don’t be in a hurry and create that body work. So, let me talk about what a body of work is. Everything, all your success boils down to the quality and saleability of your artwork. It must compete with whatever venue you sell it with it. Has to, you know, I used to think I could walk into a gallery in Scottsdale with one painting. Hi, I’m an artist, right? I was so naive, but it has to be priced to fit. Into that venue, but a body of work is finished. It can be any style, it can be different subject matter, but I’d say have at least 10 of your best works, have them framed and ready to hang in a, in a frame that you’ve chosen that you know that works for your work across the board, and you know you want, you want it to look like you know what you’re doing, and yes, you need a website, even if people, people think, I’ve got a website, I’m going to sell all my art for women. No, it just makes you look like a professional. People know that you’re in it for real, that you’re serious about it. And I have sold work from my website to people who have searched because I painted landscapes of places, they, I mean, I’ve sold several of people searched for that place of paintings of that place, and came to my website, and I shipped it. They weren’t scams, we had long conversations on the phone, and, and, and they could buy from my website, either using most of them, you know, they wanted to use credit cards, some use paypal, some sent me a check, and I, you know, it took a little bit longer, and I had to, I had to ship it to them, and and that worked out quite well, and remind me to talk about how I used to use my website to sell as I was artist in residence at a BMB luxury BMB when I visited Tucson in February, which was it’s the top visiting month in Tucson. So I had a credit card reader, you know, Square, Square up, but I tended not to use it because I didn’t want to carry all that. It kind of ruins the mood, you know, when you’re, when you’re eating breakfast with the BNB guests, and you know, and your work’s all sitting over there, and you don’t, you know, it’s, it’s sort of an extra bonus. I gave the owners the B and B, they were friends of mine, and I gave them a 20% on all the sales, so they kept what I didn’t sell, and they sold some even after I left. But here’s the key, and I’ll just put this in here, because I’m meandering anyway. But I, what I did was, I pull up my website, and I pull up the painting that that they wanted it, and if I didn’t have the painting on there, I could take a picture of it right there and post it. They could choose it, they could enter their credit card information right there, and oh, and please sign up for my email newsletter. And almost everybody who bought from my from me at the BMB went home, they were small paintings. I painted some of them while I was there. They went home and they bought again from my email newsletter. So back in the day, I don’t know how this works now, but people who bought your paintings in the past were six times more likely to buy again from you, so okay, now we were talking about how is, how about today? My premise was for artists who are just starting out, nothing is different, and nothing is different, because people who are interested in buying art want real print magazines now. They don’t want to be going online all the time, they don’t want to look at your Instagram account, and everybody else is, you know that just really interrupts their minds when they can scroll, and they get, and our minds get so confused. So, the way that things are the same is that you do the body of work, you go to the studio, do something you love, don’t get stuck in a rut that you’re going to hate being stuck in, because you will get known for something, whether it’s it’s locally, regionally, or nationally, and people. Collectors, even on the high level, will say, well, I’ve got enough of that. If they’re not buying for an investment, they’ll say, well, I have three of this artists already. They like variety now. There, I don’t see any patrons who were not investors who aren’t mixing it up, so you, you, you create the body of work, and I wanted to do this this year because I wanted to. I’ve learned a lot, and I want to. I moved to Arizona in 2020 I lived here when I was young, but I moved back from New England, and so you, if you want to sell in Arizona, you got to paint the West. People want what’s ever outside their window. If they’re on vacation and they’re at a tourist place, they might, they might want a seascape, they still life sells everywhere. Kathy Anderson, friend of mine, she sells almost all her still lifes at Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale. Daniel Keys sells his still lifes at Legacy Gallery in Scottsdale. So, if you’re good enough, and people just, you know, they love your work, and it can go anywhere in the country, but in New England, you, I painted Acadia National Park and Maine, because all the resort tourist towns were either in Cape Cod or they were in Maine, New Hampshire rights really didn’t buy much art, so, so I’m creating a body of work, and I need to cut out the false desire and need of posting continuously online, because my body of work is not ready yet, and we feel as artists that we’re so compelled, like, well, everybody’s saying you’re supposed to do reels, and you know you’ll get more engagement, blah blah blah blah. Do you know what? I’d get more engagement if I was already famous, but I’m not going to get, I have about 3000 followers on Instagram, and I, a number of years ago, I sought out to create relationships with Instagram users that were not artists who were lived in beautiful homes on the main coast, or their photographers, or they do other things, and I find them. We used to be able to find them with hashtags, so I’d find them, I’d go to their page, and I’d like, and I’d comment on their stuff, and I’d comment a lot, and all they needed to do was just click on my name and go to my page. Well, I have doctors, and there’s an eye surgeon who’s a photographer who said I could use any of his stuff. He follows me, so I’m getting likes from a very small crowd from people who are not artists, and they tend to like everything that I post, because I don’t post very often, you know, that’s a waste of my time, and not only that, but then I feel like I must go on and like everybody else’s stuff and give them out of boys and out of girls and everything. Well, before I know it, I’m just totally worn out, and I haven’t spent any time in studio, and and I’m getting tired of complimenting other artists’ artwork, and I don’t know about you, Laura, but I got to say that this has been going on for a number of years. Previously, with Facebook, is that I come away from social media feeling like a complete failure when I’m not, because I cannot help but notice people are posting, I got into this show and that show, and here’s my wallet at the Briscoe, and you know, and I feel like, you know, it’s big time FOMO, and and I am not going to probably, probably not going to be in their position, mostly because I, I don’t want to really have that kind of pressure in my life, but I come away feeling pretty bad some days, I think. Think that social media can make an artist feel like, why bother, you know, and do you know that’s false, because I can post one of my paintings on there. We have a private Facebook page in the retirement community where I live, and I don’t, you can’t sell stuff, but I just post what I’m working on, and stuff like that. The residents have bought my paintings, and you know, I don’t, you know, they’re they’re usually small studies, or whatever, and they have the means to buy it. They don’t ever want to have to go to a gallery, they’re not collectors, but they know me and they like my work. So that private page, which is a much smaller group, is a really good place on Facebook for me to post. So anyway, I just wanted to mention that I think you, you talked about social media losing users and people not wanting to use social media. I hear of artists all the time that are saying, oh my goodness, you know, I have an Instagram account, I’m posting, and you know what, people just scroll and they stop when they see something that blows them away, you know, or they know the person, or they think, oh, wow, that that artist is really successful, I want to be like that, you know, but they’re not buying a gallery owner or a manager recently said to me about an artist that posts every single day or multiple times a day, and she’s very successful, but he said, “Where’s the magic? He says, “Where’s.. where’s the the magic that the collector is looking for? You know, so I just thought I’d throw that out there.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:02:15

If you’ve been enjoying the podcast and also want to ask our guests live questions, then you might want to join our monthly webinar, The FASO Show, where our guest artists discuss marketing tips, share inspiring stories, and answer your burning questions in real time. Whether you’re a seasoned painter or just starting your creative journey, this is your chance to connect, learn, and spark new ideas. And whether you’re stuck on a canvas or building your creative business, this is where breakthroughs happen. Don’t miss out, ignite your passion and transform your art practice by joining us. Our next FASO show webinar is coming up on the 16th of July with our special guest Vladislav Yelisaev. You can find a sign-up link in the show notes. Yeah, no, and it’s, it’s really interesting that you also mentioned the what I like to call the content creation hamster wheel of I have to post something, I have to be present, people are going to forget that I exist, and it does kind of feel that way, and I’ve actually been in and out of social media, like I maybe posted two things in the past four years, because I got so tired, I was, I wrote once, like I’m on hiatus, you want to reach me, go to my website, email me through there, and I did have some people reach out, you know, like, oh, How are you doing, are you okay, and those are the people who actually matter because they are genuinely care, but yeah, I think the way that the algorithm works is just, it’s, it does not lend itself to the level of observation you would get if you go to a museum, if you go to a show, like no one’s, no one’s gonna look at a tiny square image for 20 minutes, the way you would at a museum or at a show, because the whole purpose of the app is to not do that. It’s like it’s to just, okay, I see it, it fills my entire view, because it is a tiny square, and then you move on,

Lori Woodward: 1:04:21

and you move on, and you move on until you’re absolutely exhausted. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:04:26

and then, and then that brings me to internet fatigue, which is what I’m starting to notice, that I think more people want real-life interaction, real-life everything, like even here in Stockholm, like, I feel like everyone goes outside. Obviously, it’s a summer, and, like, love the sun, but there’s also a level of, like, oh, there’s an event happening over here, we should totally go, or, oh, there’s this happening over there, or, like, there’s a very

Lori Woodward: 1:04:55

dimensional world. Yes,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:04:57

exactly. So, I think now we’re reaching the point where the. Pendulum is starting to swing the other direction, and that’s why I have heard marketers say that there are less users interacting on Instagram, and a good portion of the stuff that’s going on is actually just bots, or it is, you know, unfortunately, there are people out there, even on YouTube, every social media platform, who will use fake accounts to manipulate engagement, so it’s

Lori Woodward: 1:05:26

a waste of time. It is. It

Laura Arango Baier: 1:05:28

is because half the time you might get like a weird comment on one of your posts, or you might get a weird follow and it turns out to be a bot, so then the follow you got gets removed. So even in that sense it just, if everything feels very, what’s the word in English, like fake, like it just feels like very, like plastic, like it just doesn’t feel like you’re you’re interacting with real people either, like it’s so funny to see people argue with each other online, because it’s easy, right. It’s easy to argue with somebody you’re not looking in the eye, right? Or it’s easy to like talk to someone and say things you would never actually say to anyone in real life when you’re not physically there with them. You wouldn’t have the bravery to do that, right?

Lori Woodward: 1:06:16

And then you walk away feeling irritable. Yes, we don’t need that,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:06:21

no, or

Lori Woodward: 1:06:22

you read, you see somebody else having an argument, it’s kind of puts you in a bad mood, and then you know that that doesn’t make you want to go and do beautiful art, but you know what, I want to just cite what I’m seeing at gallery openings recently, I can go to some that are a little bit closer to home now that I live in the Tucson area, and then I want to talk about if you’re open to it, about if I were just entering the market in today, and I wanted to be established in the market, where would I spend my time, and what what steps would I take, and so I, what I’m seeing at the gallery opening, I’ve been going to the Settlers Westminster show since the late 90s, it’s been going on forever, it’s in February during the Gem and Mineral show. It’s usually around Valentine’s Day. It’s the biggest tourist time of the year. Now, years ago, they didn’t sell the works from the internet. You had to actually attend, and all works are sold by draw, and if you don’t know what that is, there’s a little box, and you put your name in it, and they pull out the box, and, and you know, they pull the first name, so it’s kind of funny, because I’ve been.. I wasn’t in the show years ago, but some of my friends from Putney were, and they said,’Could you go over and shake my box and see if there’s anything in it, you know, before they’d start pulling the names at usually at about 7o’clock in the evening. So people would come, collectors would come in to to buy from Oklahoma, they fly in from all kinds just to be there to get one of those paintings, and so especially the more famous expensive artists, if they were big collectors. So I put my name in a box a couple times, you know, to buy somebody else’s work, but I, my name didn’t get chosen. Now the exciting thing is that when, when there were a lot of people that wanted the same painting, and it could be expensive because it’s an established artist or it’s a new artist, and they would, they would get the box, and there’d be so many names, you know, stuffed in there, that they’d have to open the box and pull out a salad bowl full of papers for that one painting, and it could be, you know, back then, maybe it could be $5,000 you know, Jeremy Lipkin was in the show, and his would always get the bowl full, and so then they passed the bowl to somebody who’s sitting in the audience at the gallery, and it was so crowded you could barely move. It was so exciting. There was no place to park, and they pull out this bowl, and somebody would have to pull out. They still do this. There are still salad bowls full. They pull out the name, and somebody would, you know, maybe it’s $5,000$6,000 or $10,000 but. Pull out the name, and inevitably that person would scream with delight, and usually a woman, if it was a couple, the woman would scream, and everybody else would go, “Oh, because they didn’t get it, so there’s a sense of competition, which is great, and so in middle years when they did start taking names online, the crowds didn’t come. They weren’t there at the opening. In fact, I remember Scott Jones saying at Legacy Gallery when the Putney painters had the show. He says,”You know, only the artists show up to the openings these days. Everybody else just calls up on the phone, says I want that painting, first come first serve, and they, they sold before the opening night, so there were a lot of red dots already before opening night, so that was so true. It’s like all the artists go to the openings. Well, now again, what I’m seeing is a difference where people, where the room is full again, and people are competing, and they love, they love competing with each other for these, these, and they tend to be newer, younger artists, but sometimes they’re the older established artists, and sometimes they don’t compete for my work, but I have sold two out of the three years, so I’m happy about that. But it’s just an exciting to see that things are going back the way they were, and I’ve also had the chance to go to several openings at Medicine Man Gallery, Mark Seb Blitz Gallery, which is huge, she’s got shows going on all the time, and, and so those openings are full assured there’s artists that come up, but they’re mostly the artists that actually show in the gallery that attend, maybe they live in Arizona, there are a lot of collectors there, and then with Thomas Blackshear, they had a talk afterwards. I even bought something I couldn’t afford, the cowboys heads that were $25,000 but they all sold every single one, and they sold at the opening. There were people there who wanted to meet the artist, and I was so exciting. I was excited to buy a little drawing, a study that he did, you know, just to be part of it. And so I’m seeing a return to old times. If I could turn back Time Song by Cher, I would go back to the way that in some ways that art was sold before the internet. I’m seeing people buy print magazines, the big shows and auctions, and even artists. My friend Darcy Pete, who she comes down to Tucson for the winters, and she sells at a number of galleries around the United States, and she’s part of our little group that talks business on Wednesday. She’s great, and so she advertises in this in this in art Western art collector, other magazines, quarter page ad continuously, and I, she usually sells that painting, so I asked her, well, why, you know, what do you get from doing this? You know, it’s expensive, she said. “Well, I don’t ever expect. I’m not doing it to sell. I’m doing it to keep myself visible with collectors, and just to let them know that I’m a professional, I’m active, I’m out there, so I don’t just disappear from their view, and she’s advertising in the same magazines, and she puts the link in the magazine ad to the show at Settlers West, or to the show at her. She’s in number galleries, she only sells through galleries, so she just always puts the link to the gallery. Now you might, artists might think, well, that’s so unfair. Why would I do that? Why would you do it? Because they have collectors that you will never reach, and that’s why you want to work with. If your work is good enough to get into a gallery, then you can always sell on your own, but you’ve had validation like never before, even if it’s just a local regional gallery, you know. I can, I can cite friends and stuff that sell it at village galleries, they’re like the gallery on most. Most of the crooks are gone, so you know we don’t have to worry about that anymore, but the gallery owner has a different set of clientele who they are the gallery’s clientele, they want to be the gallery’s clientele, they don’t want to be your clientele, and I’ll tell you why, because I know a lot of collectors, they don’t want the artist contacting them, because they’re loyal to galleries to buy their art. The gallery vets the work, they’re not going to sell, they trust the gallery owner that’s been in business for a while, whatever, to vet the work, and they’re not going to sell something that they don’t think is valuable or worthy of being in their gallery, so they are loyal to galleries, and so I think artists need to know that, because they say, well, why won’t they give us the name of the people? Two reasons. It’s not like they’re trying to be stingy, of course. Artists used to go behind the gallery’s back and try to sell directly. Well, that doesn’t happen very much anymore, and the reason why it doesn’t happen very much anymore, is because the person who bought your artwork, for the most part, wants to remain anonymous. They do, they want to buy from a variety of artists, they don’t, they’re they want to have a collection, they’re having the time of their lives because they have the money to collect original art, they actually compete with each other at the shows, and it’s not about the artist. I realized this recently when I finally got into the Settlers West show. I asked, I said, Stuart, you know, do you think my work would sell at this show, that’s all he cares about. I’ve known him for years and years, and years ago, no, it wouldn’t have, it wouldn’t have been good enough. It is good enough to sell, but not at that show. And he said, well, let’s try it out and see how it goes. Now, if you don’t sell anything for two or three years at that show, you’re just not going to stay there. That’s just the way it is, and that’s the way it is at all galleries at all levels. They just cannot afford a wall space for an artist that’s not selling. I got, I got kicked out of ant gallery back in the day when watercolor was hot, and when G Clay Prince came out, watercolor fell sales of water because they couldn’t tell the difference, oils came into folks, so I had to go up and pick up all my watercolors at the gallery in Maine, and and then another artist, she was watercolorist, and same exact thing. Well, she was so depressed. I drove her. I took her out to lunch. We went to the other side of town of Kennebunkport. There was a gallery owner I knew over there. He had a lot of more watercolorists, so we had all our paintings in the car, and and we walked in, and I said to him, I said, “You know, she’s an incredible artist, you should see her watercolors, she’s just so good. And he said, “Oh, sure, said I have some in the car, would you mind if I brought a few in? And I’m so brave, I brought him in. He looked at him. He was blown away. Of course, she’s good. The other gallery couldn’t sell watercolors anymore. That was the problem. So he was in Dock Square, more of, you know, shops and stuff nearby restaurants. So, so we brought him in. I’m going out to get the paintings. She’s still in there, and he said to her, “She’s your agent, isn’t she? And she said, “No, she’s just a friend. Anyway, he took almost all the paintings on the spot, so you never know, you know. Don’t give up if you’ve got good work, and you know comparison is the thief of joy. Just don’t compare yourself to the top artists online, you will not give yourself enough credit. Yes, it has to be good. Yes, people have to want to buy it. Yes, it has to emotionally connect with them. Perfect, perfectly composed paintings don’t sell because they’re perfectly composed. The buyers don’t know anything about composition. They don’t care that the tree’s right in the middle or the horizon. They don’t care. They think it’s truth and beauty. They connect with it. Don’t even worry about that. Not worth it. So, so, where was it going? The galleries, you know, people are wanting to go on real vacations. They want to be in places, they want to eat out at real restaurants. They want, they people do have a lot, especially retirement crowds and stuff. They have a lot of money, they have a lot of time. What are they going to do with it all, well, maybe they want to buy, maybe they have second homes, they want to buy artwork. Now, interestingly, another thing that gallery owner said to me recently, because I’m always asking questions, is do they care, you know, for artists like me who aren’t the superstars, I’m not going to be investment or resold on the market. It’s just true. And I asked, well, so for artists like me who do not have a national reputation right now, but I can, I can’t sell at the gallery shows, do they care about signature memberships? Do they care about hidden? Said no, no way. They don’t care. They don’t even look at who painted the painting. They just buy what they like. And I said, oh, well, that changes everything for me. That gives me a lot of freedom. That means that I can paint a portrait of a cowboy. I love to paint portraits. That means that I can paint landscape, I can paint, I can give a variety of artwork, because it’s about them, it’s not about me at my level, it’s about them creating a conversation piece, a beautiful thing for their home or homes, usually they own more than one, so that just gives me the freedom to paint whatever I want, and I’m seeing even, you know, nationally known career artists who paint, you know, in the West, they might paint, you know, Native Americans, they might paint floral still lifes, they might paint landscapes. Kyle Ma just had a sellout show at Legacy Gallery, he had a number of floral still lifes, he’s a little bit more famous for his landscapes. He sold them all. Now he’s got a name, he’s got that halo around his head, you know. People know his name, but I’m seeing other artists who are, you know, new, pretty new to the scene, who are painting different subject matter, and it’s not even an established style, but they’re painting different subject matter, and they’re, they’re very well painted, they’re representational, of course, they’re not photo realism by any means, but they’re selling both in the same show, and then after people buy the artist, then they might want to know more about the artist, but they originally bought the painting just because they liked it, so I think a lot of what artists think actually happens in the art world doesn’t, it’s just it’s what you’ve heard in the long past, it’s but I know from experience and watching people that there’s a lot of freedom out there on every level, so you know, artists who sell it, local gift shops and stuff, they get a whole wall. The owners just thrilled to have them. They sell everything, and everyone loves them. Who could ask for more than that? Right.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:24:01

Yeah, yeah,

Lori Woodward: 1:24:01

so do you have any other questions? How are we doing on time?

Laura Arango Baier: 1:24:07

I think we’re getting close to the end, but I mean, I feel like there’s always so much beyond even just like what we’ve got left to discuss, that like,

Lori Woodward: 1:24:20

oh, pricing,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:24:22

yeah, that’s actually the next thing I really wanted to cover, because I think that’s like one of the top questions every single artist out there will ever ask, especially when we’re starting out, is how the heck do you come up like a really good pricing strategy that you know if you’re going to purchase a gallery or if you’re going to go and sell, you know, at a show, or you know, an outdoor show of some sort, like what would you recommend?

Lori Woodward: 1:24:49

Okay, so pricing is a really big area, and I wrote a blog years and years ago for American artists, they’re online, it was their number one buy. Um, hit blog for a decade, so artists, it’s very confusing, but your price matters more about where the arts being sold than anything. You can’t arbitrarily price, you can’t arbitrarily put a high price on work unless you’ve got proven sales at that price, so it’s better to start out low. In fact, gallery owner said keep, keep it on the low side, because you know the economy could, could dictate that people, people aren’t going to buy a painting because it’s more expensive unless they’re investing, so you want to keep it reasonable, but you want to always make a profit. There’s no sense in giving your art away. There’s no sense in selling art. If it doesn’t sell, then you just gotta get better. You know that, that’s your, that’s your cue, that’s your wake-up call. But once you do start selling, you, if you’re just starting out, and I did this, and I recommend it to other artists, maybe they’re doing a show at a, oh, I don’t know, country club or outdoor show, or whatever, something where they don’t have to invest a lot of money that you take every single cost that it costs you to make that that work of art, the frame, the materials, part of the show fees, whatever you know, it can split that up, you want to calculate every single cost that it costs you, and then you want to double that to get your retail price, and that way you make a profit. And if somebody wants a little bit, 10% of a discount, I never give a discount unless to buy more than one painting, because it just doesn’t happen that way, but but but, yeah, so you double the cost, you get a retail price, and you know, when you’re just starting out, you need quality materials, because it’s just paintings just look better on linen than they look on canvas, you know, it’s easier to paint on quality materials, you want things to be archival, but you know, so maybe, maybe my costs, or you know, 300 bucks, because I’m not, you know, starting out, I’m not at the the point where my paint, my frames cost 300 bucks, you know, so if so, I’d say, well, my costs are this now. If I work through somebody who takes a commission, then I’m going to add that commission, and it’s important when you work with a gallery that you double the cost of all your your supplies, including your frame, because let’s say I spent $150 on the frame, it’s not unheard of, even if it’s a little one, if I say before we even talking about, you know, the gallery commission, I want to get all that money back for that frame, so I’m going to double that, because most galleries are going to take 50 or 40% so I double the cost of the frame, so we’re, we’re talking 304 $100 of my supplies, we’re not even talking about my time or expertise, but I’m going to at least get back everything that I’ve, that’s cost me. I’m only just getting paid for getting better when I’m first starting out. No, but I want to make profit. I do not want to come home with in the hole knowing I lost money, I never sell to somebody who can’t afford to buy original art, and yeah, you know the reason why is that you don’t go around feeling sorry for people like, oh, well, I want to be able to give art to people that you know, if you’ve got family members, just give them a painting, don’t sell it to them, and and then Monique used to say, I’m not in the charity business, I’m in business, and as, as an artist, a professional artist who wants to make a career out of it, you are a small business, and you have to run it like a business, and it needs to be profitable at every step of the stage. Keep your expenses as low as you can. Don’t try to do shows that it cost you too much. Don’t, don’t pay for ads. I did that early on. I took my best painting, put it on newspaper that was in Scottsdale. Well, I ended up on the same page next to Kevin McPherson. How’s that going to go over, right? Yeah, they made money for me, but I didn’t make anything, so you know, make sure that your work is vetted. It takes a while. Be patient with yourself. Spend, spend as much time as you can in the studio. Here’s another thing that I would do, that I’m doing, is I chunk my weak parts. The stuff I really have trouble with, it’s holding me back from being productive, it’s a, it’s a term that Brian Mark Taylor came up with a number of years ago, says take the thing that you’re weakest with and just do little studies of that part until it’s your strength, take the time to do that, and you will have a lot more fun, and you will get work done a lot faster, so with the pricing, once you sold a work at a certain price, like I just sold my, my eight by 10 at the miniature show, it’s on the low side for $950 I sold my nine by 12 for $980 yeah, my frames were very expensive. I made an investment myself, but I still came home with money in my pocket, right? If I start selling, I cannot sell. I do not sell at where I live in the auditorium. People say, why don’t you sell there? I said, because it doesn’t respect the people who already spent that much money on my artwork, so I can’t undercut, and why would I want to if I can get somebody to buy my work for $950 Why would I want to sell it for any less? So don’t, don’t backtrack once you start selling it, shows that is your retail price, and if you sell most of your work at that retail price, or it all sells too quick, don’t don’t take a huge leap in price just because somebody else who’s really famous is cost so much more. Test the market, raise it by 10% for the next year, or whatever, if you’re really selling out, you can, I mean, if, if your work’s so cheap, everybody’s buying it all the time, raise it by 20% The people who already buy your work will be thrilled, because they’re like, wow, I got a bargain, you know, and this person’s going places, but for the time being, for me, I’m not going to raise my prices. I asked, should I raise my prices this year, and the answer was probably no. There’s a lot of artists that come in, they sell, and they, and they raise their prices too high, too fast, and they just price themselves right out of the market, so, so that’s that’s my advice on pricing to get started, go from there, and it’s a slow growth process, just just know that we’re looking at people online, we don’t see what they did, how they were 10 years ago, you know, but for most of us, there are superstars like Rachel Brownlee, who did the Mountain Oyster Club show three years ago, got an award, sold her painting, her work is spectacular and unique, and must take her hours and hours to get it done, and so she went right to the top, and just a few years later she’s in Legacy Gallery, she’s in Prix de West, but if you look at her work, how many of us could even begin to produce the kind of work that she does, you know, and so there’s a reason why that happened to her, and it’s because of the quality and just the epicness of her artwork, she was doing that for years, and a friend of hers said, “You know what? You should see, you should enter the show and see if you can get in, and that’s what started all. But her work was ready. I know artists that they don’t feel ready, but I mean, I’ve had, you know, studio mates, I don’t feel ready. I don’t feel ready for a gallery. I don’t feel I need to sell my work daily paintings for 20 bucks. I’m going to be nuts. You’re really good, you’re really consistent. And I said, you know what, you’re not ready, but your work is ready. You could be paid. Playing a much bigger game, and she didn’t. She just had a solo show last year at a major gallery in Maine, so there you go.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:35:08

Yeah, yeah, I think didn’t

Lori Woodward: 1:35:11

get there right away, but she got there.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:35:13

Yeah, I mean, there was still all the time that she put into developing her work, right, which actually you mentioned earlier about voice, which I kind of now really want to circle back to that really quick, but yeah, it’s one of those things where, like, some people, they’re a little too overconfident, and they jump too early, and then there are people who are not confident enough, and they use every other thing as an excuse to not do it, which is perfectly normal. It can be, I think, one of the things probably is also like the higher expectations and commitment that you have to have when you’re working with a gallery, specifically with a gallery, because their timelines are so, so strict, right? If you have to have work for a specific show or another show, like, you really like you said, you have to be prolific, or you have to have some sort of really strict studio time, and I think, for, oh, yeah, that’s so

Lori Woodward: 1:36:11

important,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:36:11

yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a huge commitment,

Lori Woodward: 1:36:15

yeah, huge. I once had a gallery, I used to help get other artists into galleries who were already established locally, and gallery owner in Scottsdale said to me, don’t bring me anybody who isn’t painting at least 75 works a year minimum, because that’s what it’s going to take for them to work with galleries and I think that’s pretty much true, because you look at most of the artists, you know, who are career full-time artists making a living, and they, yeah, they teach and stuff too, but they aren’t, you know, maybe they’re in four galleries, they’ve got to keep those walls full, so they, you know, you’re making not only you’re making a huge commitment to the quality of your artwork, but to the production of it. And if you don’t think that you’re cut out to do that, like me, you can still sell your work. I still sell my work. I want to do small work shows invitation. I don’t want to be represented by a gallery, because I think that pressure would throw me over the top. Just being in the small work shows with nationally known artists has been a little bit intimidating for me for the first time in my life, but I just know I’m not going to meet that need. I’m not going to be in the studio all the time. I’m not ready to make that commitment, but that’s okay. It just means I’m going to sell my work on a smaller scale, and I’m happy with that. So, okay, so we cover pricing,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:38:01

yes, and I wanted to circle back really quick about voice, because I mean,

Unknown: 1:38:06

yes, of course,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:38:07

I do want to, like, after that, I do want to do, like, a little bit for our listeners, kind of like a checklist type of, like, bing bang boom, if you’re starting out as an artist, like, this is what you got to do, so we can make a little bit of like a summary, yeah, because it’s just it’s a lot, but yeah, so voice, I think that’s another huge, huge, huge thing that a lot of artists, thank

Lori Woodward: 1:38:31

you for bringing

Laura Arango Baier: 1:38:32

about, yeah, because it’s like, oh, how do I develop my voice, or what is, what is even a voice, or like, what’s is that different from style, and, like, you know, bada bing, bada boom. Do you mind telling us a bit more? I

Lori Woodward: 1:38:45

can give you examples.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:38:47

Perfect.

Lori Woodward: 1:38:47

So, so you had the paint in us. Don’t try to paint like somebody else just because they’re successful, and the only way that you’re going to get to find your voice is to paint all the time, do a bunch of studies, find out what works. I mean, I’m, I’ve been painting for 50 years, and I’ll try something out, and I’ll go, well, that was cool. I’m going to try that again, and I want to use my friend Karen Bruces as a, an example. She was the person who did the daily paintings for a long time. She’s very prolific. She did graphic arts before she got into fine art. She’s all she and her husband have always had their own businesses, so they’re really, really excellent at running business, but her, she’s got a very bright contemporary palette, and she paints, she paints for still life. Paints people, she used to paint mug shots. She, she painted room interiors that were just.. I mean, I bought some, and now she’s in a main gallery in Kennebunkport that she got into as a recommendation by a friend who was in that gallery, who saw her work and had the owner come out and and visit her studio, that the best way to get into a gallery is to have another artist who’s in there recommend it. Her style is so recognizable, and it is it. I’ve seen the style. She went from the Daily Painter style, no, Sarah Sedgwick, and, and others, but she developed her own color palette, and it’s very bright, sort of transparent oils, and you cannot walk by one of her paintings and not notice it. It’s just, they are just delightful and fun, and they just give you a good feeling, and she’s, she sells everything, no matter what, what the subject is, of course. When she’s, you know, painting for the gallery along the coast, it’s a seasonal- all those are seasonal galleries. She’s going to paint. She paints people on the beach, you know, carrying lawn chairs and umbrellas and stuff, or kids and inner tubes in the in the waves, and you just know it’s her painting, or lobster boats, or you know, whatever, she developed that style. I watched her develop that style, and she didn’t. She painted continuously fast. She didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether it’s coming out, you know. She didn’t think painting was good. She says, “I’ll just put it in the antique shop, we’ll just sell it over there, you know, and and she’s just paints, paints, paints, paints. She doesn’t have a lot of time, so I think she only spends two or three hours a day painting, but she is, she’s become sort of a formula painter, and and I find that people who paint formulas can paint different subjects, but you find your style really fast by just painting and experimenting and being willing to throw stuff out. Oh my gosh, you know, some of my mentors say they cut up their paintings and throw them away, and those are paintings that would be my very best if I could do them, but that’s how you find your voice. You find your voice by enjoying, risking just painting every day without putting a lot of pressure on yourself. You know, it’s just paint. Richard Schmidt used to say that to me, Laurie, it’s just paint. You know, you can scrape it off, you don’t care, it’s, it’s, it’s not who you are, your reputation, just paint, just do it, and that’s how not only do you, you improve by repetition, by failing, by experimentation, and you know if you’re doing that all the time, you’re going to end up with a pretty good body of work, which you can select from, and then maybe you get a little bit selective about, you know, which ones you take to a show, or you, Karen, and I, Karen Bruce, and a number of others of us, you know, back in 2012 I joined their shared studio. It was in a mill building that was run down, but it had a lot of artisans in there, so every they had classes, they had shops, and perfect. We turned the front area, had beautiful windows, lights, French doors into our gallery, and we sold a lot of artwork. We all worked in the back, but we had lights on. We just turned. We just owned that gallery, and we had such freedom. Collaboration between artists is a beautiful thing, especially if you get a group of artists where you’re all just really pretty easy going. Works great. great, but Karen developed style. My friend Monique Sakalarius, she had - she had a formula, so her pain - she painted all her underpants with red, she painted French impressionistically. She had formal training, but she just, everybody recognized her work, and she painted about 200 paintings a year, so, and she sold most of them.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:44:49

Amazing.

Lori Woodward: 1:44:50

Yeah, so, and then another guy, Dennis Sheehan, he’s he’s gearing down now that he’s older, he’s teaching a lot. But he did paint about 400 paintings a year, and he, he, he followed a formula, so he made a lot of money, he had a family to support, you know, there’s he, he did, he did his work was very, very well collected, so just go for it. Play around, find out what you like, experiment. Don’t spend too much on supplies, and say,”Well, if I only try pastel, maybe no. Don’t just stick to one, get very good with it, understand it. Expect to make a lot of failed paintings. Okay, but you’re going to fail your way up to success,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:45:46

absolutely. And then to kind of close off the conversation before we hear about where people can reach out to you, do you mind giving us just like a recap, right? If someone is starting out today and they decide, okay, I’m going to do this full time, what’s like top things for them to really set their sights on?

Lori Woodward: 1:46:15

Well, make create a vision, a vision that is specific, that’s reachable in the short term, that you believe that you can actually do it. Don’t you know, dreams don’t go very far. What, what happens is the next step goes far. So create a vision that you can reach within the next year or two, expect there to be stuff that doesn’t work out, but it, if you don’t try, you won’t get there. I study with mentors, and in the area, I study with people who, whose work I don’t want to emulate them, because I’m not a copycat kind of person, but they can teach principles that I think will help me, and I have more than one mentor, and I don’t tell them about the other mentors, because they actually get jealous, but so study, improve, make sure that go to go to regional galleries, or you know, tourist areas. Do not walk in like you’re a collector. Do not walk up to every painting and look how it’s done, and comment and look at the price, because collectors never do that. They walk in, they don’t look at the price, they don’t look up close, they don’t care about how it’s painting, they just look around, they find something that catches their eye, they walk up to it, but they don’t get real close, because they’re picturing it on the wall, and they only look at the price if they’re thinking about actually buying it, and then they turn around and they look for a staff member, and they want to know more. Okay, so Scott Jones got on my case about that, but he didn’t understand that that you want to see how they treat people who aren’t artists, and so you don’t want to act like an artist, because they’ll ignore you a lot of times. No, it happens. So, go in, visit galleries, find a gallery that isn’t the most expensive, doesn’t have the, you know, super major, you know, well-known artists. There’s lots of galleries on Cape, you know, in tourist areas in Arizona villages. They’ve been in business for a long time. See what the prices are with the artists, you know. Walk up to the gallery owner, see if they’re attentive to you, because a lot of times if they’re not attentive, maybe you don’t want to be in there to ask them, “Oh, tell me about this artist, you know, whatever. Just pretend, find out about the industry, find out, go to Instagram, just to see artists that, who you like. If you look through a magazine, an art magazine, and you just flip through, flip through, and you stop and you dog ear any page that you go ooh and you don’t have to analyze it, justify it, you said ooh and dog ear it, and then you go back and you see what they have in common, and that’s the way that your mo. Is likely to want to paint, it’s true. At least for now, you’ll change in the future, but it’s a starting place. Then you can look up some of those artists online, you can find them, you know, Instagram, social media, whatever, and you’re not trying to be like them, because they’ve been working at this for many years, but it just gives you a direction to move into, to say that’s what I like, that’s my taste, and so I’m going to develop that taste the best I can, see if I can, you know, find some online demos and stuff like that. Don’t even worry about marketing right away until you have that body of work, because you don’t want them saying you’re not ready yet. You want them to say, I’d like to invite you into my gallery, and I’ve had that happen, so you know that’s you want to be, you want to be totally ready to make your debut. Don’t feel rushed, don’t feel pressured, like, oh, you’re supposed to do this and that, the other thing. Don’t feel any pressure, you go at your own pace, because slower is faster.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:51:19

Beautiful. I love that, that is very true, very very true. Yeah, and then do you have any upcoming shows or exhibitions or anything that you would like to promote?

Lori Woodward: 1:51:36

I do the Settlers West miniature show, but what the direction I’m heading is to do more writing again, and I do want to do more marketing research. I’m actively researching what’s working for artists on different levels, artists I’ve known through the years. I just get in contact with them, and I’m going to blog about that. I have a sub stack. Oh no, it’s sort of like, oh, you need more engagement. I think, shut up, I don’t want that. I have about 1500 subscribers to my email newsletter on my website, and most of those are there because I used to write blogs, and so I want to start blogging again. This is the time in my life when I want to contribute and help artists, and so that’s going to be my main thing. I will also post my paintings step by step, and my approach with that has always been even when I’ve done demos for groups and I say, oh, I made it, that was a big goof, I made a mistake. My approach is, I made a mistake, this looks terrible. How do I fix it? You know, because none of us paints perfectly all the time, right. So that’s where I’m going. They should go to my website. They can go to my Instagram if they want. That’s where I post a lot of what I’m currently working on, but I do want to really beef up my blog. I would say that 90% of the visitors that get to my website are coming there for blogs I wrote a long time ago, so that’s who my audience is. It is also a way for me to sell paintings to people who want them, so that’s it. I’m playing a small game now. I’ve done plenty in my younger years,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:53:42

but that’s wonderful, and I think I’m also going to be including all your links. Okay, show notes, but do you mind telling us what your website is?

Lori Woodward: 1:53:51

It’s Laurie L O R I Woodward W O O D W A R d.com just my name.com and my, my, my user number is 5700 It starts. I got that website so long ago.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:54:11

Yeah, you’ve got the, the short numbers. Yeah, that’s how you know you’ve been around for a while, which is amazing. Yeah, but yeah, I think I’m definitely signing up for your newsletter, because I think there’s, you know, you’ve definitely experienced a lot of the art world, the way that it functions, what works, what doesn’t work, and the fact that you’ve experienced it too, like you’ve witnessed artists who experience these types of, like, some of them have had windfalls, some of them have not, some of them have made it work somehow, and that’s, you know, one of the beauties of the art market is precisely that it functions depending on how you function, right? If you don’t like teaching, okay, focus on tackling, if you like teaching, teach. And you can sell on the side, or oh, I just want to do galleries, and I don’t want to talk to anyone. I’m sure you have to be a really, really good painter with a really good connection, but yeah, it’s like you hit the nail

Lori Woodward: 1:55:12

on the head, because, because people want a protocol, and there is no protocol, because we’re all individuals, we have to know who we are and who we are determines on what is realistic for

Laura Arango Baier: 1:55:27

us. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, like kind of like how you said, you know, some some people that they just need to have that prolific quality, that ability to paint fast, and and some people I’ve actually, you know, like Audner Drum, he makes like six paintings a year, and they’re all massive, of course. His price range is different, yeah,

Lori Woodward: 1:55:50

right.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:55:50

Rice range is different, and of course, he’s been around for many, many, many years. So he does have, you know, his collectors from before, but no, he doesn’t really work with galleries.

Lori Woodward: 1:56:03

Yeah, and there is that, there is that option. If I were starting out, I would even get.. I worked with frame shop galleries and local galleries and stuff, and I would start.. I would try to at least get into that, because when people go to your website, who went, I started selling on my own, I left galleries because I wasn’t prolific enough, and I started selling on my own at different venues, even in a high-end antique shop, I rented a booth, I sold everything there, and and I kept in, you know, the people weren’t.. I wasn’t there when they bought it, but I sold pretty well, and I sold on my own for most of my career. I did portrait commissions, whatever, whatever, and you know, you, you, you got to go with your flow, and you end up building an audience over time, but you do once you start building an audience, get them to sign up for your email newsletter, because they will, especially if they bought something from you, then they’re invested, right, so they will sign up, and they will buy again from you, and you can, you know, use that, and you can see who opens it, and you know, stuff like that. I lose, I lose subscribers every time I put an email newsletter out. That’s normal. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:57:35

but yeah. Well, thank you so much, Lori. This was an eye-opening conversation, very encouraging, also, which I really love. I feel like so many, so many times it’s easy to be so bleak about selling as an artist, and I see it’s not. I see

Lori Woodward: 1:57:53

a lot of good things happening, and I, I’m, will be doing research with artists, and explaining to you that they’re doing very well, the people who aren’t doing very well, probably it’s their art is not really ready yet.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:58:12

Yeah, and that’s one of the hard truths, I guess. It is, it is. Yeah, just develop your work, have a day job if it’s really, really necessary, or have a way to, like, not worry about your economy while you develop that work. Yeah, you

Lori Woodward: 1:58:27

can teach long before you’re.. I taught long before my work was ever gallery ready.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:58:37

Well, there you go. Oh man. Well, thank you so much again, Lori, for being with us. Thank

Lori Woodward: 1:58:43

you for having me.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:58:45

Of course, I’m so happy. Thank you to everyone out there for listening to the podcast. Your continued support means a lot to us. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for the podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or leave us a comment on YouTube. This helps us reach others who might also benefit from the excellent advice that our guests provide. Thank you.

Artists—you—do not need another complicated website builder. You don’t need to become a web designer, to study page layouts, to install plugins, or to spend a whole afternoon figuring out how to add just one new painting.

You need to make art.

And when a new piece is ready, adding it to your website should be as easy as posting it to Instagram.

That is the first important difference between FASO and general-purpose website builders.

FASO was built specifically for artists.

If your impression of FASO was formed years ago, it is time for you to take another look. We have rebuilt and modernized the experience around the way artists actually work: our interface is now clean, beautiful, intuitive, and fully usable from your phone. Here’s today’s FASO:

With FASO, adding a new artwork is not some secondary feature buried inside a system designed to work for everyone including restaurants, dentists, plumbers, lawyers and yoga studios.

Adding and updating art is the central act around which FASO is designed.

Adding a new artwork, and a brand new page on your website to sell it, is this simple:

1. You upload the image, adding the title, size, medium, and price in the process.

2. Choose whether it is available for purchase or inquiry.

3. You are done. It is on your website and ready to sell.

When you upload a new piece to FASO, something important happens. Unlike a social media post—which briefly feeds someone else’s platform (and AI training) before disappearing into the endless scroll—you have added that artwork to a professional home you control. Most art websites fail because they aren’t updated and used by the artist. And they aren’t used because it’s not easy to use them.

When you add art to your FASO website it becomes part of your permanent body of work. We present it in a beautiful setting where collectors can find it, learn more about it, send you an inquiry about it, or purchase it. In addition, your site visitors can join your mailing list and ask to hear from you again. FASO gives you all of this out of the box.

With FASO, you’re not on your own. Once you upload a new piece of art, FASO’s built-in marketing system, which I’ll tell you more about in my next email, goes to work to promote the piece on your behalf.

We believe that your website should not compete with the studio for your time. Your website should support your studio time.

That is one reason we have spent more than two decades making FASO unusually easy for artists to maintain. The best artist website is not the one with the most complicated design options. It is the one an artist will actually keep alive with new work. And none of them are easier for that purpose—that most important purpose—than FASO.

If starting a new website seems daunting, please remember that you do not need to rebuild your entire online art presence is one day.

Just start with ten strong artworks.

Choose the pieces that best say: “This is the work I am here to make. And it is the work that only I can make.”

Give us a try and see how easy and quick it is to build a serious home around them.

Get Started with FASO for Free

Free for 30 days
No credit card required
Keep your existing site while you build

Creatively,

Clint Watson
FASO Founder and Art Fanatic

P.S. You do not need to take down or change your current website to explore FASO. Build your FASO site during the free trial, compare it with what you have now, and decide which feels like the better home for your art.

As always, let us know what you think.

Leave a comment

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“People start out painting what they know. Then they learn to paint what they see. The third stage is the best stage: you paint what you feel.” — Ned Mueller

In Episode #185 of The FASO Podcast, longtime illustrator, fine artist, and teacher Ned Mueller reflects on the habits, skills, and relationships that have sustained his career for decades. His advice is practical, but it also reaches beyond technique to address resilience, artistic identity, and the realities of building a meaningful creative life.

1. A lasting art career requires patience, perseverance, practice, and passion.

Mueller’s “four Ps” provide a clear framework for long-term artistic growth. Patience allows artists to accept that meaningful progress takes time, perseverance helps them continue through setbacks, practice strengthens their skills, and passion keeps them emotionally connected to the work. Together, these qualities help artists remain committed to their craft and create paintings that reflect genuine enthusiasm for their subjects.

“Find something you love and can get excited about, because if you’re not excited about your painting, it’s going to show.” — Ned Mueller

2. Artists should build strong fundamentals before trying to express everything they feel.

Mueller describes artistic development as a progression from painting what you know, to painting what you see, and finally to painting what you feel. The emotional stage may be the most compelling, but artists cannot reliably reach it without first learning how to observe, draw, organize values, and understand color.

3. Drawing trains the eye, regardless of what an artist chooses to paint.

Artists do not need to specialize in figures to benefit from drawing. Whether they study landscapes, portraits, still lifes, animals, or interiors, sustained drawing practice strengthens judgment, proportion, design, and visual sensitivity. Mueller’s larger point is that artists become better by learning to see more accurately.

4. Simplifying a subject is often more valuable than adding detail.

Mueller encourages artists to think in large shapes, major value relationships, and clear masses before focusing on small features. Plein air painting is especially useful because changing light and limited time force artists to identify what matters most. Once artists stop trying to paint every leaf, branch, or surface detail, they begin making stronger and more intentional decisions.

“Once artists begin thinking in shapes instead of details, they really start thinking like artists.” — Ned Mueller

5. Small studies can produce more growth than one ambitious painting.

Mueller recommends making numerous small value, color, and plein air studies rather than investing all available time in a single large canvas. A small format encourages experimentation, speeds up decision-making, and makes failure less intimidating. Completing several studies also gives an artist more opportunities to solve problems and recognize patterns in their work.

“You will learn more by completing ten small paintings than by spending a day or two on one large painting.” — Ned Mueller

6. Artists improve more quickly when they seek instruction and constructive criticism.

A knowledgeable teacher can help an artist avoid years of unnecessary trial and error. Mueller also recommends forming small critique groups in which artists can share work, exchange thoughtful feedback, and build lasting friendships. The most productive groups remain supportive while making room for honest discussion and multiple perspectives.

7. Professional growth often requires both adaptability and reliability.

Mueller’s career moved from illustration and commercial assignments into fine art, teaching, workshops, galleries, and juried exhibitions. His experience demonstrates that artists may need to accept commissions, explore new income streams, or work in several areas while developing their personal voice. He also learned during his illustration career that clients valued artists who could meet deadlines and complete assignments dependably, even when significant money was at stake.

8. A meaningful creative practice can provide purpose during difficult seasons.

Mueller speaks candidly about chronic pain, health limitations, and the frustration of no longer having the energy he once had. Art continues to give him something meaningful to work toward, while the support of his wife, Karen, and his relationships with other artists help him remain connected. His story suggests that an art practice is not only a career or a means of self-expression; it can also become a source of structure, identity, and resilience.

Mueller’s advice is ultimately grounded in consistency rather than shortcuts. Artists must keep strengthening their skills, remain open to guidance, accept the realities of the marketplace, and continue making work they genuinely care about. A sustainable art life is built one study, one critique, and one determined return to the easel at a time.

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PS — Note from Clint: One of the reasons I built FASO is because I believe art is important, artists are important, and the work you’re called to create deserves to be taken seriously. We are all sharing “miracles of existence” through our art.

Yes, at FASO, we build professional artist websites. Yes, we talk about marketing. Yes, we give artists tools to present their work, tell their stories, reach collectors, and sell more art.

But that is the how.

The why is that we love art, and we want to push back against a world that too often treats art like content and artists like algorithms. The modern world denigrates Beauty in preference of profit and efficiency. At FASO, we hold Beauty sacred.

So we don’t just host artist websites. We promote artists. We feature their work. We try, in our own small way, to help more art find the people who need it. And that informs everything we do and build.

If that resonates with you, we’d be honored to have you join us.

Get Started with FASO for Free

PPS — If you’re not ready to look at FASO, you can support our mission by simply clicking the heart icon at the top or bottom of this article. That helps us reach more artists and art lovers and helps us spread Beauty to a world that is desperate for it.

—Clint

Our use of AI in this article: Our team worked with AI to help generate this summary and from there we manually edited it. Our beef with AI is primarily when it is used in a way that reduces opportunities for artists. Our goal, in the places we do utilize AI, is to use it in a way that supports human artists. And we believe this use case supports rather than harms.

At FASO, we do not train AI on your artwork for the purposes of using it to generate alternative images. We do use AI to protect your artwork from scrapers (including other AI bots) and to detect and block spam. And we are exploring the use of AI in ways that send more art lovers and collectors to our customers.

As always, The FASO Way is an open forum, so we’d love to know what your opinion of such AI use is in the comments. And, please, as we always request, all comments must be dignified and respectful of us and of your fellow artist colleagues who may have differing points of view. We are in this together, so discussion, and even debate, is important. But hateful or threatening comments will be blocked.

A FASO customer, Beverly Caputo, wrote to us after a print sold from one of our newsletters. She thanked us, but also expressed her deep existential angst that AI is causing her.

Thank you so much. That print sale shocked me... but it does show that exposure helps. I do think the ability to earn a living as an artist is over in 2026 for all artists. I wish I had just taken a job when I was younger and worked it and got a pension or something. I have been self-employed at this my entire life and it’s like the whole thing was a cruel joke because now any teenager with a computer can make art. Someone with zero skills can tell AI to create this or that and suddenly the craft that I spent my entire life perfecting is worthless. The art industry is no more with the advent of computers and AI. I thank Clint, you, and his staff for the features and for caring.

My response:

Thank you for writing to us. I understand why you feel discouraged. The world is changing quickly, and I won’t insult you by pretending that earning a living as an artist has suddenly become easy—or that AI hasn’t created real uncertainty, though I think that uncertainty is much lower for fine artists than for professional graphic artists. In fact, in the long run, I think AI will make human-made things, especially art, more desirable and valuable.

With respect, I would like to refute one thing: your life’s work was not a cruel joke, and your craft is not worthless.

A teenager with a computer cannot simply “make art.” What they can do is ask AI to generate an image. But art requires spending a lifetime learning how to see. A lifetime spent mastering a craft. AI cannot live your experiences, develop your hand, make your choices, or put your particular humanity into a work of art. Sure, it can spit out endless images, but quantity is not the same thing as meaning. We have to remember that the work is not only the objective output but also that each work of art “works” upon our interior Self. AI robs people of that important interior “soul building.” We work on the art and the art works on us.

“Through work, we don’t just make more; we become more.”—Luke Burgis

And that print sale—however modest the price—was evidence of something important. In a world already overflowing with free images, one person saw your work and chose it. They wanted something you made to become part of their life. That is not nothing. It is the entire mysterious exchange upon which art has always depended: one human being making something that sends something important from one soul to another. AI isn’t going to completely eliminate that magic.

We featured your artwork because we believed it deserved to be seen. And someone else saw something in it too.

I cannot promise you that the path ahead will be easy. It has never been easy to live as an artist. But I do not believe the age of the artist is ending. If anything, as synthetic images become effortless and infinite, work that bears the unmistakable energy of a real human soul will become more precious. I realize this all may ring hollow when you’re struggling to pay the bills. I hope these words aren’t minimizing the real stress your difficulties are causing.

Please don’t let a machine convince you that the years you spent becoming yourself were wasted; for that is the work of the artist; to become fully herself.

For what it’s worth, as FASO, we care, and we’re still here trying to help artists find the people who need their work. We have many initiatives happening in our efforts to increase the ways people can discover human artists. And, I don’t know if it’ll make you feel any better, but we are using AI in multiple ways. But never to replace artists. That is our difference.

Our promise, regarding AI is this: We will use the technology to reduce administrative work, to make websites easier to maintain, to reduce spam, to help artists market more consistently, to connect artists with collectors, and to protect more of their time for the studio. We will not use an artist’s life’s work to train machines intended to make that artist unnecessary.

In short, We, at FASO, will use AI to support human artists, never to replace them.

Creatively,

Clint Watson
FASO Founder

PS—Do Beverly’s fears worry you as well? How are you dealing with the angst of the AI age? Has AI hurt your sales or helped your process? We’d love to know your thoughts and feelings in the comments.

Leave a comment

The FASO Way newsletter — exploring how to thrive as an artist in the age of AI

Today’s Article

The following article was written by Debra Keirce, a regular contributing author to The BoldBrush Letter.

Step Back, Focus Your Lens, and Claim Your Niche

What do you do that makes you a little different from all the other artists?

In my own quest to focus my art career and use my limited resources efficiently, I decided to do something a little counterintuitive. I went smaller when the world started feeling bigger.

Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, I zeroed in on the sharpest aspects of my skill set. I create oil paintings and charcoal drawings, I work in tightly rendered realism, and here is the kicker. I specialize in miniature and small works.

Now, maybe miniatures aren’t your thing. Perhaps your focus is western art, abstracts, portraiture, scapes. Maybe you’re the undisputed king or queen of a very particular medium. At a photo shoot once, I spent several days with Robert Hagan, a fun and amazing artist who paints larger than life multi figure pieces. He spent much of the time talking about all the virtues of painting large works. Whatever your passion is, there is a proven marketing fact we all have to face. The fewer specialties you promote, the easier it is to build a brand people actually remember.

We all have areas of expertise that pull us in. For me, it’s a deeply rooted, borderline obsessive love for miniature fine art. And before you think this is just a modern gimmick, it actually has a rich, beautiful history. We’re talking about the medieval scribes who pulled all-nighters illuminating manuscripts by candlelight during the Dark Ages, and the European masters who rendered intricate, pocket-sized portraits.

Today’s miniatures are a bit more modern, spanning almost any 2D or 3D medium. If you want to play in this sandbox, the general rules of thumb are:

• Paintings & Drawings: 25 square inches or less.

• Sculptures: 8 inches or less in any direction.

• Subject Matter: 1/6 life-size or smaller.

Outside of those boundaries, the sky’s the limit. Both representational and abstract art are welcome, and the community is fiercely international.

If you’ve never considered going small, let me shamelessly attempt to convert you. Here is why I put so much love, energy and resources into painting in little:

Incredible Sell-Through Rates: Generally, at least 1 in 3 pieces sell in any given show. In the art world, those are beautiful odds. My larger works are in up to 10 show venues before they sell, in most cases.

Low Overhead: You can ship an entire exhibition’s worth of inventory in a single box. Framing, shipping, and supply costs are delightfully minimal.

Space-Saving: The studio space required to create them is wonderfully tiny. You don’t need a warehouse. A well lit table from Costco will do.

An Amazing Community: Miniature artists are a tight-knit, incredibly supportive group. You see the same friendly faces at exhibitions, making it easy to develop deep, lifelong friendships.

The Ultimate Skill Builder: In my experience, wrestling with edge control and precision on a two-inch surface drastically improves the brushwork and technique I use on larger scale works. It’s precision training for your eyes and hands. I spend so much of my life in this magical corner of the art world that I am overtly trying to recruit you into it. But even if minis aren’t your jam, use this as a metaphor.

How can you highlight a specific area of your own art experience? Once you identify that thing that is unique in your practice, start brainstorming how to market it. Often, the best ideas have been staring us right in the face. We just didn’t notice them until we looked through a highly focused lens.

For example, have you noticed the “Free Little Art Galleries” popping up all over the country? They look like the tiny libraries people put on stilts in their front yards, but they’re packed with palm sized art. The rule is simple. Take a piece, leave a piece. What a brilliant, low stakes way to advertise, clear out those little alla prima studies you consider giveaways, and get your name and art into the world. I follow several of these on Instagram, and the creativity is infectious.

You just never know where brainstorming a specific genre might lead you.

With that said, if I have managed to spark your curiosity about the miniature fine art world, I highly recommend these three fantastic international exhibitions:

1. The Miniature Art Society of Florida (MASF) International Exhibition

This is the largest miniature exhibition in the world. I had the absolute honor of judging the show in 2025, and we saw over 600 stunning entries competing for 64 awards. Visit their website to see the sheer caliber of work and check out what sold or won.

The Logistics: Keep an eye out for the entries to open in August, with a late September deadline for receiving shipped work. You can enter up to 6 works from anywhere in the world. The prospectus is online now.

Website: miniatureartsocietyofflorida.com

Bonus: Follow them on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for announcements. I happen to run their social media, so come say hi!

2. The DC Miniatures (MPSGS) International Exhibition

Located in southern Maryland, this is the oldest international miniature exhibition in America, and it is a truly prestigious, beautifully run show. You can enter up to 3 pieces each year. Their website is a goldmine of inspiration where you can see exactly which works took home prizes or red dots last year. The entry form and prospectus are available right now, with an early September deadline for shipped work.

Website: mpsgs.org

3. Seaside Art Gallery International Miniature Show

Since I am unapologetically plugging the wonderful shows I am closely affiliated with, I have to mention this gem held every May in the Outer Banks. Full disclosure - I served as the judge here a few years back! This show is unique because it is judged, but not juried. This means every single piece that meets the prospectus criteria will actually hang on the gallery wall. It’s a welcoming, incredible opportunity to get your work into a physical gallery. There are 17 awards up for grabs, and the deadline for shipped work hits in mid-April.

Website: seasideart.com

Whether you want to try your hand at the miniature art, or you are busy carving out a completely different niche for yourself, I want to hear about it. What is the specific space you are claiming as your own? Let’s talk about it in the comments below and inspire each other!

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Debra Keirce
www.DebKArt.com

Join me each month for free updates on this art adventure at
https://debkart.com/email-newsletter

The modern world has a form of “dark arts” that steals attention for engagement.

I don’t mean anything supernatural. I mean the deliberate development of addictive technology that slowly pulls you away from the truth of your work and “enspells” you with “false” drives: Chasing algorithms, posting only for applause, copying what seems to get attention, turning you studio life into “content,” measuring the value of your art by likes, views, comments, or whatever the platform decides to reward this week.

Social media can be useful. I’m not saying artists should ignore it. But the algorithm is a dangerous master because it trains artists to ask the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “What am I called to make?” the artist begins asking, “What will get engagement?”

Instead of asking, “What do I want collectors to understand about this work?” the artist begins asking, “What will stop the scroll?”

Good marketing should do the opposite.

Good marketing should not pull you away from the truth of your art. It should help you reveal that truth more clearly.

That is why your email newsletter matters. And, sadly, no area is more neglected by artists than this one. You could catapult your art marketing past most artists simply by doing this one thing.

When artists say, “my website never sells anything” they almost universally also admit, “I never sent any newsletters.”

So, why not repurpose those hours of social media frustration into something that works?

An email newsletter is not as flashy as social media. It does not provide the same immediate dopamine rush. It may not make you feel publicly popular. And, if we’re honest, this is the real reason newsletters are ignored. We like the dopamine rush we get from social media. Junk food isn’t nourishing but it tastes good in the moment.

Email marketing is like real food. It does something important and nourishing: It gives you a direct line to people who have asked to hear from you. And that is sacred territory.

When someone joins your mailing list, they are saying, “Please keep me connected to your work.” Subscribing to your email list is a far more relevant signal of interest than the low-commitment, high-dopamine signal of yet another “follower.”

The “FASO Way” is very different from shouting into a feed and hoping the algorithm is kind today.

Your newsletter lets you tell the story behind each new painting. It lets you share what you are working on. It lets you explain what inspired a piece. It lets you invite people back into your world again and again. And, importantly, it tells these stories to the people who actually care.

Most art is not sold in one dramatic moment. It is sold through attention, memory, trust, timing, conversations and a regular cadence of contact. I once followed up with a potential collector for three years before he made his first of many purchases.

The journey is winding: Someone sees your work, they feel something, they leave, they come back, they read your story, they see another piece, they begin to understand what you are about, they see THE piece, they email you, you reply, and finally, they purchase it.

Your newsletter helps make that journey possible in a way that impossible on social media. Leaving the critical points of that journey in the hands of a soulless tech-company algorithm is practically guaranteed to fail most of the time. Facebook promised to show your posts to your hard-won followers. And then, like Darth Vader, they altered the deal, pray they don’t alter it further. They will, because social media is their money machine.

“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh!ts quantity.” — William S. Burroughs

This mismatch between their goals and yours is one of the reasons FASO includes a full email campaign system as part of your artist website account. No extra fee. You don’t need Mailchimp, or Kit, or ConstantContact. You don’t need anything but FASO for this to work.

Your website should not just sit there waiting for people to visit. It should help you stay in relationship with the people who care about your work. When you let it just sit there, waiting, you’ll join those who say, “my website never sold anything.” That is really just a way to avoid saying, “I never sold anything.”

With FASO, you can build your artist mailing list, create email campaigns, send newsletters, feature your artwork, and invite collectors back to your site — all from the same place where your art already lives.

Your art should not have to beg for attention. But it does need a way to reach the people who are waiting to hear from you.

So today, ask yourself:

Do I have a direct way to reach the people who care about my work?

If not, start building one.

Begin using your email campaign tools today: Import a previous list. Invite people to join your email list. If they have, send a simple note. Share one piece. Tell one true story. Invite people back. If you’re with FASO, the email tools work even during the trial period. If you’re not with FASO, there are lots of tools these days, or you can give us a try.

Your newsletter does not need to be fancy. In fact, it’s better if it’s not.

Don’t even think of it as a newsletter. Think of it as a simple way to update people about one thing at a time.

It just needs to be honest and from the heart. Just like your art.

As always, let us know what you think and how you use email in your own art marketing in the comments:

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Creatively,

—Clint

Many artists dream about the day they’ll “make it.”

Maybe that means landing gallery representation, selling out an exhibition, earning a steady income from their artwork, or finally receiving the recognition they’ve been working toward.

But according to contemporary painter and educator Jennifer Balkan, those milestones aren’t what keep artists going.

In FASO Podcast Episode #184, Jennifer shares why the artists who last are the ones who fall in love with something much deeper than success—they fall in love with the process itself.

Here are eight powerful lessons from the conversation.

1. If You Feel Pulled Toward Art, Pay Attention

Jennifer didn’t begin as a full-time artist.

She studied behavioral neuroscience, earned a PhD in sociology, and was on what many would consider a practical career path. But after visiting Paris and taking her first painting class, everything changed.

“Once I really discovered painting, I felt so fueled and so passionate about it... I realized that I’ve got to do this.”

Sometimes your calling doesn’t arrive on the timeline you expected. Instead, it finds you when you’re ready to recognize it.

2. Growth Begins Outside Your Comfort Zone

Choosing art wasn't the safe decision. Friends questioned her choice, her family was worried, and Jennifer questioned herself too.

But she learned something every artist eventually discovers:

Comfort rarely leads to growth. Taking thoughtful risks—even small ones—is often what opens the next chapter of your creative life.

3. Your Past Experiences Make Your Art Better

Nothing Jennifer studied was wasted.

Her background in neuroscience and sociology now shapes how she paints people—not just their appearance, but the emotions, thoughts, and humanity beneath the surface.

Everything you’ve experienced becomes part of your artistic voice, and no experience is ever truly unrelated to your work.

4. Don’t Be Afraid to Change Your Process

Even experienced artists get stuck.

Instead of forcing herself to paint the same way forever, Jennifer experimented with Posca markers, colored pens, and new drawing techniques during the pandemic.

Those experiments eventually influenced her oil paintings in unexpected ways.

Trying something new doesn’t mean abandoning your style. In many cases, it’s exactly what helps your style evolve.

5. Your Artistic Voice Develops Through Practice

One of Jennifer’s most encouraging insights is that you don’t have to chase your artistic voice.

It grows naturally through consistent work.

“You will figure it out... You just kind of gravitate toward something.”

The more you study, experiment, and create, the more your unique perspective begins to reveal itself.

Your voice isn’t something you invent; it’s something you uncover through years of observation, practice, and experimentation.

6. Teaching Can Make You a Better Artist

Jennifer never expected teaching to become such an important part of her career.

But explaining painting to others forced her to better understand her own process.

She also discovered that learning never stops.

Students often teach their teachers just as much as teachers teach their students, and sharing knowledge strengthens your own understanding of the craft.

7. A Sustainable Art Career Usually Has Multiple Income Streams

Jennifer is refreshingly honest about the financial realities of being an artist.

Artwork sales alone often fluctuate.

That’s why many successful artists combine exhibitions with teaching, commissions, workshops, licensing, or other creative opportunities.

Building several income streams isn’t a backup plan. For many artists, it’s what makes a long-term creative career both sustainable and rewarding.

8. Fall in Love with the Process—Not Just the Results

This may be Jennifer’s biggest takeaway.

“You’ve got to love the process... If you don’t love the process, then it’s not worth your time... You have to love the practice of doing it.”

Every artist wants to create beautiful finished paintings, but completed artwork represents only a small part of the journey.

Most of your life as an artist is spent sketching, experimenting, making mistakes, starting over, and continuing to learn.

If you can learn to enjoy those moments, you’ve already discovered something that many artists spend years searching for.

The Process Is the Reward

Jennifer Balkan’s story reminds us that becoming an artist isn’t about reaching a destination. It’s about building a creative life you genuinely enjoy living.

The exhibitions, sales, and recognition are wonderful milestones, but they aren’t what sustain a lifelong career.

Curiosity sustains a creative career. Discipline keeps you moving forward. Community provides encouragement along the way. Above all, a genuine love for the daily practice of making art is what makes the journey worthwhile.

When you fall in love with the process, success becomes something much bigger than a finished painting. It becomes a life spent doing work that matters.

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PS — Note from Clint: One of the reasons I built FASO is because I believe art is important, artists are important, and the work you’re called to create deserves to be taken seriously. We are all sharing “miracles of existence” through our art.

Yes, at FASO, we build professional artist websites. Yes, we talk about marketing. Yes, we give artists tools to present their work, tell their stories, reach collectors, and sell more art.

But that is the how.

The why is that we love art, and we want to push back against a world that too often treats art like content and artists like algorithms. The modern world denigrates Beauty in preference of profit and efficiency. At FASO, we hold Beauty sacred.

So we don’t just host artist websites. We promote artists. We feature their work. We try, in our own small way, to help more art find the people who need it. And that informs everything we do and build.

If that resonates with you, we’d be honored to have you join us.

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PPS — If you’re not ready to look at FASO, you can support our mission by simply clicking the heart icon at the top or bottom of this article. That helps us reach more artists and art lovers and helps us spread Beauty to a world that is desperate for it.

—Clint

Our use of AI in this article: Our team worked with AI to help generate this summary and from there we manually edited it. Our beef with AI is primarily when it is used in a way that reduces opportunities for artists. Our goal, in the places we do utilize AI, is to use it in a way that supports human artists. And we believe this use case supports rather than harms.

At FASO, we do not train AI on your artwork for the purposes of using it to generate alternative images. We do use AI to protect your artwork from scrapers (including other AI bots) and to detect and block spam. And we are exploring the use of AI in ways that send more art lovers and collectors to our customers.

As always, The FASO Way is an open forum, so we’d love to know what your opinion of such AI use is in the comments. And, please, as we always request, all comments must be dignified and respectful of us and of your fellow artist colleagues who may have differing points of view. We are in this together, so discussion, and even debate, is important. But hateful or threatening comments will be blocked.

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For today’s episode, we sat down with Ned Mueller, an American artist and longtime illustrator-turned-fine-painter, known for his strong drawing, expressive plein air and figurative work, and decades of teaching and mentoring artists around the world. He shares his lifelong journey in art, from drawing as a child and training as an illustrator at Art Center School of Design to eventually transitioning into a fine artist with a distinct voice of his own. He talks candidly about facing serious health challenges, chronic pain, and burnout risks, and how having something meaningful to get up for—his painting practice and the support of his wife Karen—has kept him going. Drawing on decades of experience, Ned emphasizes the “four P’s”: patience, perseverance, practice, and passion, urging artists to find subjects they truly love so their excitement shows in the work. He underscores the importance of strong fundamentals—especially drawing and values—explaining that you must first learn to paint what you know, then what you see, and ultimately what you feel. Ned also advises artists to simplify by thinking in big shapes, values, and edges, to do lots of small studies (in plein air and the studio), and to keep sharpening their skills through critique groups, workshops, and consistent practice. Throughout the conversation, he offers grounded yet hopeful insight into building a sustainable art life: do the work, keep learning, accept the hard realities of the art market, and let your love for painting carry you through the long haul. Finally, Ned tells us about his online classes!

Ned’s FASO site:
www.nedmueller.com/

Sign up for Ned’s workshops!
www.nedmueller.com/workshops

Sign up for Ned’s Newsletter!
www.nedmueller.com/email-newsletter

Ned’s Social Media:
www.instagram.com/nedmueller06/

www.facebook.com/NedMuellerFineArt/

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Transcript:

Ned Mueller: 0:00

Sort of the four Ps: patience, perseverance, practice, and do something you love. No, find something you love, because, and you can get excited about, because if you’re not excited about your pain, it’s going to show.

Laura Arango Baier: 0:19

Welcome to the FASO podcast, where we believe that fortune favors a bold brush. My name is Laura Baier, and I’m your host. For those of you who are new to the podcast, we are a podcast that covers art marketing techniques and all sorts of business tips, specifically to help artists learn to better sell their work. We interview artists at all stages of their careers, as well as others who are in careers tied to the art world in order to hear their advice and insights. For today’s episode, we sat down with Ned Mueller, an American artist and longtime illustrator turned fine painter, known for his strong drawing, expressive planar and figurative work, and decades of teaching and mentoring artists around the world. He shares his lifelong journey in art, from drawing as a child and training as an illustrator at Art Center School of Design, to eventually transitioning into a fine artist with a distinct voice of his own, he talks candidly about facing serious health challenges, chronic pain, and burnout risks, and how having something meaningful to get up for, his painting practice, and the support of his wife, Karen, has kept him going. Drawing on decades of experience, Ned

emphasizes the four Ps: 1:19

patience, perseverance, practice, and passion, urging artists to find subjects that they truly love, so their excitement shows in the work. He underscores the importance of strong fundamentals, especially drawing and values, explaining that you must first learn to paint what you know, then what you see, and ultimately what you feel. Ned also advises artists to simplify by thinking in big shapes, values, and edges, to do lots of small studies in plein air and its studio, and to keep sharpening their skills through critique groups, workshops, and consistent practice. Throughout the conversation, he offers grounded yet hopeful insight into building a sustainable art life. Do the work, keep learning, accept the hard realities of the art market, and let your love for painting carry you through the long haul. Finally, Ned tells us about his online classes. Welcome, Ned, to the FASO podcast. How are you today?

Ned Mueller: 2:11

Pretty good, thanks very much, Laura. It’s great to be here. It’s a sunny good day. Summer’s here, and yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 2:21

yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah, I’m excited to have you, because your work is so stunning. Every image that I see is so beautifully composed. I love your multi-figure compositions, and just capturing life the way that you capture it is just.. it’s, it’s so pleasing to the eyes, so I’m really grateful and excited to have you on.

Ned Mueller: 2:45

Well, thanks for those great words, I appreciate them. Yeah, yeah, I’m looking back, I don’t know how I did it. Look back in the 85 85 I’m looking back more than I’m looking forward. So, I, I see what I did, and I look at some of my.. I couldn’t.. I can’t do what I did 50 years ago.

Laura Arango Baier: 3:14

I just

Ned Mueller: 3:15

don’t have the energy, or you know, whatever. So, I do what I can do.

Laura Arango Baier: 3:23

Yeah, yeah, that’s how it is. I feel like that’s one of those natural things about, you know, getting older and also having a career that is so exciting. I mean, being an artist, it’s never like a never-ending array of problem solving in all the senses, and of course, we change, we evolve, our work evolves, and that’s just the natural part about being a human being. But actually, I did want to ask you, if you don’t mind telling us, you know, me and our listeners, a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Ned Mueller: 3:59

Well, I call myself an artist, probably, you know, but I, I had such a nice career as an illustrator, and my training was all in that direction, so I mean, I’ve, I’ve had to make changes becoming a fine artist, but yeah, I started young. I was drawing when I was four years old, and gosh, in school they gave me assignments to do Thanksgiving decorations, Christmas. I got encouragement from my teachers, my parents, and my friends, you know, I didn’t hear some of the, get some of the horror stories you hear what some kids have gone through, and you know, so really lucky that way, and I. And my big break was I got admitted to one of the best art schools in the country Art Center School of Design, and that was great, and I got an illustration, and now I’m older and don’t have the energy, and I’ve got this rare autoimmune disease that I, this pancreatitis that I have to get operated on every month or so, and then I’ve got chronic pain from nerve damage, so it’s limited me, which is really made me frustrated, and really probably the hardest thing to adjust to, you know, from just being healthy for so long, you know, and gosh, but I, but right, like right now I’m feeling pretty good, and I get work done. We go to drawing sessions twice a week, and then I’m getting stuff done in the studio, and so right now, you know, doing okay.

Laura Arango Baier: 6:15

Yeah, it’s good that you, you do what you can when you can, and that’s what really matters, because, of course, painting can be really motivating as well. It gives you something to enjoy, and wake up in the morning and say, I want to continue this piece, and I feel like I have the energy to do it, and I think that’s that’s really great. I think it makes a huge difference.

Ned Mueller: 6:36

Yeah, we have something I think I told it before, we went to a pain clinic at the VA, and the instructor was pretty rough. You guys are in here, you have chronic pain, and chronic pain means chronic pain, you’re going to have it the rest of your lives. And boy, everybody kind of shuddered, you know, because you always have hope. Oh, it’s going to go, but no, often it doesn’t. And, and, and the whole thing was that I have something to get up for in the morning, and also I had my artwork, and half of them didn’t, and half of them were on opioids, and that wasn’t - they just had nothing to get up for, I guess. Even if you have to get up for a peanut butter sandwich, it’s something, but the other thing I’ve got, my dear wife Karen, that she’s a heck of an artist, and she, she really looks after me. Yeah, she.. I wouldn’t be here if one for her.

Laura Arango Baier: 7:51

Yeah, it’s good to have a support system.

Ned Mueller: 7:54

Oh, it really is. Artists need artists too. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 7:59

yes. Yeah, community artists, just someone who can understand as well. Yeah, yeah. And I actually did want to ask you as well, can you tell us a little bit more about your path as an artist, you know, how it began and where it continued?

Ned Mueller: 8:19

Yeah, like I was saying, and I was drawing, I drew figures and landscapes, mostly drawing, and then when I got in high school, took art, and luckily had a pretty good teacher, and he saw I had had a little bit of talent, so he kind of mentored me along, and that was helpful, so I was doing more painting, and then I went to, I was in Bozeman, Montana, in the state, one of the state colleges there, Montana State, so all my friends were going to school there, and my parents moved to California, so I wanted to stay, but their art department, everything was getting into modern art, and I was really one naive person, and just didn’t understand it or the purpose of it, so I love to draw, so I just took architecture for three quarters, but wasn’t totally happy there, and in the middle of the winter quarter, a bunch of my friends were fed up with winter and everything, and they decided they’re going to drop out of school and go to San Francisco, live on the beach. So I had, what the heck, that sounds like a good idea. Didn’t know what direction I was going. But I, I stayed and finished the quarter, at least my dad would have killed me if I dropped out, and, and so that’s how I got in California, and it lasted about eight months living on the beach, our parents were getting pretty disgusted of us, so they all went back to Montana, and my parents were living just north of San Francisco, and basically my dad said, “Well, what, what do you think you want to do? He said, “I don’t know, I’ve always wanted to be an illustrator or an artist, but I had no confidence, I don’t think I could ever do it, and he said, Well, okay, we get you in an art school, we’re going to get you in the very best one, because that’s what you’re going to compete against when you get out. So that was really good advice. And anyways, we interviewed some other schools and letters, but anyways we drove down to Los Angeles and interviewed Art Center School, and I just had a crummy little cardboard portfolio, some drawings, and a couple of paintings, and they saw something, and they gave, they accepted me, and gave me a scholarship, so I was just overwhelmed. I thought, geez, you know, I’m in this art school with people from all over the world, and yeah, and it was, it was really something, and every teacher was a working professional, so they knew what you needed to know, and it was tough. I mean, they gave you a lot of assignments, nobody was looking to see if you already had four assignments by another teacher or other teacher. Anyways, that it was even tougher to get out of it, had really high standards, and they asked my one of my best friends to leave after six semesters, but they kind of did him a favor, because he wanted to coach football, so that turned out well for him. And I remember the sixth semester I didn’t hand in one assignment, they made with your scholarship, had to go straight through, no breaks, and I just had no gas in the tank. It was just.. I never had that experience. I just hit this wall anyways. They called me into the office, and well, this is it. Gonna get kicked out, and apparently this was not unusual, even happened to older students, and they said you just settle down, get back this next semester, and you know, get some work done. So I did graduated, and I forgot the question. My wandering off of it,

Laura Arango Baier: 13:18

no, no, you’re, we’re discussing, you know, your entire trajectory of becoming an artist,

Ned Mueller: 13:25

yeah. And anyway, so after that, that was 1963 and it was just before Vietnam, and so they’re having the draft and all that stuff, and you know, if you’re in college, you were safe, but once you’re out, you were put on a list, so most of us are trying to get in the reserves, and including myself, but two of my best friends went in the Marine Corps reserves, anyways, everything was filled up and the only thing left was the Marine Corps Reserve. So I went across the street and signed up, and went to boot camp a couple months later, and I, after a month and a half, two months, I got pneumonia really bad, and ended up in the hospital. Couple guys died next to me. I didn’t know it was that serious. Anyways, all of a sudden I couldn’t sleep, and that went on and on, and you know, I don’t know, I was really worried about it. Talk to a chaplain, he said, “Just go back to training and you’ll be okay, and I did, and it did got worse and worse. Anyways, I ended up with a. Breakdown got out, got out the medical honorable discharge, and it’s a long story. What happened there was the issues even before I went in, which I wasn’t aware of, repressed a lot of anger and shame. I won’t go into all that, but anyways, it didn’t help, and ended up just literally like a vegetable, and I admitted myself to the hospital and got some good treatment, got out, got back on my feet, when you know, started out working as a laborer, as a, as a carpenter, started doing work, you know, weekends and nights of my portfolio, and going to drawing sessions, and you know, getting some confidence back, and going to San Francisco for interviews, and so slowly getting freelance work, and this, that, and you know, doing getting better assignments, and gosh, I did everything I was, I did architectural illustrations, I did storyboards, I was a courtroom artist, you know, you do anything that comes along to make money, and the whole key there was not that you had to be the very best, which was kind of my goal, for better or for worse, but that you were reliable, that you’d get the job done, because sometimes there were millions of dollars at stake, and you know some of those, the advertising, so, so I, you know, I was good at getting it done, and yeah, and I did that for 25 years, yeah, and got some great assignments, and gosh, I did at one point, I did murals for the Olive Garden restaurant, just traveling all over the country doing, I got so I could do a six by 12 foot mural in one day, I mean, they weren’t great works of art, but they weren’t bad either. They’re pretty good, and yeah, and so I, and I was doing the thing, because I could draw well, and I want to say here, for drawing well, you don’t necessarily have to draw the figure, I have landscape friends, some of the best in the country, and we talk on the fall star now that’s oh, Ned, you know, you know, you do figures and portraits and all this stuff, and I just do landscapes, I said, yeah, but you don’t want to do figures you love and do great landscapes, so cut that out. And the point is, if like, if you draw, if you were drawing landscapes or even couches or whatever you were doing, after a few years your eye gets so good you could do a good figure, because all this business is is developing our eye, our judgment, and whether you’re drawing it, I mean, if you’re going to do figures, you know it’s good to go to drawing sessions and you know get good at that, but yeah, you’re just developing your eye. The thing of doing figures, because it’s so difficult, and if you don’t love it, you know, you’re just not going to probably survive it, really, because it is a lot of hard work and a long time, and, but if you get good at that, you can. I was able to draw horses and other animals and everything, because I could do the figure, because it was so hard. And, yeah, so it’s not just you have to draw the figure, you know, you draw anything, you’re going to get good.

Laura Arango Baier: 19:46

It’s very true, and that’s definitely something that you gain with illustration, since illustration is very much, you got to figure out how to do all the things, since most of the time you don’t know what jobs you’re going to get, and it’s good to. Had a job, or you can do all of the things that they’re asking for, you know,

Ned Mueller: 20:06

yeah, but then I, you know, illustration started turning to digital, and photography was kind of taking over magazines and stuff, so, so I was wondering what’s going to happen, but anyways, I was coming home from a camping or painting trip in Montana, and there’s a western show in Ellensburg, Washington. I just pulled off this curiosity and went in there, met some of the artists, and geez, they were, you know, doing paintings of stuff that I enjoyed doing, and I thought, geez, what the heck’s going on here? And talked to the other artists, showed him my work, and they said, gosh, you know, because I had gotten pretty good as an illustrator, and they says, “Wow, yeah, you should, if you’re interested, get involved with this, you know. So I kind of hit some of the shows running, because it’s just that I getting into fine arts, like one of the first big shows was this Northwest Rendezvous in Montana, and I had to submit three times because my work was just a little too commercial, you know. It kind of, as an illustrator, you have to develop certain techniques and stuff you can rely on, because you can’t get an assignment and then do a bad painting, and so you had to have some skill levels, and you know some discipline and consistency, so I had that, but in the fine arts it was not so much that you know, looking for something you know that really sets you aside and makes you look different, more more creative, so and I started hanging out with more artists, so to speak, and, and, and just sing, and some of the beautiful work. Gosh, I was started doing plein air, and, and God accepted in the plein air painters of America, and boy, some of those people were just doing wonderful things, and I said, yeah, you know, here I’m sitting here, you know, very nice work, but not really what I’d like to do, so being exposed to that, you know, I think, and if you can, and most artists are pretty open and helpful and friendly, be because it’s like, you know, if you just kind of stay off by yourself, you know, you may not be challenged, but if you’re with a group and you’re painting with people that are better than you in some regards, or whatever, or whole lot of things that kind of makes you try to lift your game, you know. It’s like tennis, if you or anything, if you play with somebody you can beat every time, you’re not going to get much better. So that was good to me, and I just got out there, and I see other artists around here in the area that just for some reason they didn’t want to go, but particularly this area, when I got here, some of the other established artists, and really says, Ned, you got to get your stuff out of state, because if you just hang around here, you know you’re going to be selling your paintings for three or $400 So I did that and saw what I needed to do to get better and to advance there wasn’t no internet. Then you pretty much advanced by how good you got. The better you got, the better galleries you got in, the better shows. So it’s changed now. Yeah, it’s still a lot of that, but gee whiz, yeah, yeah, I don’t know how people keep up with it. It’s really, it’s difficult, you know? I do a little bit. I told other artists or other people, boy, I just.. and they told me, “Wow. Tonight, well, you’re doing a lot more than most people, and I guess I guess I was, and still am a little bit, but this point I’m just kind of painting what I want to paint, you know, and you know, don’t care so much whether it sells or

Laura Arango Baier: 25:22

not,

Ned Mueller: 25:23

so it’s kind of a nice position to be in, yeah, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 25:28

yeah, and it’s, I think it’s so serendipitous that you ran into the, the Western painters when you were, you know, just hanging out, and then suddenly you went from illustration into fine art, do you find that there were some, because you did mention that your work was a little too commercial, but were there other aspects of illustration, technically speaking, that you felt really set you apart from other fine artists who hadn’t had an illustration background?

Ned Mueller: 25:59

I had that training, where drawing, you know, I, and I had the love of drawing, and I could draw well, and well, I might mention, and I read once in the paper one of the one of the fine art schools here was getting a new director. I interviewed him in the paper, and he says, “You know, we’re not going to teach skills here, and he said, “But they get in the way of creativity, and I thought that’s crazy in a way, he’s right, anyways. In my example, I, I could draw so well, it kind of became a crutch. I thought it enabled me to do, and I was, because, namely, I could do watercolors, I did watercolors, gouache, acrylic, pastels, and oils, because I had this idea to be this great artist, you should be able to do everything and anything, and I finally woke up one day and realized nobody else is trying to do this. It’s insane, you know, the most, most people are maybe doing two or three mediums, you Yeah, but one of my friends, the name was Bill Reese, and he was kind of the dean of artists in the Northwest, but he could do everything, he could sculpt on top of it, and watercolor and oils and pastels and watercolor, but he, he was a rare one, so anyways, I cut it down, I quit doing acrylics and and watercolor and kind of kept it to oils and pastels, and so I was mostly doing, doing that, and I was doing a lot of, I love to do portraits, you know, and I’m pretty good at it, because I love it, you know, and kind of like people like to do figures and portraits anyway, so I, but I didn’t want to ever do it for a living, because that’s kind of what you get caught up doing too much of, so I just do it mostly now to keep my skills sharp, and because I enjoy it, you know, I

Laura Arango Baier: 28:45

like that you just mentioned sharp skills. Sorry, yeah, it is one of those things that, um, we do have to keep honing the blade, so to speak, no matter how long it’s been.

Ned Mueller: 28:58

Yeah, it is, um yeah, and, and even if I get away from doing it for, like, with my health reasons, I wasn’t able to do things much for a month or so, not go back and do it, and, Jesus, you know, start a three hour, the first, first, we’ll one or two, I just couldn’t get with it, but it took, and it just took two or three times. You start getting back to it. It’s, it’s always there, doesn’t leave you, but and you don’t lose it. I don’t think you lose it. It just takes a little while, a little rusty, and you just get back on the horse, so to speak.

Laura Arango Baier: 29:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s one of those things where I think you mentioned last time, it’s like riding a bike a little bit, yeah, where no. Maybe, maybe at first it feels kind of awkward, and then you know you’re back in on it in no time, but yeah, and I also did want to ask too, because you mentioned early on when you were, you know, getting jobs or like getting back into illustration after your time being ill, what did you find that maybe you had a little bit of burnout from school as well, and then have you had maybe some sort of like burnout as well throughout your career? And then if you did, how did you overcome, you know, that feeling of burnout or artist block?

Ned Mueller: 30:41

Oh boy, that’s a tough one, because I did a lot of different things, like, you know, I think if you’re doing the same thing too much, or you probably get burnt, but I, I was doing different subjects, so I think that sort of lessened it, I would get, I don’t want to recall ever getting totally burned out. I just did a portrait workshop this last weekend, and then we went to our drawing session Monday, and I just. I was just flat, you know, and I just wasn’t excited about anything, you know. So, yeah, so that it happens, but I’ve never experienced that total thing. And two, I traveled quite a bit. I love the travel because I love painting different cultures, and I just had a curiosity for that, and I wanted to, and I wanted to expand beyond, you know, just the United States, and I wanted to see the world, and know, and do other things, so yeah, I was always, always busy with something, I mean, it was never, never a quiet air, like I never took a vacation, I think it was for almost 20 years, that’s really dumb, but I think I said I was driven, you know, I didn’t want to fall behind,

Laura Arango Baier: 32:27

yeah. But why do you, why do you say that it was done to not take a vacation,

Ned Mueller: 32:33

not take a vacation?

Laura Arango Baier: 32:35

Yeah, why was it

Ned Mueller: 32:36

done? You really need a break, and you know you need to get a break away from doing it, but even when we did go on a trip or something, I always had my camera, I was always looking to find a scene that I could paint later, so even then I wouldn’t get away from it. Just to, yeah, I think I think that’s that’s healthy. I don’t, I think someone like me, that’s you know, doing it every day, and you know that’s not healthy. I wasn’t healthy.

Laura Arango Baier: 33:17

That’s good to know. Um, I think I agree. I think it’s important to rest as much as it is, you know, to do a lot, but I totally understand. I think a lot of people, like you, especially who are extremely driven, just find it hard to not keep going, you know. It’s tough. Yeah.

Ned Mueller: 33:39

Now I have to, because of my health issue. I have to, so, and I just ask Karen. I still get this urge to, you know, go off someplace and do this and do that, and I’m not even capable of it. can. If she wasn’t here, I’m sure I’d be dead.

Laura Arango Baier: 34:10

That’s very dark. Well, I’m glad that she’s there

Ned Mueller: 34:20

trying to climb this cliff to get a better view of the landscape or something, yeah, but that’s I survived, I got lucky, yeah, fell off a couple of not tall cliffs, but short cliffs, and that didn’t help.

Laura Arango Baier: 34:48

Goodness,

Ned Mueller: 34:50

I mean, they were just things. Yeah, I did a lot of.. I love. Backpacking and hiking in the mountains, so yeah, and coming down on a rough trail, you know, it’s so easy to get in a hurry and stumble, and you know, you hit your head on a rock, it can kill you, so I did that a couple times, and managed to fall in a bush.

Laura Arango Baier: 35:27

At least it was a bush and not a rock. Yeah, yeah. And who says that artists don’t have risky jobs, especially if you do go hiking to find the perfect view and the perfect spot to paint, besides, you know, using toxic pigments and toxic cleaning materials. Yeah, I think we have a very strange kind of risky job.

Ned Mueller: 35:55

Yeah, yeah, it is. Karen just finally got me off of turpentine, what is it? Can’t think the name of it, but it’s, it’s, it’s better, it’s healthier.

Laura Arango Baier: 36:11

Yeah, there’s a, there’s a few brands that are good, there’s mineral spirits, or odorless mineral spirits, there’s Gamsol, that’s what

Ned Mueller: 36:17

I was using, but she, she thought I needed to get rid of that, because there’s no such thing as odorless, apparently.

Laura Arango Baier: 36:24

No, there isn’t. It’s good to have an air purifier, or just like not be anywhere near it for many hours, have good air circulation. Yeah, it can be, could be really risky.

Ned Mueller: 36:39

Then, when I was doing pastels on top of it, and again, all that powder going all over.

Laura Arango Baier: 36:44

Yep, you need to have some sort of suction thing, like a vacuum underneath, so you’re not breathing that in, because that it’s also gonna get really dangerous.

Ned Mueller: 36:56

Learn a mask, and, yep,

Laura Arango Baier: 37:00

yeah, wear one of those like really intense masks with, like, the, you know, like for people who do woodwork, but yeah, besides that, I wanted to ask you also, when you were transitioning into becoming a fine artist from illustration, did you start making paintings to work with galleries, while you were still taking on illustration jobs, or did you just cut, you know, very dry between the two?

Ned Mueller: 37:29

Oh, I was doing both. Yeah, doing both. Yeah, I guess it slowed my transition up, you know, and I, and I, and I hear a lot, a lot of people say, well, illustrators make really good fine artists, because they, they have good skills drawing, and I think better one can draw, the better one can design, you know, I think that sharpens your design skills. I, I think all that’s drawing even probably makes you more sensitive to color. You know, I’ve heard that before. I don’t know if that’s true or not, probably for some people.

Laura Arango Baier: 38:21

If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, and also want to ask our guests live questions, then you might want to join our monthly webinar, The FASO Show, where our guest artists discuss marketing tips, share inspiring stories, and answer your burning questions in real time. Whether you’re a seasoned painter or just starting your creative journey, this is your chance to connect, learn, and spark new ideas, and whether you’re stuck on a canvas or building your creative business, this is where breakthroughs happen. Don’t miss out. Ignite your passion and transform your art practice by joining us. Our next FASO show webinar is coming up on the 18th of June with our special guest, Timothy Tyler. You can find the signup link in the show notes. Yeah, I mean, when I was in school, we used to say you can’t out render a bad drawing, you just can’t. So, I agree, I think drawing is the fundamental thing to learn, and everything just comes from there. And I agree, I think a lot of the illustrators that I’ve seen, who have become fine artists, they’re really excellent composers, just from the get-go. I feel like there’s something with the extreme amount of work that illustrators have to produce that the more you do it, the more you pick up the intuition of how to design a really good image, whether it’s just drawing or value, and then, of course, adding color on top, because I know a lot of illustrators take some sort of, you know, color class where they have to learn, okay, well, these are the colors that represent this, and if you want more mystery, you add more green, or if you want more of this, then you know the image would have. Include that, although that’s, you know, I haven’t personally been in an illustration program, so I’m not totally sure, but I feel like every illustrator I’ve seen has this magical ability to just get it, and I’m like, did I go the wrong way? Should I have been an illustrator

Ned Mueller: 40:17

there for years? You know, Norman Rockwell, one of the greatest illustrators of all time, they made fun of him because, but jeez, his illustrations, as far as I’m concerned, they were fine art. I mean, he designed those things, he would do value studies and color studies, and, and full-size drawings of things before he did the finish, and I’ve got some back there, my wall, that geez, they are just, they’re just beautiful paintings, and tell a story, and credibly designed. Yeah, that’s one thing that getting the fine arts. Maybe it’s the next thing, but a drawing, but the process of getting an image, we, you know, if you get an assignment, you had to make sure you’re on the same page as the art director, so we did value studies, we did color studies, just to make sure you know we were doing what they want, and so I got in the habit of doing those, and I still do those in my fine art work. I find out a lot of my fine art, they don’t do those things, they didn’t expose to that, but I just remember, you know, the important value is the old masters worked in black and white for four years before they went in color, and when I was in art school it was two years, and our first color assignment was three white eggs on a light blue plate, but boy, we learned about value, because when people get into color, the first thing they miss is the value, amongst other things, but it’s really makes a difference. Yeah, so I use it in my paintings.

Laura Arango Baier: 42:42

Yeah, yeah, I feel like hierarchically, you know, to have a really good composition, a lot of people, and it’s natural because we’re so attracted to color, a lot of people, you know, they think, oh well, color, but in reality it’s so, it’s so, so, so much more about value and drawing and just placement of those values in the right places to keep the eye on the canvas, so that you know the color just add it’s like the cherry on top of everything, and to your point also about how illustration maintained that you know rigorous sort of like value study to you know, just doing a lot of studies, a lot of tests before the final piece. It’s very funny, because I find that that’s actually something that the old masters also did, but at some point, I think, you know, at the turn of the century, when unfortunately fine arts was seen as a dying thing, and illustration was able to maintain what I like to call the past the torch, so to speak. I feel like illustration kept it, but a lot of the more modern art schools seem to just avoid it completely, especially when modernism really took over, because it became more like, oh, well, you can have whatever process you want, because we don’t want to limit you, but I feel like that really alienated a lot of people who wanted to pursue fine art and really needed that type of support that illustrators got in their process and the type of process that they maintained, so I find it really interesting that now we’re like hopefully going full circle, where a lot more fine artists today are doing color studies and value studies and testing things, which is important. Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 44:34

yeah, so I think more people are doing it and coming up with our paintings. The exception is like a plein air thing, which I did a lot of that, and I was doing that, I was just starting off and just starting out and painting cold turkey and. I, you know, had probably had more failures than successes, but then I started going back, at least getting a something down, a note or something, and you know, not getting so many clunkers, but there’s a fine line where there’s a lot to be said just for being spontaneous, but you find a lot of the really good solid painters are doing studio work, they’re they have the time to do the studies and everything, and then they’ll have this big beautiful great painting that they’ve thought out well, and it’s just gorgeous. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 45:49

yeah, I think it’s, it’s a bit of a balance too, because, like, yeah, of course, approaching a painting, it’s important to keep in mind the composition, but then at the same time I don’t know if it’s happened to you, where you look at a painting that’s almost too perfect, it becomes a little bit boring. So it is also nice to keep some of that spontaneity and some of those little accidents that can happen sometimes, where you brush kind of strange, and it’s not really what’s happening in reality, but it works, and at that point you know you start having a bit more of a dialog with, okay, do I want this to be perfect, quote unquote, which isn’t really a thing, or do I want this to be something more alive, and I think that’s, you know, later on, after someone paints more, it’s the type of conversation they have with their work,

Ned Mueller: 46:43

yeah, yeah, they find it that in all my teaching over the years of talking to other artists was kind of three stages, people start out painting what they know, you know, they know the sky is blue and grass is green and in the shadows or cool to go in the shade to get cool, so they paint all that, and and then you get them to paint what they see, but sometimes the sky is yellow or orange, the grass is brown, and most shadows are warm, so no, except for early morning, and sun goes down, and so that makes makes a difference, and they start painting what they see, they start learning more about color and harmony and all that, and then the third stage is the best stage, you paint what you feel more, it gets a more little more emotion in it, but most people want to do the third stage before they’ve gone through the other two, so yeah, I know, if I ever told people I was gonna, they’re gonna do value studies for a week, five days, nobody would sign up, no, you know, because they all want to get into color and everything, so you kind of have to once you explain it to him, show him it makes sense. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 48:26

yeah, yeah. And that’s very interesting, because I did my first ever attempt at Plan Air yesterday, and I was first of all shocked at how overwhelming it is. It’s windy, there’s geese walking next to you, thinking you have food. It’s, and of course, I had to stop because it started raining, but I decided, okay, I’m not going to overwhelm myself. I’m just going to paint on a white canvas with Van Dyke brown and with some mineral spirits, just so I’m only focusing on value, just trying to lay things out, and I wouldn’t say it was a bad attempt. I’m actually kind of happy with it, but I think, yeah, just focusing on value alone was a challenge, trying to decide, okay, what do I want to bring forward? What do I want to push back? What do I want the center of attention to be? Where do I want to protect my lightest value? Just with that, it’s, it’s a lot to handle with color. I think I would have been so stressed out, I would have panicked

Ned Mueller: 49:37

the first time I went out with friends. Jeez, I have, I was trying to paint some trees, and I tried to paint the branches and all the leaves, and after a couple hours it was just a mess, and I looked at their work, and the hour and a half, they had some beautiful paintings. You learn how to paint, you know, 500 leaves with one brush stroke,

Laura Arango Baier: 50:09

so

Ned Mueller: 50:10

yeah, it’s good to get out there, because it forces you to simplify, you know, forces you to get stuff down, so you can see what’s right and what’s wrong, you know, get the darn thing covered,

Laura Arango Baier: 50:27

yeah,

Ned Mueller: 50:28

yeah, and once I found in my own work, in my students’ work, once they could think more shapes instead of details, they’ve really started thinking more like an artist, you know, getting the big relationships down, and it makes a big difference. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 50:52

yeah, the big masses, and the just having the right location for things before anything else. Yeah, it’s extreme, like, wow, extremely important. I think the other part that I was panicking a little bit about was the changing sunlight, which, of course, inevitable, we are rotating quite fast. So I also ignored that, because if I didn’t ignore it, I think I would also lose my mind just because you know I was just focusing, you know, I’m just going to get the drawing because there’s this beautiful building, I’m just going to get the building, and some of the really nice trees that I see close by, I don’t want to overwhelm myself with, oh, and now the sun is over here, so let me start putting that, like, no, stop,

Ned Mueller: 51:45

just go out with a 12 by 16 panel and divide it up into four six by eights, and just as does it, you can then with, you know, and on paint it with a number six or eight brush, no ones or twos, and just forces you to see the big color relationships, little, and just concentrate on getting big color relationship, and you can, you, you’ll find out you can do one of them in half an hour. After a while, yeah. And don’t try to do anything big outside, maybe after you’ve done it five or six years.

Laura Arango Baier: 52:40

Yeah, that’s good. I think my,

Ned Mueller: 52:44

you’re going to learn more by doing where you can do 10 eight by 10s or six by eights, and 10 of them, maybe a day or two, instead of doing a large one that takes you all day, you know, you can get 10 paintings done in one day, as opposed to doing one in one or two days. I mean, there’s a lot to be said, you got to blow it up, and everything changes, but you know, and I’ve talked a lot, a lot of other artists said, you know, that’s really, really made a difference for them.

Laura Arango Baier: 53:26

Yeah, yeah. Actually, the canvas that I used, I made sure that I wouldn’t, because I only had like a piece of loose canvas with it, was already pre-gessed. Well, it’s oil primed, and I just taped it down. I was like, I’m not even going to use this entire piece of canvas, I’m just going to use maybe half of it, and that made it a lot easier, but because I got rained on and it was a pretty bad storm, I could only get like 45 minutes to an hour in, so I had to abandon it, but, but, yeah, I’ll try the four little ones, just, you know, kind of like when I did color studies for portraits, where it’s you’re not worried about getting the features perfect, you’re not worrying about the drawing too much, just major placements, major values, and then go from there. Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 54:14

same thing.

Laura Arango Baier: 54:15

Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 54:16

doing a portrait, if you get the, if you get the shape, the shadow shape, right? You get a likeness, you get the right color and right shadow side of a tree, and the light side, it’s going to be a pine tree or a maple that has that look, and yeah, just makes all the difference in the world, but trouble is, we all, you know, and that’s there’s why it’s being a self-taught artist is really tough, because you know you can get with somebody, can really save you a lot of time, you know, can.

Laura Arango Baier: 55:01

Yeah, yeah, and time is something we don’t get back money, we hopefully do, but time is not, time is non-refundable. So I agree, it’s good to get someone that can help who is knowledgeable, but then actually speaking of money, for your career, what were some of the ways that you were able to maintain some of your income as an artist? Was it primarily galleries? Was it commission work? Teaching?

Ned Mueller: 55:31

Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did commission work. I started teaching early. They had me teaching even when I was at Art Center. They started a Saturday group for some of the better high school students there, and they asked me if I’d do it, and I never taught before to know what to do, but I’ve found I enjoyed it, and you know, I, I knew more than they did, so that’s kind of good, and and then they even had me substituting for some of the instructors or teaching life drawing. Boy, I was in a little over my head there, almost got in a fight with a couple of guys, goodness.

Laura Arango Baier: 56:24

Why?

Ned Mueller: 56:25

Oh, I just.. I forget. Probably more my fault, something I didn’t handle, but some of these guys I remember hearing stories of, you know, veterans coming back after the Korean War, getting the GI Bill and going to college, and some of these professors were going on. Well, these were in art classes that were going on too much about theory, and they, they literally grabbed their cow, says, listen, I, you know, I just came through hell, and I want to learn how, and I need to get a job, so teach me how to do something constructive. Just don’t talk,

Laura Arango Baier: 57:18

that’s understandable.

Ned Mueller: 57:20

Yeah. Mm. yeah, so that’s where the, yeah, lucky to have instructors that were working professionals. They, they knew what the heck you needed, needed to know if you’d listen to them.

Laura Arango Baier: 57:42

That’s the key. key, you can lead a horse to water,

Ned Mueller: 57:46

yeah, yeah. And

Laura Arango Baier: 57:48

then, do you find that working with the, you know, like any of the organizations, associations, like Oil Painters of America, or any of that, did that also help you with, you know, making more sales, or also just connecting with other artists.

Ned Mueller: 58:06

Yeah, mainly my sales got better, and I could get more money just because I was getting better. Yeah, there, you know, there, like I said, you didn’t have the internet and all these other things, to you know, Instagram, and all that stuff, to promote yourself, so then it was just, you just, you just got better, and you got in better shows, and better galleries, and sold more paintings and made more money. Yeah, I’m probably the wrong person to ask how to make a good living artist. I’ve never even taken a business course,

Laura Arango Baier: 59:02

I but I think it’s

Ned Mueller: 59:04

pretty typical of most artists, you know. We avoid those things like a plague, but the galleries, you know, did that, and there were better collectors there? They don’t, they don’t teach it in schools anymore, but there’s three states that mandatory they have teach art classes or music, or the three states, rest, they don’t have to, and so the collectors, when I was getting involved, they got it in school, they, they loved it, they studied it. Most of those collectors are dead or dying, so I think there’s less educated collectors, and I think. Right, that’s a big problem, that’s kind of catching up with us, and I live in a high-tech area in Seattle. Here, I’ve seen Microsoft’s collection, it’s pathetic, it’s all hard edge and boring, and you know, no feeling, so yeah, it’s.. I don’t know, it’s.. it’s got to be tough. I’m glad I’m not starting out now. I just glad I was able to start when I did, and we had.. we had good collectors. There were more there. I, yeah. but

Laura Arango Baier: 1:00:43

I do think what you said is still, it still holds true, which is the better you are, you know, with your work, the better artists technically skilled, but also in terms of developing your voice as an artist, you know, what makes your painting stand out from the others, it could still be fine art, of course. I think that still holds very true. That really good work when it is marketed, because now, of course, we have social media, and people can actually work without galleries. When you can take care of that marketing side, I still.. I could be naive, though. I don’t know. I still believe that really good work speaks for itself, and if you have a way to market it, show it to people, it’s.. it’s going to make a difference, instead of, you know, marketing something that’s maybe less good or a little bit more well, something that needs more time to develop, I think it’s good work speaks for itself. Again, it could be nice, but I

Ned Mueller: 1:01:50

agree, but then two, if you don’t have, if you don’t have collectors or buyers of all the difference between good art, well, I can tell one story, it might explain a lot. And I did some articles, some of the art magazines, and then they asked me to do a book, but I just, you know, I knew it took a lot of time to do it. I just didn’t want to do it, and and I asked the editor, I says, “Is it true that the bad art books sell better than the good ones? And she said, “Yeah, unfortunately, so because people can identify with the bad work, so that’s why you can see god-awful paintings in a gallery, the worst art outselling the good art.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:02:50

That’s heartbreaking,

Ned Mueller: 1:02:52

but it’s kind of true.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:02:54

Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 1:02:57

we, we don’t get around to the galleries like we used to, but geez, we go in there and we see some work in there that is just horrible, and they’re getting outrageous prices for it, and the people buying it, they just, they don’t know the difference.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:03:18

Yeah, you’re not the first person who mentions that, that buyers are less aware or educated about what makes good work, though I do have hope, because despite the internet being, you know, like the biggest rabbit hole ever, I do come across a lot of people who, at least, you know, they have the wherewithal and the critical thinking to come across an image and research about it and learn about the different art history periods and have a more nuanced interest than you know someone who basically, who just took a basic art course because they had to for credit, so I have some hope that the age of information could still enlighten some important people to be patrons of the arts.

Ned Mueller: 1:04:06

Yeah, and I don’t know, I look at, you know, traditional work, and the best markets that I’ve seen where people can flourish is the Western art, it’s very traditional, and I mean it’s when I, when I started Western art, it was there again. It was, it was ridiculous, you know? People were selling three-legged horses, and you know, people got all caught up in this Western thing. It was, it was crazy, and not so much anymore, but and I guess there’s, it’s always been that way, there’s always been a lot of bad art cells, I know out of. And years ago, and he was, he would paint a farmhouse, and then have trees on each side, and he’d vary the trees, and maybe the farm, and he says, you know, Ned, I don’t want to get any better, because I’m selling everything I do, and now the risk of getting better was too, too scary for him. That’s probably a poor analogy, but it’s,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:05:36

oh no, but it’s, it’s interesting, because it does fall under, you know, if you are doing the same process on repeats without changing the process, and you always get the same results, then your gallery knows what to expect, and galleries like that. But when you’re an artist who is also doing it, you know, in the I want to get better, I want to explore type of sense, or I don’t want to, I get bored just doing the same thing over and over. I think it, I don’t want to say gets punished, but some galleries don’t quite like change because they want a product

Ned Mueller: 1:06:20

in a way to keep the doors open, but yeah, years ago I had interviewed with some guy, they told me I was unmarketable because I do too many different things in different means, I understood it, you know, got collectors in the rat, they gotta sell stuff to keep the doors open. That’s also why some of these galleries keep some of this bad art there, because it sells, you know, and it keeps the doors open. That’s what they told me. The worst artist brought in a million dollars last year, so you know there’s a true story, and it was he was the worst artist in the gallery, but he was their best seller.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:13

Maybe I need to lower the bar.

Ned Mueller: 1:07:16

Well, yeah, I would

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:20

not. I would be, I would be betraying myself if I did that. That’s awful.

Ned Mueller: 1:07:25

No.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:26

Oh man, that is.. I think we need to discuss something a little less bleak, and

Ned Mueller: 1:07:36

I may be a little too cynical.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:39

Oh no, but you have, of course, the experience to see, you know, the perspective long term of how things have shifted, so it’s absolutely natural. But I did want to ask, oh, learn more

Ned Mueller: 1:07:52

stories, it’ll depress everybody.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:07:57

I mean, I would love to hear them, but, but yeah, I think it might be a little bit of a bummer for, yeah, but I did want to ask you in less bleak terms, do you have any advice for someone who wants to become a full-time artist?

Ned Mueller: 1:08:22

What are the 4p’s patience, perseverance, practice. What’s the other one? Okay, there’s four of them. Perseverance, yeah, we need that, you know, and like we say, learn how to draw. Don’t have to do the, the figure, you know? If you want to do landscapes or still lifes, you know, induce, do something you love. No, find something you love, because, and you can get excited about, because if you’re not excited about your pain, it’s going to show, and so, yeah, and you think those things would be easy, they’re not. Some people don’t know what they want to paint, and so try different things, try to get, if you’re going to go to an art school, or take workshops, or get them, you know, it just makes sense. Find somebody that you can relate to, that’s, you know, that sincerely wants to help you. I mostly teach because I love it, you know. I know it’s not all about money, I love it, and I have to charge something, so I charge reasonably prices anyways. Uh, and if you do teach well, you know it’s a way to make money, but it’s, and I’ll be better if you love to teach. If you want to help people, you want to sincerely see them get better, but yeah. and it’s, you know, if you have to take commissions or you have to do things or things you may not want to do, but they’re going to pay you well. Do it when you’re starting out, you do what you have to do, you Um, let’s see what else I can’t, you know, do studies, you know, do two studies that you’re sometimes just do to learn color, just do color studies, because if you’re trying to color studies, design, and all that, it’s hard to do, so kind of separate them to go outside and just have fun learning about color, maybe go out and start thinking more about composition and design, and you know very few people can do it all at once.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:11:22

Yeah, I I think that’s very sound advice.

Ned Mueller: 1:11:26

Yeah, probably just about everybody else would give the same.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:11:31

I mean, there’s a common thread that a lot of people mentioned, but I think even if it is very similar advice, you gotta hear it a million times. I mean, you hear it once, you think, yeah, yeah, I get it. And then you hear it again, you’re like, I think I get it. And then eventually you’re like, I, wow, I need.. I didn’t think about that, even though you’ve already heard it a million times.

Ned Mueller: 1:11:59

And if you think three or four people are saying the same thing, maybe different words. Gosh, there must be something to it, you know. And these people are doing pretty good work, and you know, and you actually don’t have to be a great artist to be a great teacher either.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:12:20

Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 1:12:21

people say that, but I don’t, I don’t think so. I think there’s other things involved, and no patience, and relating, and

Laura Arango Baier: 1:12:35

yeah, listening, being a good listener as well. Yeah, totally,

Ned Mueller: 1:12:41

even if you’re just getting one person you know that you know that knows something and you know will take you out painting or have you over the studio or talk to you or give you some critiques that’s another thing start a critique group. I’ve always been in a critique group for years, and they’re really helpful. You just need to start maybe four or five people, and then you go to each other’s house, and you bring something to eat, and you critique three or four paintings, or whatever you got each time, that that helps you just got to be Gary. Don’t get somebody in there that’s going to dominate the thing and always have their opinion getting out there. So, yeah, so that key groups are useful, and you make good friends, and

Laura Arango Baier: 1:13:48

yeah, yeah, yeah, and you can always bounce ideas, and and you make discoveries about your work, because you know you have someone else looking at it and having a different opinion, because it can be really lonely when you’re in your studio, and sometimes you keep hitting a wall with a problem, and you, there’s no other way to get around at them by showing it to someone else to see what they think, and you can show it to your, you know, to someone who maybe doesn’t have much to do with painting, but they might not be able to resolve it as well as someone who can see it with the eyes that with educated eyes, so to speak, you know. Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 1:14:30

and gosh, what’s I gonna say? Yeah, you know, gosh, I forgot, you know, art groups are kind of nice to belong to. They can be supportive. I know some people enjoy the organization, some people don’t. And, and I was president of. A couple sometimes find out your friends were the ones that abused it more than anything. You thought just because they’re friendly didn’t have to get something in on time or do this or that. Yeah, become an officer, you sure find out a lot about human nature.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:15:25

Oh, yeah, even just, you know, living your life, you find out a lot about human nature. Yeah, but, but I also wanted to ask you, do you have any upcoming shows or workshops or Zoom classes that you would like to tell us about.

Ned Mueller: 1:15:44

Yeah, far shows I’m mostly, you know, some invitational shows around I submit to, because, like, I’m on designated master with oil painters of America and American Impressive Society, so you’re supposed to enter as many as you can. The nice thing that being a master, they don’t screen your work, they take, so yeah, so you, it’s, it’s too tempting to put in something that you should put in, so you got to be careful that I entered juried shows a lot, because there’s some that they don’t have, like, so many jury shows you have to do it in the last three five years or something. So some of these online shows they don’t have a limitation. So I’ve got paintings from 40 years ago, and when they first started doing those, I entered them, they’re all, and I at one time actually there was somebody keeping track of that after about five years, and I was number one in the country of winning these online jury shows, mainly because they didn’t have a deadline, and I was entering shows I did some of my best paintings, I did 3040 years ago. Now some were one of them just clamped down and decided, well, they’re going to stop that because other artists were complaining. Well, I told them, well, wait, yeah, wait till you get older, you know, and you know you may not be able to do as much or do them as great as you did 3040 years ago, and so I mentioned that to him.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:17:56

Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 1:17:57

anyways, yeah, everybody has their perspective on things, so I entered those, and anyways, I, I still win some, and last year I got the, you can see it on the wall poster of the Modern Impressionist, but I got, I called it Best Artist of the Year, yeah, hardly. you know, already the best, but you know it’s still nice to get, you know, 5000 bucks.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:18:31

Yeah,

Ned Mueller: 1:18:32

anyways, the other thing is I have a regular class online class on Wednesdays from 10 to one Pacific Daylight Time, and that’s just work on value studies, color studies, and all things related to art, and that goes on year round, except like in the summer, the summer were taken off in July and August, and we’ve been doing it for years and years, and then I do other workshops. Last week, and I just had an online expressive portrait workshop drawing, and I always limited to 12 students. I just don’t believe in having a lot of students, not fair to them and not fair to me. And then I’m doing a two day plein air workshop on jury shows. Right now I’m in the middle during two shows and yeah, and my website has all this stuff listed, so I don’t do as many as I used to, but yeah, and but I, I like a. Entering jury shows or shows, because I’m an artist, I like people to see my work, and I get an award here and there, and so, yeah, and, yeah, and I once in a while I can still do a halfway decent painting when I, when I’m, when I’m feeling pretty good, and yeah, that’s pretty much it. Yeah.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:20:38

Well, if someone wants to maybe join one of your Zoom classes or wants to see more of your work, where can they go

Ned Mueller: 1:20:47

w w w.net mueller.com m u e l l e r. Yeah, great, but yeah, the workshops fill up pretty fast because we limit it to 12 people, and that’s nice. I have some really loyal students that have been doing taking my class for like five or six years, you know, it’s amazing, and I get people from Paul, not all of the, but around the world, Mexico, Shanghai, England, you know. So, yeah, so I got a pretty good life.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:21:36

Yeah, sounds very comforting to be able to, you know, work on paintings that you want to work on, and still have contact with other artists, even if it’s through, you know, workshops, and of course, your wife being an artist also helps. Yeah, yeah, no, I’ll also include all your links in the show notes as well, for, you know, our listeners, if they want to immediately go to your website and sign up, or check out when your next signups are. They can go visit your links. I

Ned Mueller: 1:22:07

got a newsletter. Join my newsletter, do Instagram and Facebook, and other thing I encourage people to do is do Pinterest. Pinterest, I mean, there’s just great stuff there, you know. Whatever your tastes are, or styles, you know, start your own page, and it grows, and you figure out how you know they start sending you things because they find out what you like, and they send you similar stuff, and trouble is, boy, it’s hard to get off of it.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:22:49

Yeah, I am a regular Pinterest user, so I totally understand.

Ned Mueller: 1:22:54

Yeah, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:22:56

yeah,

Ned Mueller: 1:22:57

all the social things can be pretty addictive.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:23:02

Yep,

Ned Mueller: 1:23:04

yeah. So be careful. I’m not the best example, but yeah, I follow my own advice and do it less.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:23:17

Yeah, I will also go out and touch some grass, as they say. Yeah, but thank you so much, Ned. This was a very fascinating conversation. Very, there’s a lot to digest in terms of, you know, my hopes and dreams for the future of art, but I will follow your advice. Thank you to everyone out there for listening to the podcast. Your continued support means a lot to us. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or leave us a comment on YouTube. This helps us reach others who might also benefit from the excellent advice that our guests provide. Thank.

Today, we have a post today by Shiv Sengupta, the man and the mind behind the publication Dark Dawn.

Shiv is the Author of the Advaitaholics Anonymous series of books. His avant-garde, no-nonsense approach to the existential questions of life has captured the minds of readers across the globe. With a balance of caustic wit and profound insight, his writing throws down the gauntlet for each person to confront reality by themselves, without the assurances of authority figures, the dictates of dogma and the comfort of cultural belief systems.

Clint’s note: Shiv is one of the few writers whom I carefully read every single essay he posts and I believe today’s essay has great value for people from all walks of life but, especially, for those of us pursuing creativity and the truth of the self, which, in the end, are the same pursuit.

I highly recommend you subscribe directly to Shiv’s newsletter Dark Dawn:

Subscribe to Dark Dawn

To prevent duplicate content issues, this article will be locked in two days for paying members only. After that point you may read this article on Shiv’s Substack site here (if you are a paid subscriber of Dark Dawn)

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This piece originally appeared on Clint’s personal newsletter, The Universal Riddle, here. We will be locking this piece in a few days to prevent duplicate content issues.

Read more

Our confusion about art, and a great many other things, stems from the modern, materialistic, idea that there is only one big “economy.” And we’ve been confused about art for over a century.

The great “glamour of forgetting” started around the time of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal being presented as “art,” and “the great forgetting” accelerated from there, eventually causing the public to forget the deep magic of true art. But, our confusion, all along, has been in thinking art belongs to the market, when it actually belongs to the soul. This is why the modern man struggles to define what art is.

Collectively, we no longer understand art because we view it only through the lens of market-based materialism, which, in reality, is only one possible perspective

Fortunately for us; however, there isn’t just one master “economy.” There is another economy that you were never taught to see.

There are, in fact, two economies, and they are vastly different.

Let’s call them the following: the soul-economy and the market-economy.

We may have suppressed our knowledge of the soul-economy, but the desire to participate in it still simmers in every human heart. Deep down, we all know that some things are made for the sale, and that other, more important things, are made for the soul.

Art is made first for the soul, not the sale.

And most of the pain artists feel around marketing comes from confusing these two economies.

The true artist must choose the soul-economy; for “no one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Nor can you truly serve Art and Mammon.

In the market-economy, value is measured by what others will pay.

But, in the soul-economy, value is measured by what the creator was willing to give.

When creation requires no sacrifice, no discipline, no transformation, the viewer’s soul senses the absence of spiritual weight.

Art, music, and writing—these are all works of love and they are meant to be gifts of love in the economy of the soul. That is why the worst thing an artist can do is “sell out” their soul to the market.

Don’t misunderstand: I am not suggesting that artists cannot sell their artworks or make a living from their art. Selling is not the same thing as selling-out.

Selling-out involves creating primarily for the market-economy with the goal of getting. Art must be made as a gift of the soul, for the purpose of giving. In a proper art transaction, the purchaser’s money is viewed a reciprocal gift back to the artist.

The “trick” is that artists must learn to stand at the edge and straddle these two vastly different economies.

The market-economy forms the horizontal beam while the soul-economy forms the vertical pole and, together, they construct the cross upon which the true artist must sacrifice himself voluntarily. His Art must be his true passion, and our passions are those things we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for. As always, the key that balances the two is found where they cross, at our heart, and that key is constructed with love.

Learning the difference between the two economies will enhance both the artist’s peace of mind and her pocketbook. Knowing the difference between these two economies will help an artist to not feel rejected when a soulful piece doesn’t sell. And, it will help her understand why some pieces sell easily and others do not.

The artist’s challenge is not to reject the market. The challenge is to keep it in its proper place.

The soul comes first and thus, the Art comes first.

Then, once the work exists, you need a sane and honest way for people to discover it, understand it, follow it, inquire about it, and buy it.

That is the kind of structure FASO is built to provide.

So today, take one practical step in the market economy that honors the soul economy:

Make sure the available works on your FASO website are presented clearly for collectors. Because, believe it or not, collectors also enjoy and view art through the lens of the soul-economy. Think about the last time you wept while listening to music. I’ve seen collectors do that with visual art. Your art matters.

So let’s look at how to build a website that honors the sacredness of your art.

Here’s what I suggest:

1. Start by uploading no more than about 20 pieces. Don’t overwhelm people.

2. If you have more than 20 works, group them into 3-5 collections (such as portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes, for example).

3. Make it easy for collectors to support you by presenting each artwork with a Title, size, and purchase price. If you use FASO, make sure to connect Stripe or Paypal and to enable ecommerce so that people can easily purchase from you. You’d be surprised at how many artists make it difficult to actually purchase.

4. For FASO members only—when you join FASO, and upload 20 pieces and add your bio, we feature you in our new member newsletter which goes out to nearly 70,000 art collectors and lovers. That’s the first of the many marketing channels you gain when you move your website to FASO.

Creating a great art website is not “selling out.” This is creating a sacred space, that you control, that presents your art on the internet without the noise and rage of big tech’s algorithms. We’ll discuss how to get people to your site in upcoming emails.

Let us know what you think and how you honor the sacredness of your art in your online efforts in the comments:

Leave a comment

Creatively,

Clint Watson
FASO Founder

What does a lifetime of painting teach you?

If you ask Sarkis Antikajian, the answer isn’t fame, perfect technique, or selling more artwork. It’s something much simpler: keep learning, stay curious, and enjoy the act of painting.

At 93 years old, Sarkis still paints nearly every day. Although he spent 35 years working as a pharmacist, his dream was always to become a full-time artist. When he retired in 1994, he finally had the chance to devote himself completely to painting—and he hasn’t stopped since.

During his conversation on the FASO Podcast, Sarkis shared decades of wisdom artists at every stage can relate to.

1. Enjoy the Process More Than the Result

It’s easy to get caught up in finishing a painting, making a sale, or wondering what other people will think. However, Sarkis believes those things matter far less than simply enjoying the work itself.

“Love the process. It’s not the outcome, it’s the process.” — Sarkis Antikajian

This mindset has kept him excited about painting for nearly eight decades. Every painting becomes another opportunity to learn instead of another test to pass.

2. Stay Curious, No Matter How Long You’ve Been Painting

You might expect someone who’s been painting for decades to feel like they’ve mastered it all, yet Sarkis feels exactly the opposite—he still considers himself a student.

“I am in an experimental mode all the time. I am in a learning mode all the time.”

Instead of repeating what already works, he looks for new ways to solve old problems. That’s what keeps his painting experience interesting.

3. Don’t Let Boredom Take Over

One of the biggest dangers for any artist isn’t failure—it’s boredom.

Painting the same subject the same way over and over eventually drains the excitement from creating.

“Boredom is a killer for the artist.”

Whether it’s switching mediums, experimenting with color, or simply looking at a familiar subject differently, Sarkis believes growth comes from trying something new.

4. Paint What Excites You

Artists often worry about what galleries want, what collectors expect, or what performs well online but Sarkis encourages artists to tune out that noise.

“Go with what you want to do and forget about what other people want you to do.”

When your work comes from genuine curiosity instead of outside pressure, it has a better chance of feeling honest—and that’s something viewers can recognize.

5. Financial Stability Gives You Room to Grow

One of Sarkis’ most practical pieces of advice had nothing to do with painting techniques.

He recommends having another source of income while you’re building your art career. His years as a pharmacist gave him the freedom to experiment without worrying whether every painting had to sell.

“Find some kind of income... so you’ll be able to experiment.”

Without the pressure to create only what sells, artists often discover their strongest work.

6. Paint Often—and Don’t Worry About Expensive Materials

Many artists wait until they have the perfect supplies before they really begin. Sarkis believes the opposite approach works better.

Paint often. Practice often. Learn from every painting.

“Paint a lot.”

If that means using inexpensive canvas or paper, that’s perfectly fine. The goal is to build experience, not protect expensive materials.

7. You Don’t Need to Travel Far to Find Inspiration

Some artists think they need dramatic landscapes or famous locations to create meaningful work. Sarkis spent years painting the scenery around his own home, finding something new every season.

“I see things that I’ve never seen before.”

The more closely you observe your surroundings, the more you realize there’s always something worth painting.

8. Don’t Let Your Style Become a Cage

Artists often hear they should stick to one style, one subject, or one recognizable look but Sarkis isn’t convinced that’s always good advice.

“This branding thing... you’re stuck with it.”

He believes trying different subjects and mediums helps artists continue growing. One area of painting often teaches lessons that carry into another and growth rarely happens by staying comfortable.

9. Never Stop Being a Student

Perhaps the most inspiring part of the conversation is that, even at 93, Sarkis doesn’t believe he’s finished learning.

Even today, he’s still experimenting, still sketching, and still asking questions.

“You have to stay young... I still like to learn.”

This attitude may be the real secret behind his remarkable career. It isn’t talent or success. Just an ongoing desire to keep discovering what’s possible.

Why the Journey Never Ends

Sarkis Antikajian’s story is a reminder that becoming an artist isn’t about reaching a finish line. It’s about building a lifelong relationship with creativity.

His advice is refreshingly simple: paint often, stay curious, and don't be afraid to experiment.

And most importantly, enjoy the process because if you love the act of creating, you’ll always have a reason to return to the studio tomorrow.

Leave a comment

PS — Note from Clint: One of the reasons I built FASO is because I believe art is important, artists are important, and the work you’re called to create deserves to be taken seriously. We are all sharing “miracles of existence” through our art.

Yes, at FASO, we build professional artist websites. Yes, we talk about marketing. Yes, we give artists tools to present their work, tell their stories, reach collectors, and sell more art.

But that is the how.

The why is that we love art, and we want to push back against a world that too often treats art like content and artists like algorithms. The modern world denigrates Beauty in preference of profit and efficiency. At FASO, we hold Beauty sacred.

So we don’t just host artist websites. We promote artists. We feature their work. We try, in our own small way, to help more art find the people who need it. And that informs everything we do and build.

If that resonates with you, we’d be honored to have you join us.

Get Started with FASO for Free

PPS — If you’re not ready to look at FASO, you can support our mission by simply clicking the heart icon at the top or bottom of this article. That helps us reach more artists and art lovers and helps us spread Beauty to a world that is desperate for it.

—Clint

Our use of AI in this article: Some of you may bristle at our use of AI for this, so we’d like to explain: Our beef with AI is primarily when it is used in a way that reduces opportunities for artists. Our goal, in the places we do utilize AI, is to use it in a way that supports human artists.

For example, at FASO, we do not train AI on your artwork for the purposes of using it to generate alternative images. We do use AI to protect your artwork from scrapers (including other AI bots) and to detect and block spam. And we are exploring the use of AI in ways that send more art lovers and collectors to our customers.

As always, The FASO Way is an open forum, so we’d love to know what your opinion of such AI use is in the comments. And, please, as we always request, all comments must be dignified and respectful of us and of your fellow artist colleagues who may have differing points of view. We are in this together, so discussion, and even debate, is important. But hateful or threatening comments will be blocked.

This post may be truncated in some email clients. I encourage you to read it on the web at this link: Read full piece.

Happy 4th of July weekend! You’ll notice the ads in this newsletter feature art celebrating America. I encourage you to look at Beverly’s prints. They are extremely affordable.

FASO Loves Beverly Caputo’s Art

Wouldn’t You Love to work with a website hosting company that actually promotes their artists?

As you can see, at FASO, we actually do, and we are the only website host we know of that does.

Please click the button below to start working with an art website host that actually cares about its artists.

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Who Told You to Stop Believing in Magic?

This piece originally appeared on Clint’s personal newsletter, The Universal Riddle, here. We will be locking this piece in a few days to prevent duplicate content issues.

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Join our next FASO Show Live!
https://register.faso.com/live-guest

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For today’s episode we sat down with Jennifer Balkan, a contemporary representational oil painter and art instructor based in Austin, with an academic background in behavioral neuroscience and sociology. She describes how a lifelong love of drawing crystallized into a serious painting practice after a transformative, self-gifted trip to Paris, which led her to take her first painting class in Austin in 2001. Despite completing a PhD and following a more “rational” career path, she felt an irresistible pull toward painting, ultimately choosing to pursue art full time even amid concern and confusion from friends and family. Jennifer explains that her scientific and sociological studies deeply inform her figurative work, especially her focus on the emotional, cerebral life beneath a subject’s expression and her love of optical color mixing and visible mark-making. She discusses how her inspiration has evolved from narrative series into a stronger emphasis on shapes, light, and color relationships, and how experimenting with different media during the pandemic revitalized her practice and fed back into her oil painting. Jennifer also highlights the central role of Atelier Dojo in her life—as both a co-created figurative hub and an atelier program that nurtures students’ individual voices. Jennifer also shares practical, grounded advice for aspiring full-time artists about embracing multiple income streams, loving the process, and committing to sustained, disciplined practice. Finally, she tells us all about her upcoming shows and workshops!

Jennifer’s FASO site:
jenniferbalkan.com/

Jennifer’s Social Media:
instagram.com/jenniferbalkan/

Atelier Dojo!
atelierdojo.com/

---

Transcript:

Jennifer Balkan: 0:00

You gotta love this stuff, you gotta love quote practicing, because we’re always practicing, and so it’s like, if you don’t love the process, then it’s not worth your time, because it’s too done, it’s too darn hard to like sustain yourself financially for you not to love the process, and just love the practice of doing it.

Laura Arango Baier: 0:24

Welcome to the Fast So Podcast, where we believe that Fortune Favors of old rush. My name is Laura Baier, and I’m your host. For those of you who are new to the podcast, we are a podcast that covers art marketing techniques and all sorts of business tips, specifically to help artists learn to better sell their work. We interview artists at all stages of their careers, as well as others who are in careers tied to the art world, in order to hear their advice and insights. For today’s episode, we sat down with Jennifer Balkin, a contemporary representational oil painter and art instructor based in Austin, with an academic background in behavioral neuroscience and sociology. She describes how a lifelong love of drawing crystallized into a serious painting practice after a transformative self-gifted trip to Paris, which led her to take her first painting class in Austin in 2001 Despite completing a PhD and following a more quote unquote rational career path, she felt an irresistible pull toward painting, ultimately choosing to pursue art full time, even amid concern and confusion from friends and family, Jennifer explains that her scientific and sociological studies deeply inform her figurative work, especially her focus on the emotional, cerebral life beneath the subject’s expression, and her love of optical color mixing and visible mark making. She discusses how her inspiration has evolved from narrative series into a stronger emphasis on shapes, light, and color relationships, and how experimenting with different media during the pandemic revitalized her practice and fed back into her oil painting. Jennifer also highlights the central role of Atelier Dojo in her life, as both a co-created figurative hub and an atelier program that nurtures students in the visual voices. Jennifer also shares practical, grounded advice for aspiring full-time artists about embracing multiple income streams, loving the process and committing to sustained, disciplined practice. Finally, she tells us all about her upcoming shows and workshops. Welcome, Jennifer, to the FASO podcast. How are you today?

Jennifer Balkan: 2:12

I’m good, Laura. Thanks for having me.

Laura Arango Baier: 2:14

Yeah, I’m excited to have you, because you have such beautiful work, and you just have like such a fun personality to be around as well, and I can see it in your work, and I can see it when I talk to you. So I’m excited to discuss more of that, and how your very unique background also led to you becoming a really great painter somehow magically that we are going to hear about. But before we talk about your gorgeous work, do you mind telling us a bit about who you are and what you do.

Jennifer Balkan: 2:43

Sure, I’m Jennifer, and I am predominantly an oil painter, but I also love to draw. I would, I classify myself as a contemporary representational painter. Always funny to kind of put labels on your visual stuff, but that helps kind of kind of understand it, and yeah, I’m the art instructor, and but yeah, that is who I am, as far as the visual art part of it, there’s more to more to who I am, but yeah, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 3:25

yes, there’s always more things in life. Yeah, I think that question can sometimes, some people like, oh, tell us who you are, what you do, and I think some people can really get deep, deep into.. I know, I know, like, well, there’s all other things,

Jennifer Balkan: 3:37

but let’s just talk about the art, yeah, exactly, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 3:41

but of course the art comes from your experience as a human on on this fine earth, so it can go deep. I mean, it’s it’s inextricable, it just depends on how far you want to go, but, but yeah, you did have a very interesting background before you became a painter, so actually I really want to know, when did you begin to follow the path of the artist?

Jennifer Balkan: 4:06

Yeah, so you know, I have drawn all my life, and always, yeah, always had a pencil or a pen in my hand, and I didn’t, you know, I didn’t study art formally as a kid at all, other than, you know, just playing around, and I think it was really.. I took a couple of, you know, exciting, informative classes in college that were a studio art class, as well as a, an art history class, and loved, loved it, loved them, but was kind of just pursuing other things, trying to figure out what my major was, and, and exploring, and, and so it really wasn’t until at. Actually, after I finished graduate school, not an art on a trip that I gifted myself, I was sitting in an internet cafe when those existed in Paris, and signed up for my very first painting class, I guess, painting class as an adult, and, and that in Austin, that that is so signed up when I came home, having been like super inspired by seeing all these master works, and sort of just trying to, trying to imagine how, you know how to, how to learn such things? Yeah, basically came home in 2001 and took a class and just kind of got hooked and went from, went from there. So that was sort of like the, the spark, the beginning of it all. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 6:00

yeah, and I think also I feel like a lot of people that have interviewed as well have a similar sort of, like, oh, I know I love this, but oh, my family wants me to be rational and have a, you know, a career that they’re not worried about, so and then they always end up just going back into it anyway.

Jennifer Balkan: 6:20

Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I don’t know, in this, in this life, in this one life, you know, some of us believe we have one life, you are at least on this planet, it’s like you’ve got to do, if you’re lucky enough to be able to pursue a dream, you got to do it, it’s, I mean, that’s basically what happened with me. It’s like, I, I, you know, there are all these, not, you know, this forces that were sort of, sort of trying spelling out a life that I guess I had started putting together, or a path based on what I studied and what I went to school for, and, and that, that just.. I don’t know, like once, once I, once I really discovered painting, I felt so.. I know, so fueled, and so passionate about it in a way that I had not felt like anything else before, it, and so at that point I realized that I’ve got to do this, this like this is what I need to do at the cost expense of letting whatever else go, so yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a strong force,

Laura Arango Baier: 7:43

it’s, it’s like, you know, a magnetic force. It really pulls you back, and it’s, it’s also, you know, for some people it’s even like after a successful career, where, like, they retire, and they’re like, okay, this is what I always wanted to do, and now, like, nothing’s gonna stop me. So it takes a lot, a lot of strength and gumption, to you know, pick up from a sooner stage, right? Like, oh, wow, I like, I studied this crazy major, and then it just wasn’t fulfilling, and I know exactly what fulfills me, you know. I think, yeah,

Jennifer Balkan: 8:16

you know, and I, and people around, you know, friends, family, they were just sort of like scratching their heads, like you just finished a PhD, and so it, my, my graduate studies were different from my undergrad, so my undergrad was in behavioral neuroscience, and then my grad later in sociology with a focus on Latin American sociology, which, which is what brought me down to Austin, the proximity to Mexico, and, and so, yeah, you know, like, had some really great experiences living, living in Mexico, and conducting field work, and it was, you know, really, really beautiful, and so after all, after all of that, and I mean, you know, there were there were a lot of low points, as because that’s that’s what life looks like, and and that, and I think mainly that I just kept on kind of like questioning myself and wondering if this was the thing that I’m, I’m meant to be doing, and so when I, you know, when I discovered the thing, and it was not the same as sort of this, this path that I had started creating for myself, it was like, what, you know, people were just kind of puzzled, and like concerned, and, but you know, you just gotta have to go with what I don’t know with yourself, like with, with you have all the answers for yourself, and sometimes. Don’t know what they are, but you know, in the universe helps guide us to kind of determine what what’s next, so, so, yeah, that is, yeah, kind of went, went, went forward with, with the, with the help of, of having some like wonderful interactions with people who you know, as I was telling you about this when we first met, like a couple of people, and not necessarily in, in visual, in the visual arts, but had, like, taken a big leap of faith, so to speak, like just had pursued a creative, a creative passion, a creative pursuit that was not in line with their kind of prescribed practical life, and just went for it, and I, you know, I kind of glommed onto some of these, these stories, and I’m like, all right, I don’t want to look back someday when I’m when I’m old and regret like not not doing it, so so I went for

Laura Arango Baier: 10:59

it. Yeah, exactly. I was actually going to mention that, you know, the regret part, because, like, you were saying, you know, we have one life that we can control at the moment, maybe, right? Yeah,

Jennifer Balkan: 11:11

right, right. So

Laura Arango Baier: 11:12

it’s good to keep in mind, like, oh man, like, how do I live a life that I know every morning I wake up, I am excited to wake up, and I’m excited to work on a project, instead of, you know, leading all the way down to my deathbed, eventually, and just regretting not having the strength to trust myself, you know. I think that’s, you know, it’s one of those things to consider if someone out there listening is like, oh, maybe I want to be an artist, but I’m a little scared. It’s, it’s scary

Jennifer Balkan: 11:48

indeed,

Laura Arango Baier: 11:48

but yeah, but if you’re gonna regret it at the end of your life, not at least trying, then there’s your answer, you know.

Jennifer Balkan: 11:55

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s just, I don’t know, it’s like it’s taking risks, risks of all kinds, and, and some are much, you know, feel much bigger than others, but, but I like, you don’t, I mean, even in whatever it is you’re studying, you know, whether it’s whether it’s art or something more academic or scientific, it’s if you don’t take these like little, like, I don’t know, kind of throw caution to the wind and trust yourself a little bit in, in taking a step forward, kind of out of your comfort zone. You’re just like, you’re never going to, I don’t know, you’re like, like, I feel like you’re never going to move to the next level, whatever the next level is in life, like in getting to a higher, higher space, and something that’s more rewarding and fulfilling, and and connecting in some way, so, so it is, it’s like it’s not necessarily always the safe way to go, the safe, comfortable, yeah, route, but, but that doesn’t, yeah, I don’t, I don’t, I think like those that don’t, that that are just always on that safe, comfortable route may never get to a spot where they like feel like complete elation, you know, this sort of like this, this bliss that doesn’t last. It’s like, does it’s like these moments of, I mean, that’s just.. I guess that’s just.. I don’t know, this like the metaphysical aspect of our lives and such, which we’re, we, you know, hold on to these like these moments, these flow states that are like very, very precious, and of course, if they were like continuous and they lasted, then they wouldn’t be what they are, and it’s just this, you know, yin yang thing that’s a constant up and down, but it’s good to try to bite onto those little morsels when we can

Laura Arango Baier: 14:02

exactly, yeah, yeah, and actually I also really wanted to ask you, because you, you have such a studied STEM background, do you find that your past studies, you know, neuroscience, sociology, have they affected your career as an artist, or the way that you perceive painting, or the subject matter.

Jennifer Balkan: 14:27

Yeah, I think you know, I think the short answer is yes. I think that, like, I mean, really everybody is what all of us do in our lives, whether we want it to or not, like impact the choices we make, and whatever those choices are, and what we choose to create, what we choose to describe in words and in pictures, and so even if I were to say no, like it has. Has to, it’s like it just like has to impact what I’m, what I’m, or how I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about, and I’m when I’m articulating something with paint or coming up with a, an idea for a series or paintings, and so I think, like, very like tangibly. I love, I love the idea when I, and I’ve always been drawn to painting people, like from from the get go. The the work that has spoken to me most before I ever even started to paint was figurative work, and particularly the kind of figurative work, the kind of mark making that’s probably, I mean, you know, now as a like a learned person in this, which I didn’t know how to describe really before, I’m like optical mixing, basically work that in which you can really see the artist’s hand, but has has a strong capture of, you know, some naturalism and reality, but is very much a little bit of a beautiful abstraction of of swaths of paint, so, so, like, you know, basically getting up close, and you know, this, what, like, what, what reads from a distance as very realistic and very continuous and fluid, is a, is a, is a wonderful little collage of, of little shapes and bits, and so, so that’s so that’s been the kind of stuff that has that has like really really spoken to me over the years and and I see it like I want to, well, so when I’m working on visually describing and and a person or a face or I’m like thinking about what is underneath that skin, so to speak, and so you know, thinking about the thoughts of what’s happening under the expression and really trying to evoke an emotional state in the paint, and and so like that is like that’s very kind of brain like emotional neuro scientific thinking about sort of the cerebral and the emotional within all of us and so somehow when described like describing that in paint, so I am, so I, so I think that just because I always loved that kind of study, it definitely informs the way I think about painting the human subject matter that I, that I do,

Laura Arango Baier: 18:01

yeah, and I totally agree that it is inevitable that you know anything that has happened in our past in some way or another is going to influence what we do, regardless of whether we perceive it that way or not, because the human brain is so complicated.

Jennifer Balkan: 18:16

Totally, yeah, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 18:19

yeah, and actually speaking of, besides, you know, the evoking emotion and the collage of color, what inspires a piece for you? Like, where does the idea start for you?

Jennifer Balkan: 18:37

You know, it’s so like, as a, as, as somebody who’s been doing this for a while, and I know you, as you know, fellow artist and painter, can relate to what, what you know, what, what drove us at one time change has changed, you know, and I, we, I hope, like I hope, I hope that we all, you know, who are on this path can continue to grow and change. I mean, I know you know we all probably see, see work out there, you know, maybe not know personally or not know personally folks who are like look very much the same as they did, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, and, and so, and it always kind of puzzles me, because I, I get, I don’t know, I get tired of, of the same thing, and what’s like, or like creating the same thing in the same way, and I am, and what’s funny about that is that I think, like, okay, I’m kind of totally going off of thrills here, like, tangent-wise, but I’m realizing, but anyway, bring it back and maybe expand on that thought in a moment, what is what inspires me, so I would say at this moment. And time like shapes and light, and it as, as related to human subject matter. I mean, this is so.. it was like I’m laughing at myself because I feel like this just describes everything, but like human subject matter and objects, people and stuff, and their stuff, not our stuff assigned to them. If you are like creating a composition, and much like you know, in the past I used to think of creating concepts and series somewhat like a storyboard and film, and so I would, and I’ve, I like, actually, to this day, I still continue to paint like this, and I, it’s like something that it’s very hard to shake, and I guess that’s just, you know, we are what we are at some point, but, but from the very start of when I, when I began to paint, I would think in like little series, and so, so it might be, you know, working with a model and kind of coming up with this narrative that includes various physical elements, objects, and things, props that, that kind of tell whatever the narrative is that I’m creating and and so and that and working that out across like you know anywhere from three paintings to six paintings or whatever whatever my my my idea is and so so that of course, is like a little series of something. What we usually label, and I got so accustomed to kind of thinking like that, or maybe it just has always been in me, that that it’s hard. It’s like hard to just paint a painting and leave it at that, like it’s like frustrating, I mean, when it comes to like working on something in my studio, like not just, you know, responding to in the moment of whether you know it’s a still life project or working on a model at the at the school or in an open studio, which all of which I love to do. I just like love somebody puts something in front of me, and okay, draw and paint that thing, like that is that’s a that’s something that I, you know, it’s like just just drawing and painting for paint sake, and not coming up with the the thing that you’re going to visualize, so, so that, yeah, so like, but, but in my, I would say earlier I was very much driven by it, like, okay, I’m creating this particular narrative and spelling it out, and with paint, and but in, in like the last, I don’t know, hand, like few years, I’ve, I’ve been really, I don’t know, like the impact of the light and the color and the shape within the pictorial space is so exciting to me, so it’s like, like, more so than it used to be, and I, you know, when I look at work out there, I am like, so moved when I see really strong shape, I don’t know, like shape relationship, and so when, so now, and things that I’m thinking about now is like, how can I use elements that I, you know, like actual, you know, person, and and various objects and such to create that effect, like I’m so, and and then sometimes and also I love color and so there are times where I’m like I just want to paint pink and yellow, like it has to be pink and yellow, and so so I will like that color relationship will kind of drive something, drive and, and the idea, the concept, whatever. So, I think, like, it’s gotten just less concrete for me, as like, I don’t have to paint like the person doing the thing, but it’s more of, like, yeah, the person might be doing the thing, but there has to be all this exciting light shape thing, you know, first and foremost, almost before whatever the actual identifiable stuff is,

Laura Arango Baier: 24:51

yeah, and I think that’s a really great route to start with, because at its, I guess, at its core, like painting in general is an. Abstract form of reality, because it is a d on a d, so there’s no way around it. You are taking, you’re drawing out from reality, and you’re putting it on something else with the illusion that it’s something entirely different than a flat surface. So, yeah, I think that that makes perfect sense. And I totally relate to, you know, I think a lot of us are so motivated by ooh, this object, and like, what if I put it like this with this other thing, and yeah, and it tells us about this other thing, and that’s perfectly normal, because you know, as humans, that’s how many of us perceive visual narrative, but yeah, I think exploring that is really cool, and it actually wanted to circle back on, you know, what was it like for you? And it’s okay, this is like a little too personal, but what was it like for you when you realized, man, I don’t like what I’m painting anymore, or I’m bored of this, I need to break away. Like, what was that transition like for you?

Jennifer Balkan: 25:55

I feel like it’s.. it hasn’t been so.. I don’t know, dramatic, I guess it’s just like these little moments where, and it’s, it’s usually where I’m, I don’t know, like exploring, maybe exploring a slightly different medium, a different palette, a different, you know, just doing something a little different, and I just, I kind of really recently read another artist, trying to remember who now, I can’t remember somewhere, somewhere out in the social media world where they were saying that if they, if they get stuck in a rut, they try something in a different medium, which I thought was like very relatable, and so one, you know, one thing that, like, really changed, or I don’t know, added, added, and adjusted a lot for me was during the pandemic, like, you know, a lot of, lot of change happened for a lot of people, and it started off as being like really, really hard, I know, I know, you know, it’s like either as an artist you were having the time of your life because like you could lock yourself in your studio and nothing mattered, and I’ve heard of people being like the most creative they ever were, but as an artist and a parent and a kid, you know, just trying to navigate school and isolation and all that stuff, it was, is pretty rough, pretty rough, but anyway, thankfully that’s behind us, but one thing that did happen for me during, during the COVID times was that I discovered some new drawing medium, and it happened because I, you know, at at our school, Telia Dojo, while we were, while we were trying to survive the pandemic, like as a school and financially and such, we we started remote hope hosting remote open studios, which actually ended up being like just a savior for so many people out there that were, you know, I mean, feeling isolated and wanting to continue some kind of drawing communal experiences or painting experience, and so what we, what we would do was that we would, we would host Zoom sessions with recordings of live models, so it was kind of, so we would do these recordings where it’s kind of funny to think about a recording where someone’s just sitting like that, like recorded, like, but but it’s still, it still was not a photo, you know. It’s like we wanted to sort of the feeling of like we’re work, you know, there’s a, there’s a person in there that it’s not totally still. So, at any rate, we did that, and the silver lining in that was that we had, you know, people tuning in from all over the world, which was not, you know, I think that’s what a lot of people talk about now, about pandemic stuff, but so that was pretty neat, and so, so, as, as, as someone to host the Zoom session, you know, we would alternate among the people working at Dojo, and so what I had decided was like, I didn’t always feel like, you know, it’s like computer screen, you’re navigating a Zoom session, letting people in and out, and doing all the kind of technical stuff, and then also working on your, your whatever, your drawing or your painting of the individual on the screen, and we would share, we would take breaks and share and such, so, which was pretty cool, and you could see everybody’s little head, you know, working on their stuff, and, and so at some point I, you know, it just like became a little too cumbersome painting because of the work, you know, because of the key using the keyboard and all of that, so I’m like, oh. To draw, and, but I’m like, I want to draw in color, and so my, I had gotten my kid a set of Posca markers, and so the, are you familiar with those? What those are, they’re paint pens, and so they look like markers, but they’re actually acrylic paint in, in pen form or in marker form, rather, and, and so, anyway, I was like, huh, maybe I’ll try, you know, this is like random, maybe I’ll try using some of these, and so that became a whole thing for me, and, and so, because they, they’re opaque and they dry like that, just like acrylic paint does, but you have a lot of control because it’s really like using a drawing medium, and so, so I, you know, I got really into it, I got really into all the hatching, basically, like, so I would describe the, you know, the physicality of a person with hatching with cross hatching as color mixing, so it was like it just fulfilled this whole like this real fun optical optical mixing kind of process that I love, and, and so I ended up like getting more of them, and getting a bigger palette, and, and really, really kind of rolling with that for a while, so that was a whole new thing, and people responded to them pretty well, and I started doing little commissions of little like portrait heads and such, with doing that, and so that was born out of needing something a little different, and some change, and then, and some change in that, and then from that I got into Bic pen drawing as well, very similar, except ink, and, and using those little, like old, like old school clicky mix, the four, the blue pens with the red, red, black, green, and blue ink, and they also have a couple other varieties of color, so, so, yeah, and so I kind of, I just like developed another way of mark making on with a, you know, dry-ish medium on paper, which was really, really fun and different, and from that, after from that, my next kind of, I don’t know, idea concept was like, how can I merge that with my oil painting, so that kind of like spawned trying to figure out a union between the two, and I did, and I created a body of work with that, bringing those two things together. So, anyway, all this is to say that, like, it’s just exciting to try new things, and so, and I like, but, like, in the end, when looking at all, you know, the kinds of things that I have done, I kind of like laugh, because I realized that there’s still such a similarity, like what I perceive as like such a big step in a different direction in the overarching umbrella of all of it. It’s like you’re still painting the people, you still like the masks, you still like the animal, like it’s just like you still are doing kind of a lot of the same thing, but in slightly different ways, and I guess that I guess that is what, like, really describes, you know, somebody is like personal voice, you know, in through throughout it all, so it’s like you see all these changes, but there’s still kind of a common thread of that, that individual through, through it all, so, but, uh, but yeah, so that has, that has kept me from, I don’t know, things getting like stale after a while,

Laura Arango Baier: 34:16

yeah, yeah, and I think that’s it’s one of those things as an artist, where that growth is there, it’s waiting in, you know, like in your case, like a new medium that you hadn’t explored, and or even just in digging deeper to one subject matter. I mean, there’s, there’s so many different ways to just grow as an artist if you’re looking, and if that’s what you want, I mean, I think it’s inevitable that we grow, and in terms of the voice, I mean, yeah, that’s like one of those things where, like, you look at your work, there’s like one piece part of like the micro and the macro, and like you, it’s like it’s totally different, but then in the macro, it’s like, oh, never mind, still me, it’s still me. Yeah, like I still write exactly the same with pen and with pencil and with a giant marker or Sharpie, it’s still going to be the

Jennifer Balkan: 35:09

same. Yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 35:11

so it’s yeah, it’s inevitable. And then I also wanted to ask you, how your time with Atelier Dojo has also affected your work and your inspiration as well.

Jennifer Balkan: 35:28

My whole Atelier Dojo existence has been, you know, such an incredible part of my life as an artist, and, and you know, I think it’s just, I don’t know, it’s beautiful, what, when, when, when things unexpected happen, and then they end up being like such a big part of you, and so the story behind that is that back in 2018 my dear friends Denise Fulton and Karen Offit, friends, fellow painters opened up the school, and that was that came out of us regularly painting together, and just painting models together, like we were for a little bit with a couple other people calling ourselves the five LPs, which were the five lady painters, never got, never got the T-shirts with the actual like LP record, but anyway, we talked about it for a while, so, but at any rate, opened up a school, and the initial vision for it was a place where we could teach classes, painting and drawing, not just us, but, you know, other hire other people to host open studios, live open studios, were model poses, and, and also bring workshop artists in from all over the place, so there was like nothing like that in Austin, and we were, you know, we were frustrated that this, these kinds of places existed in, you know, other cities all over the country and world, and so decided that it was time for us, so really got that rolling, and what it was met with like great acceptance from the community, which was wonderful. So you know, we wanted to have a figurative art making, mark making hub in Austin, and like you know that seemed to be a need for other people too, so, so, yeah, so that was, you know, so the dojo became, you know, a popular place from from the get go, and then come about 20, about, you know, probably about a year, like maybe a year and a half later, one of our wonderful instructors, Justin Baiersa had yearned to teach some classes with longer poses akin to what he had studied at in the Angel Academy, where you went. I learned, and so, so he, yeah, so you know, we were like, we’re very open, we’re like, well, if people want them, let’s, let’s do it. And so Justin started teaching a couple classes, a cast drawing class and a long post figure drawing class, and and students were signing up and signing up repeatedly, and wanting, you know, wishing that they could do it on more of a regular, you know, not just a weekly basis, but come in a couple times a week or more, and so it just really organically grew out of a desire of from from students as well as just in teaching it, Danny Grant jumped in with him, and they were co-teaching for a little while, and then come, I guess, in 21 I had, I had just had a solo exhibition, and I was like ready for some change, you know, the feeling of like finishing up a show, and just being, you know, kind of exhausted, so, and also, and also having taught in the same manner I had been teaching for years, which was really wonderful, and I’m like, you know, super grateful that I was able to do that for so long, but wanting to just pause, and I don’t know, be a student for a little bit, be a student again for a little bit, and, and try something different, and I don’t know, just kind of like a little bit of, I was at a little bit of a crossroads in my, in my own art world, meaning I was definitely getting a. Little burned out on the classes that I was teaching, and just the format of them, and so I began to study with Justin at the, at what we were at that point calling Dojo Academy, and I loved it. I just, like, I, you know, I don’t know, I think it was just, it was he chuckled when I told him I wanted to be a student, and but he, yeah, jumped in there, and spending time with these casts, and the figure for longer than I had ever done was really, you know, like I don’t know, just really, really exhilarating, taking a much deeper dive into observational work than I had been doing in the past, and so anyway, super loved it, and kind of just sort of inadvertently became Justin’s assistant with students, didn’t plan for that, but it just kind of happened, I think, like I, you know, I did, I did okay as a student, just having had all the all the experience that I had in a slightly different way, so it, it was like I’m learning something new, kind of, but I, I still, I felt very connected to it, so, so, anyway, fast forward, Justin decides he’s moving out of state, because he’d been in Austin for a long time, and I’m, I realized it was up to me to sort of say to keep this thing going, and so I was like very, very committed to it. I did a ton of research on atelier programs, consulted with some painter friends who are very like well deep in within their own programs, teaching, that is, and, and, yeah, basically, got the program going, hired, you know, it’s, it’s crazy to think about, it’s been through some changes, hiring some different people, we are now at this moment, we have an incredible staff, and we are, I guess, coming up on our third year and graduating our very first students, so.. and it’s like.. it’s just such a.. I don’t know. it’s. it’s so neat to be on other artist students journeys with them, and so that, that’s something that I didn’t experience as a teacher before, before this, and so, though I had, like, you know, it was, I always loved teaching, I loved geeking out on technique, and, and, you know, and I had the range of students, like people, take art classes for all kinds of reasons, some, some pretty serious, some like really, really want to, you know, learn and better their craft, and have some professional goals in mind, and other people are like hard after a hard day’s work, just want to, you know, relax a little bit, and so, and all of that is equally good, you know, it’s like there’s so many reasons for, for, for, you know, trying this kind of thing, but when I started teaching in the academy, it was like, it was, it was just a whole different kind of teaching experience, because you know, continuing to teach the same students over and over, and watch, get to get to be by their side as they were like having those light bulb moments, and these, you know, also pitfalls, like just, you know, the things that happen as we’re, as we’re all learning and continuing to work, and um, and and just like developing like really strong relationships and community and camaraderie and I like, wow, this is such a beautiful thing, and, and it’s like, I can’t imagine life without it at this point, so, so, yeah, Atelier Doda, we’ve been growing, we’ve, we’ve moved into a different space from our original space, and now we’re getting ready to move into an yet another space, because we’re expanding the size with an additional classroom to get to offer more programming, so we still, we have lots of six week classes, we host workshops still from with artists from all over, we have our open studios and we have our three year ish tuition based Dojo Academy program, so lot of good stuff going on at the school and and it’s yeah, it’s a lot. Really great place to be. I feel grateful for it.

Laura Arango Baier: 45:03

If you’ve been enjoying the podcast and also want to ask our guests live questions, then you might want to join our monthly webinar, The FASO Show, where our guest artists discuss marketing tips, share inspiring stories, and answer your burning questions in real time. Whether you’re a seasoned painter or just starting your creative journey, this is your chance to connect, learn, and spark new ideas, and whether you’re stuck on a canvas or building your creative business, this is where breakthroughs happen. Don’t miss out. Ignite your passion and transform your art practice by joining us. Our next FASO show webinar is coming up on the 18th of June with our special guest, Timothy Tyler. You can find the sign-up link in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, and I think if anyone’s in the Austin area and wants to get some good education, they should totally, of course, add the link in the show notes for Atelier Dojo, so anyone can go check it out and sign up for any workshops and fun stuff, you know, you never know, you can try a figure session one night and before you know it, you’re obsessed,

Jennifer Balkan: 46:01

totally, yes. yeah, yeah. Oh, and you know what? One other one thing I wanted to say about that, you know, as I was thinking about some of the questions in advance, something that maybe you’ll, you know, you were thinking of getting to anyway, but something really special about the art program, and something that I think about in my own artistic path is that, that we really, you know, I think, like, as artists, or as, let’s say, as, as growing artists and students, we wonder how we will cultivate our own voice, you know, it’s like, you know, it’s like, I don’t, I don’t want to just learn how to draw and paint well, but I also, you know, I want to, I want to be unique in some way, or I want to, I want to do something a little different, and and be able to express myself in my own way, and have, you know perhaps be identifiable in some way, you know, and and I hear that a lot, like, how, okay, like, how do I figure that out, and I think, like, my answer to it is, like, either, either you already have it, and you just need to work like hours and hours of, of like, you know, really, really learning and practicing and growing within the craft to, to more successfully articulate visually what’s all what’s what’s there, or you maybe don’t know what that is yet, but you’re working on it for hours and hours, and, and experimenting, you know, with instruct, you know, taking the instruction in and trying things in different ways, and, and just, you know, learning the medium, and such, that you just can’t, you will, you will, like, there’s no way you will won’t figure it out, you know. It’s just like you will kind of just gravitate towards something, you know. Certainly, some subject matter, some way of paint handling from all your studies with different people. You like a little of this, a little of that. You take, you know, you take something good from from each person, and then work out how best to describe that yourself, and that becomes the you, and so, so at our school, like, we’re really, we don’t, you know, we’re something that’s very important to us is, is to, you know, is to really cultivate being the best, the best version of yourself, and so that means that when a student comes in, we never want to strip them of what is already there, because something is already there, and so we’re, you know, it’s like with our instruction and our critiques and our, you know, help helping them to grow as a, as a painter, as an artist. There’s, there’s kind of, there’s caution not to, like, you know, remove some of what’s already there, but instead, How can we help improve? How can, how can we help, help them to see a little more, see differently, I guess. And so, and with that, you know, certainly the all the technical stuff, you know, the measurement accuracy and line and mark making and construction and anatomical knowledge and all that technical stuff, but it does not necessarily have to be at odds with the with the the voice that’s that’s already in that that particular student, so we don’t need to kind of strip them of the of the Eunice, I don’t. To take the you out of you, but we just are adding all this other stuff to it, so and I think that also just helps with them coming out the other side and feeling like motivated and feeling like they, you know, maybe they don’t actually know exactly what you know, I mean, you know, it takes a while, as we know, to sort of figure, figure yourself out, but, but they’re not, they don’t feel stripped of anything, so that’s that’s important to

Laura Arango Baier: 50:31

us. Yeah, and I totally appreciate it, because from my experience, obviously, this doesn’t happen to everyone, but you know, when you go to these academic schools, there’s a lot of course competition, and there’s a lot of really rigorous, intense training, which is great. It’s really great, but at the same time, like you said, you know, there’s a little bit of that erasure of the self that happens because in order for you to reach a specific level of skill you need to erase your mistakes a lot, and I had a guest, actually a long while ago, who said your voice is actually the mistakes you repeat, which I thought was really interesting. Of course, you choose what mistakes you want, or what could be deemed as mistakes, right? Because, of course, there’s no real right or wrong in drawing. In the end, it’s really just like, okay, well, if this is my goal, then these are the steps I have to follow. But then, when that’s no longer your goal, say, for example, the super high finish, high render academic style, now you have to figure out, okay, what’s my new goal, and what are the steps that I need to get to there, because if I keep following these steps, I’m never going to get to this other goal, and I think that’s one of the hard parts about graduating from a very rigorous academic program, which is you become so reliant on this from a to b situation that when you want to go to point C, sure, you have some of the starter tools, but you, you don’t even remember what point C was supposed to be anymore, like, like it, because, of course, the academic can, it can be really addictive, it can be really fun, because it’s like, oh my gosh, I could paint a million still lives, because I know I can accomplish it, but at the same time, it’s like, for me personally, I just felt very unfulfilled by that. I was like, yeah, I can paint all these still lives, but I don’t, I don’t get any fulfillment out of it in the same way that I would if I was trying to explore these other ideas that I have, so I appreciate that Atelier Dojo, at least, wants to retain some of that. Okay, let’s think about, you know, how we can make sure that we’re using what you know and what you want and your style, and just develop that, so that it, it’s more accurate without erasing you completely, which I think is it’s a great goal to have. It seems a little hard, but it seems like a great goal. I think, like,

Jennifer Balkan: 53:11

it’s definitely.. I mean, it is.. it’s hard in this.. it’s what am I trying to say.. it can definitely be hard in the sense that maybe the progress, quote, whatever progress in quotes that a student hopes to make might be a little slow, might happen a little more slowly, and that’s okay, I, you know, I’ve, I think, like that’s really, we’ve got, got your whole life, and we’re, you know, I’m, I’m still, I still consider myself a student of all of this, so it’s, it, it, there’s, there, there are never any shortcuts, no matter what, like, no matter, no matter what particular kind of, of instructional program you pursue, or maybe, or not at all, and you are just on your own, trying, you know, learning and figuring it out. It’s time, it is time, and patience and discipline and hours and like hours and hours of bad drawings, bad paintings, and you keep on going, and so, so in that sense, like there’s, it’s just literally doing it as much as possible, and that is the way to getting better, like improving, you know. Regardless, there is not.. there’s.. I mean, I.. I would say, if, like, I did not attend the programs that exist now, didn’t, when I. Was when I was a much younger person, and, and I, you know, I’m like, oh man, you know, like, uh, if only, if only I would have gone to said school and done such and such, and it would have been quicker, like, so, so I do, I, okay, I do believe that there is a more efficient road to improvement, and to great, to great improvement, for sure, for sure. But even with that, it’s still, it’s still the hours of studying and sketching, and you know, keeping a sketchbook and drawing whenever you can, and all that stuff, so in that sense, you know, it’s just like it’s just you gotta love this stuff, you gotta love quote practicing, because we’re always practicing, and so it’s like, if you don’t love the process, then it’s not worth your time, because it’s too, it’s too darn hard to like sustain yourself financially for you not to love the process and just love the practice of doing it.

Laura Arango Baier: 56:11

Thank you. Yes, we’re so happy you said love the process, because there’s always, and I feel like it could, I could just be speaking for myself is the last before we continue to the next part, for the next question, because this is just so fascinating, but I feel like a lot of artists that I’ve noticed, you know, when you’re, you know, in the beginning stages, going into like early career to mid career, and then by the time you’re late career, you’re fine, but hopefully, but I feel like there’s always this, a bit of like a struggle between process and end result, right? And it’s always going to be like, oh, I want this end result, but then you don’t know the process to get to it, or like, the process completely alters the end result, and you know the idea you had in mind at the beginning is just like it never, it’s totally different, it’s not even anywhere close to what it was. It’s almost like when you have like a dream and things make sense in the dream, and then you like try to interpret it in real life, is like hands don’t move like that.

Jennifer Balkan: 57:17

Yeah, I like that analogy, that’s totally,

Laura Arango Baier: 57:21

so I feel like, yeah, loving the process, and just enjoying the process, and allowing that to also let, let your expectations shift, because if you have, like, these expectations about, I need this painting to look like this, and just have this extreme level of control, for some people, it works, and that’s great, but I think also, in the, you know, the side of like experimenting, learning, and allowing yourself to grow, it is so important to release some of that control a little bit, give yourself some room to maybe take things in a direction that you would never expect, that might be even better than this, like extreme uptightness, so it might be preventing a piece from like really speaking back to you, which I like to say that like paintings oftentimes will tell us what it means. It’s like screaming at you, and it’s your responsibility to reply to it and be like, okay, fine, I’ll move this over here, like you’re asking,

Jennifer Balkan: 58:21

I’m experiencing that literally right now.

Laura Arango Baier: 58:26

I feel like we all feel that, or it’s like, shut up, stop looking at me painting. I hear you, stop it.

Jennifer Balkan: 58:33

Yes, yes, yes,

Laura Arango Baier: 58:35

yes. So I’m really happy you mentioned process, because the more you focus on enjoying the process, like you said, the easier it is to, I would dare say, like you know, reach a painting that you might not have even expected to have ever reached, you know, if you had just kept limited your vision to like this level of perfection, instead of just like what can go beyond that, you know, glass ceiling that you’re putting, you know, yeah,

Jennifer Balkan: 59:04

yes, that’s

Laura Arango Baier: 59:07

a big one,

Jennifer Balkan: 59:09

so yeah, oh my gosh, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 59:11

yeah, that’s the artist’s life, but also, you know, in terms of the more monotonous side, that is a little bit tougher in the artist’s life. What was the moment for you where you became full time? What was that like for you when you, you know, you said, okay, this is it, no day job, or I mean, having a teaching job is great because you know you’re still an artist, but what was that like for you? That transition,

Jennifer Balkan: 59:40

yeah, yeah, you know, I had to, when I was thinking about this question, I kind of had to like go back and actually remember a few of the steps, like before I was like, okay, here I go, and you know, and play that out a little bit, it was in 2005 Dave, when I think I could have, I said, like, I officially left the part-time job I had as a research assistant at University of Texas, which is, which was a great thing to be able to do, because I could fill the rest of my hours with painting, drawing stuff, and before then my first like opportunity to show work was in 2003 and I was invited, kind of like an artist collective of sorts to exhibit two paintings, and it was like, was a really big deal for me, and, and, and they were received, they were received pretty well, and I then, by kind of via that, had an invitation to a local gallery, and quickly developed a relationship with them, and they, and they offered to give me a solo show in oh four, and so that was super exciting. These are the days where you know, hard to believe for most artists now, but you, you could walk into a gallery with your images under your arm and be like, “Hi, I’m an artist, you want to look at my, you know, my portfolio, which later on, even, even like a little while after that, I remember people saying, “Don’t ever do that again, or like, “Just do not do that, don’t dare do that in New York, you might be able to do that in Austin, but you know this, all like, there are just so many rules and like good guidance as to what you should and shouldn’t do as a, as a pounding the pavement, literally, artist, but it worked for me in that moment, and, and my naive self, and so, so, yeah, so that was kind of like the beginning of me exhibiting work, and and then in oh five, I, so I had been taking some classes, local classes here in Austin, and in 2005 I spent a month at the Denver Art Student League, where I just kind of filled my days with painting and drawing, and it was since I had never been like an official art student, it was as close to that experience, and it was just wonderful, and so when I returned from that was when I decided, like, all right, I think I’m going for it, and, and so that is when I left the part-time job, and, and I had recently gotten married, or in the, in the last couple years before that, gotten married, and my very supportive husband, Jeff, I said to him, I said,’Listen, I know this is like might feel really crazy, but if you can just financially support me for a little bit while I like really kind of figure this out, I’ll get you back at some point. Like, I hope to be able to do the same for you. He’s a super creative guy and musician and has played guitar all his life and such, so I, and a lot of other things, but, but I really, yeah, just with his support I was able to just say, okay, I’ll figure this out, and and so I, so that’s what I did, and then, and then in it was like later that year that I had my very first teaching job, and and the director of the local sculpture academy here in Austin was familiar with my work and asked me if I wanted to teach figure drawing, which was very scary for me, but also exciting and and very intimidating, and when I was taking some really incredible classes in Denver, I thought about the idea of teaching the stuff at some point, and like really, really holding on to some gems of knowledge that great people were bestowing upon me, and note taking, and everything, and thinking, like, okay, maybe I would want to teach this stuff. So that was my first, that was my first opportunity, which, you know, was scary and hard at first, but very rewarding. And then it just, and then more of that started to happen. I then taught figure painting there, and then that, then I ended up getting a couple other jobs, and so forth, and and eventually decided to start teaching in my own studio to small groups, so private but small. Groups of people where I’d hire, we would hire a model, and, and I, that, that, that, that began my regular six week sessions, which, at the time, I had, I had a wait list on them, you know, continually I would, I would alternate between portrait and figure painting, and then eventually I started doing some still life. It just because, at the time, there, aside from the university and the community college, there was very.. I mean, actually, at University of Texas, it.. you know, there was no representational mark making, not so much right now, either a little bit, but at the time zero, you know, it was not, you know, the the trend was not that, and so, so I had, yeah, I like the classes were in demand, which was like pretty good for me, so I did that all like for years up until 2018 where I kind of moved my classes into Atelier Dojo, and then brought on, you know, more students and all that stuff, but, but that, that really, so, so, you know, the teaching was very part-time, and it enabled me to be able to paint, be able to think about showing work do commissions from time to time, so I just, just kind of developing myself alongside that, so, so that was that, was it, that was that little turning point.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:06:35

Nice, yeah, and honestly, teaching makes you a better artist as well, because it just forces you to know what you’re talking about, and to also, you know, perceive different ways that you can explain to your students something that you know, if you may, if you say it in one way to one guy, he might not understand, or she, you might not understand, but you say it in a different way, suddenly, aha, that light bulb happens, and that’s also extremely fulfilling, you know, the teaching side can be fulfilling in its own way, but yeah, yeah, teaching and

Jennifer Balkan: 1:07:11

learning from students, learning from students, like I just, yeah, I mean, it just, I always found, you know, exactly, just to echo what you said, and, and just having, I mean, you don’t know something until you have to teach it to something else, and figuring out, I think, like a methodical, I think, because of my, because of my kind of patchwork of education, and, and really determining what a really great and effective way of communicating through, you know, in method to be able to teach somebody else, so that was that was something that I had to, I definitely had to figure out, because nobody, it’s not very educational just to watch somebody do their thing without structure, and so I had structure, but I didn’t, it wasn’t so clearly spelled out until I had to figure out how to spell it out for somebody else, and so yeah, that for 100% like, okay, what, what do I.. what do I do again?

Laura Arango Baier: 1:08:25

Yeah, yeah, that’s changed

Jennifer Balkan: 1:08:27

so much over time too, because you know, like, the more you know, the more you learn to be a great teacher, you should always be willing to continue to learn, and, and, and, and keep current on just everything out there, so you know, just constantly tweaking and adjusting and doing, you know, getting rid of what doesn’t work very well, and so, yeah,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:08:58

yeah, yeah, and it’s, it’s, it’s an endless, you know, sort of well of information, like you said, like you should constantly be learning, and also, gosh, like I know we’ve probably all experienced this as well, but like having a good teacher, it really just changes your life, no matter what subject matter, right? Like, you always remember that moment where that teacher, I think, at its core, what I think really hits when you have a good teacher is the fact that they listen to you and they respond in a way that you understand. It’s almost like they have to learn a very unique little language with you to get you to understand it, at least with painting, and I think that can make a huge difference, equally, that, like, you know, you can tell when a teacher really doesn’t care, like it’s the worst, because then that also kind of stays with you, but yeah, you know, do. Just learning from a good, good teacher, and then also from the side of teaching, you know, learning something as if you were going to teach it, even if you’re not, is also mind blowing. You can learn anything that way.

Jennifer Balkan: 1:10:14

Very good point. Absolutely,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:10:17

yeah.

Jennifer Balkan: 1:10:17

And, like, and just, and also sitting in other people’s classes, other taking classes, just like continuing your own education, is a wonderful thing. I, you know, I have the privilege of getting to sit in on my fellow instructors, colleagues’ classes, and so, and we, we encourage doing that amongst amongst our little team, so that we can, like, you know, try to stay unified, try not to confuse students. She said this, he said that. What’s the, you know, trying to, like, minimize, like, too much contradiction and conflict, but all, but just, I just, I get so much out of being getting, you know, getting to learn from them as well, and like, oh, wow, I love the way they just described that thing that I understand and describe in a slightly different way to students, like, oh, cool, I’m gonna, I’m gonna use that, like, that will work. I like that, you know, and so that you know, that’s just what I.. I feel very lucky to be able to do that, and then, and to continue my own learning with, with all of that.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:11:36

Absolutely, yes. And then I also wanted to ask, because you know, teaching, I’m guessing, is a good amount of your one of your incomes, which is great. So many artists, when they, you know, they teach workshops, or they teach at academies, that’s a great source of income, because you get to keep a good amount of it, compared to, you know, working with galleries, of course. But what have, in terms of, you know, making a living as an artist, would have been, would have been some of your income streams that have worked for you, and your unique way of approaching, you know, your business, because everyone does it a little different.

Jennifer Balkan: 1:12:12

Sure, yeah, I mean, really, I would say teaching is really the main one for me, or has been I’ve also done, you know, and continue to do commission work, but really that’s it, that is pretty much it, you know, and being kind of open to different upper, you know, different kinds of teaching in the past. Yeah, I feel like I feel fortunate that that has worked for me, because it doesn’t work for everybody, and not everybody likes doing it, and I, you know, that’s totally fine. So, because it’s worked well for me, I’ve been just keeping, you know, with that predominantly, and I, you know, it’s funny because even in times where I have taught a lot less and I have way more studio time, I.. it’s isolating, you know, it’s sort of like it’s funny because I, I’m around people, you know, as far as, like, professionally, art, you know, art wise, way more than I was before being involved in Dojo Academy, and so there was a time where the life that I had, like, I guess maybe five years ago. Well, I don’t want to. It’s funny, I’m saying five years, I’m like, not the pandemic. I didn’t mean that, like, let’s say before the pandemic would look like, like in the past, past I would have said, oh my gosh, like that is the ideal life. You’re in your studio all the time, teaching your occasional class, and like, what a dream life, you know? Just, just you and your work. So I did that for, you know, a good number of years, and, and it was good for a while, and then it was a little lonely, and even, you know, and I would really look forward to those classes that I would have once a week or twice a week, maybe, and, and you know, place like, oh, cool, my like infusion of and, and like, an open, you know, open studios, it wasn’t as if like I was I was seeing painter friends and such working from models occasionally and such, but like, but anyway, kind of like living the life that I thought I wanted, I. And yeah, kind of felt, felt pretty isolating, and so, and didn’t even realize it until being involved with the school as I am that I have, yeah, it just, it feels there’s just a lot more community, I guess is really the best way of putting it, but, but just also, and maybe it’s my, it’s also my like aging self feeling a sense of purpose, like a sense of giving back, which making art can feel, you know, very narcissistic at a lot of times, it’s like, oh, here I am making my paintings. It’s all about me, my voice, you know. It’s like, here I’m talking about, like, finding our voice and all that stuff. This is what we, what we yearn for, but, but then it’s like, here, buy my work, buy the thing that I’m putting out there, that’s me, you know, that’s which, like, it’s all a matter of perspective, but, um, but I think, like, um, there’s I I think, and maybe it’s just sort of like my years doing this, I, it’s a, it’s a nice balance, you know, and people have different ways of balancing that, all different, you know, all kinds of different ways, and, and, and, so, and I, and I see, like, yeah, just like cool pursuits that other, other, other artists choose to do, whether it’s like working for some kind of organization that promotes the arts in some way for young people, or, you know, all kinds of stuff, but I have found that it, like, for my, it really just, it helps, it, it has given me so much personal satisfaction, in terms of, like, what is this all about, anyway, kind of stuff. Yeah, like putting my work out there has been a big drive for me, but also just to be able to kind of pass it, pass this on, not, not, not my paintings, but like pass this wonderful knowledge and practice on that, that is just a beautiful part of humanity to others who will also yearn it is just like it feels, it feels like a higher purpose for me personally, and that feels, you know, it feels, feels nice, because there’s a lot of questioning about all kinds of stuff right now, and on our planet, and so I’m like, if we can just be remembered once we’re, you know, we’re ruled by the robot overlords, or whatever, whatever’s about to happen to us sooner or later, like humans, they made art, they passed art down, they, they communicated visually, they shared that experience with each other, and like, that’s that’s a bigger thing,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:18:08

yeah, yeah. And, and you know, speaking of lineage, I mean, it’s what, you know, what we’re doing is literally what’s been happening since the beginning of, you know, cave drawings, you know, yeah, we’re still doing the same thing, just unga boom, pointing it. This is, yeah,

Jennifer Balkan: 1:18:26

exactly, exactly the

Laura Arango Baier: 1:18:28

deer that’s over there, and it’s fulfilling, because it feels also like, you know, to add to what you said, is like we’re we’re just following this very long lineage of human creative expression on two dimensional surface of some sort, which is beautiful when you think about the grand scheme of humanity, and what we’ve done, and I think it’s important to remember that, yeah, because even if our name gets lost right in time, maybe someone we taught remembers us and mentions it to their students, and then, yeah, you know, you never know, life is strange. Then I wanted to ask you, if you have any final advice for someone who wants to become a full-time artist, do it,

Jennifer Balkan: 1:19:21

because you cannot not do it. It’s really hard. It’s really frustrating. There are ways your ways to make some sustainable living decent money, like I’m not even talking about like oodles of money, here I’m talking about like a decent, a decent income. There’s such easier ways to do it, so you just have to really want it, and, and, and be ready, you know. We’re talking about income, sort. And such, you know, like, really, really be ready to embrace various income streams, and that is perhaps, you know, there’s something that you’ve worked at that’s not art related that you can, you know you’ve become successful at, and you can hold a job part time that doesn’t take too much of your mental and physical energy that you know in that during your other hours you’re too tired or too spent to be able to make art, so there’s that, or art related, you know, but, but it’s, I think it’s really important to be very realistic about the fact that you’re going to have to make some money between your paint, you know, between your ups and downs of your painting sales, but while you’re maybe working on a body of work for exhibition, there’s a chunk of time that you’re doing that that you’re not necessarily like churning paintings out to sell right away, so there are those spans of time, and so that you need to make some money between that, so, so, anyway, I just, I think it’s a very, very important aspect of, of, you know, thinking about what life will be like to try to make a living as an artist, and that, you know, it’s time, it’s time, and discipline, and you know, getting back to the whole process thing, like you have to just love the act of doing it, and just really have to love it. You have, you have to love the discipline of it, and be willing to put those hours in, and try not to compare yourself to others, you know, which is really, really, really hard these days. You know, we all follow a gazillion artists and enjoy that, and see art, you know, scrolling on our feeds and such, and, and it’s very easy to kind of get caught up in that, and, and be driven, you know, by that, and by, like, okay, I make this piece, and share, and see what the response is, and all that stuff, and, and that can really suck the suck the life out of you, as I have personally experienced, and you know, being willing to kind of take full on breaks and, and sort of work without distraction, like really try to remove all the chatter, the noise, so that you can put yourself to work and also be ready to, for to be able to be self-disciplined and self-motivated, you need that. So those are my little bits of advice, but it’s, but it’s all pretty beautiful. I mean, that sounded very, very like harsh, and like, but I think it’s important to, you know, to really be realistic, like, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s hard work, and also wonderful and beautiful, which is, you know, why we did, why we put the hard work in,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:23:17

exactly, and to add to the, you know, comparing yourself part, instead of, you know, instead of go touch some grass, which we should go touch some grass, go touch some paintbrushes, like, stay away from your phone, touch some paintbrushes,

Jennifer Balkan: 1:23:34

yes, such a pencil,

Laura Arango Baier: 1:23:36

and

Jennifer Balkan: 1:23:36

to add to what you just said, like the little touching of grass, it’s you have, yeah, you know, we’ve been, you know, of course, talking about all the, all the painting and art, and being in your studio stuff here, but, but, whatever, whatever it takes for you as a person to sort of like fill your cup, you know, and actually I love being outside and and cycling and stuff, and so, like, and that’s when I’m out. It’s really when I’m not in my studio, and I’m outdoors, and often by myself when I have, like, moment to really think, and not, you know, not necessarily have a lovely conversation with somebody else. But it’s like, but is when I get painting ideas, and so it’s, yeah, so that’s pretty important. Take care of your body and your mind, and in whatever ways work for you.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:24:30

Totally, totally 100% agree. You have to step away from the canvas as much as you have to step towards the canvas. Yes, yeah, and get sleep.

Jennifer Balkan: 1:24:42

So, important. yeah, that’s hard.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:24:48

But I also wanted to ask you, if you have, you know, besides your classes at Atelier Dojo, do you have any workshops or any cool stuff that’s going on that you’d like to promote?

Jennifer Balkan: 1:24:59

Yeah. Yeah, so some something new and exciting is that I am involved with a brand new gallery here in Austin, Texas, and similar to our school name, we call it Gallery Dojo, but it is independent of the school itself, so it’s a new endeavor spawned by Denise Fulton, and we will be the gallery will be featuring great contemporary representational artists from all around and includes a handful of us over at the school, so we are having sort of a grand opening in October, and I will have brand new work in there, so that’s exciting, and yeah, I’ve been, you know, I took, I took a some much needed time off after 20 after 2024 when I had two shows, two solo shows, which were very exciting, one at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, and another at a gallery in Smithville, that’s not far from Austin, and, and I needed a break, I needed such a break. Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize I did, so I.. the last, you know, I can’t believe now it’s 2020 26 but the.. the last couple, I guess, or whatever year and a half or so, I have been drawing and painting as much or more than ever, but just like for paint and drawing sake, and so, and just kind of not knowing what’s next, and being okay with that, and so now I’m like, okay, I am finally like thinking about new work and new ideas, instead of just responding, which I needed to just respond, I needed to just respond in paint or in graphite or whatever to something out there, and now it’s like, alright, now I can think about creating from from inside me, so so that will be part of the show in October, and, and I do have a workshop also coming up. I haven’t done that in a few years, since since Dojo Academy. I’ve been teaching exclusively with that, and so I have my first independent workshop, a three-day summer workshop at the end of July at Atelier Dojo on harmonious color in an oil painting as we paint a figure from a limited palette, so that is what’s going on.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:27:53

That’s exciting.

Jennifer Balkan: 1:27:55

If someone wants to see more of your work, where can they go? So I’ve got my website, which is my name, Jennifer balkin.com J E N N I F E R B A L K A n.com and I also have I post regularly on Instagram at Jennifer Balkin, and a lot of you know my day to day whatevers are on Instagram, whereas more completed works are on my website, but lots of studies and stuff are I share regularly, so those are the main places.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:28:32

Perfect, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jennifer, for the very engaging conversation. I think we could definitely go on for hours and hours if we were left to our own devices, so it’s a bit of a shame to cut it short, short, quote unquote. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time to share your, your wisdom with us.

Jennifer Balkan: 1:28:55

Thank you, Laura. It’s been such a pleasure, and really nice to connect, connecting with you too, yeah, yeah. Look forward to more. Yes.

Laura Arango Baier: 1:29:06

Thank you to everyone out there for listening to the podcast. Your continued support means a lot to us. If you’ve enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or leave us a comment on YouTube. This helps us reach others who might also benefit from the excellent advice that our guests provide. Thank you.

What called you to create?

That’s the question collectors would like to have the answer to.

At the end of this email, we’ve got a ​free PDF download​ for you called Stories that Sell Art. You can use this guide to help you craft the stories that resonate with collectors. But I’d like to explain the philosophy behind crafting these stories first....

Most artists do not start creating with a business plan. They begin because they feel The Call.

Maybe The Call came through beauty. Maybe it arrived through grief. Maybe it was felt through the “divine wound” of wonder. Maybe a teacher, a parent, a landscape, a museum, a song, a childhood memory, or a sudden moment when the world seemed more alive than usual triggered the spark of inspiration.

But somewhere along the way, something in you said:

Create.

But, the music of The Call is easy to lose in the noise of the modern world.

The world asks artists to become content creators, social media managers, shipping departments, photographers, copywriters, bookkeepers, and marketers.

But underneath all of that, the The Call remains. And your website should serve that call; it should tell the story of that call.

A proper art website should not bury your work under clutter, gimmicks, or generic marketing language. It should not annoy people with popups or be littered with ads like a Nascar rum runner. It should make your artistic path clearer. It should help your visitors understand what you are drawn to, what you notice, what you love, and why your work exists.

It should tell your story because humans think in terms of story, myth and magic. Stories are what actually move the needle on selling art. Before people buy your art, they have to buy into your art. And that means, by and large, buying into the story of you. So it’s worth spending some time to tell your story well.

Hemingway said that all that was needed to write well, to tell a good story, was to write one true sentence; a sentence that bleeds.

So today, try this:

Write one true sentence that describes The Call behind your work.

Don’t write a marketing slogan. Don’t try to think of a clever tagline. Just write something true.

Examples:

1. “I capture the disappearing quiet of rural places.”

2. “My work explores emotion through color.”

3. “I paint the dignity and beauty of ordinary people that modernity ignores.”

4. “My landscapes are an attempt to preserve wonder in a world that has forgotten it.”

Once you have a sentence like that, you can use it to shape your bio, your homepage, your collections, and even the way you talk about individual artworks.

The clearer you are about The Call, the easier it becomes for the right people to recognize the stories your artwork tells.

And, when your bio is ready, if you have a FASO account or have started a trial, you can update it easily on your FASO website ​here​.

I started this article with a question, What called you to create?

We’d love to know the answer to that question in the comments. Please let us know!

Leave a comment

PS — Here are the links to the free ebook, Stories that Sell Art. I worked hard on it, so please, after you’ve taken a look, please hit reply and let me know what you think and if you’d like more content like this. —Clint

Download "Stories that Sell Art" (EPUB)

Download "Stories that Sell Art" (PDF)