The question, “Who does an artist really have to report to” is, or ought to be, at the very heart of what it means to be an artist.
If your answer, quite out of necessity, is your accountant, then there is little doubt who your targeted audience will be as you prepare to create and then market another flurry of fresh-off-the-griddle artworks. And for the profit-minded artist, the decision really shouldn’t be all that difficult. Quite simply, if selling for profit is your highest priority, then according to current, verifiable market trends, whatever subject has the greatest chance to line your pocketbook — a covered bridge, a pod of leaping harbor seals, a cuddly, new-born kitten — is precisely what you’ll want to produce in your studio, well into the wee hours of the night, as you dream of that magical ching-ching-ching of the proverbial cash register.
I once endured a watercolor workshop whose featured artist purred to her listeners, “Always include vermilion in your paintings. It sells!” Then, close on the heels of that little nugget of wisdom, I heard yet another artist — a person from the very same enlightened community — say, “I always include a lady bug in my paintings. It really helps me with sales! Of course,” she continued, “you don’t have to choose a lady bug. I mean, a harmless little spider — or perhaps a tiny songbird — will do the job, too!”
Such a bottom line approach to artistry is, even to the least doctrinaire of purists, an appallingly cynical way to go about things. After all, do we not go into the visual arts to express our highest ideals — our deepest emotions — in the most powerful, most arrestingly skillful way we can? Are we not, from the very beginning of our quest — and by definition — worshipers of all things beautiful and mysterious? Are we not Poets of the Canvas, highly driven Catchers of Dreams?
Of course, I’m being more than a little impertinent here. I know that! But it’s for a reason. It isn’t that I don’t like insects. It isn’t that I actually believe it’s an unpardonable sin to include the color vermillion in a landscape, a still-life, or even an abstract. (For the record, I do love abstraction — Wassily Kandinsky and Grace Hartigan are two of my favorite masters of the genre — and I’ve even been known to enjoy a cutting edge, J. M. W. Turner landscape on occasion. By the way, the works of Albert Pinkham Ryder are a thrilling experience, too. If you don’t believe me, check out his Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, a genuine small-scale masterpiece.)
Oh! And speaking of marketing strategies infinitely more callous than lady bugs and spiders, one would be criminally irresponsible not to mention Thomas Kinkade III, the self-proclaimed “Painter of Light.” Kinkade is renowned — and, amongst serious artists, actively, proudly reviled — for his laughable renderings of tasteless, shameless, saccharine-sweet fantasy cottages that only a culturally ignorant “truth-seeker,” drunk on Jim Jones tonic, would ever want to live in. He made tens of millions of dollars from mass-marketing endless trainloads of his two-dimensional tripe to anyone dumb enough to actually believe he was a world-class painter.
OK, enough about Kinkade, who died an alcoholic with a reputation for astonishingly crude public misconduct.
The more urgent question, I think — if anything about the plastic arts can be considered ‘urgent’ — is that the only person you have to report to as an artist is YOU — not the high-flying, big-city art critics, not the small-town, self-ordained “I took an art class in high school” experts, not the man down the street from you who paints pick-up trucks and skate boards for a flat fee.
So! If you want to put a lady bug in your paintings, DO it! But make that lady bug the best damn lady bug east of the Mississippi. If you’ve got an uncontrollable fetish for the color vermillion, then for heaven’s sake, buy a couple o’ gallons of the stuff on sale at Sherwin Williams, take it home tonight, and go absolutely CRAZY with that color. And, finally if you’re suddenly and inexplicably compelled — God help you — to laminate your toilet seat with a colorful necklace of visual, Kinkade-ean junk jewelry, who am I to stop you?
On the other hand, if the idea of injecting the insect of your choice into every painting — or seizing on one particular color at the expense of every other color in your palette, not to mention your monthly income — makes you sick to your stomach, then go right ahead and sneer, preferably in private, at such ghastly propensities. But then, for the sake of your reputation, you’ll want to avoid them with the same understandable zeal with which the men and women in Camus’ The Plague ran from those poisonous buboes, or America’s Pioneers — no dummies, they — ran from a herd of stampeding buffalos.
Still, you must remember, then, that whatever you choose to do as an artist, and whatever were your motives for becoming a painter — profit, personal expression, stress therapy, or an insurmountable hunger for fame and notoriety — you must be prepared either to celebrate your breathtaking success in the arts arena or, like the vast majority of trained and self-taught artists, endure the very real possibility that your career could fizzle out faster than a 4th of July sparkler in a rainstorm.
Been there, done that! So I know the personal and pecuniary sting of under-performance as an artist. My advice? Never forget that no one is immune to the unpredictable, often traumatizing ups-and-downs of the art world. It happens to the best of ’em. So be tough as iron, bear down hard, and follow your dream, no matter what you imagine will be in store for you.
Well, I suppose it’s time for me to shut my trap. (Isn’t it always?) But I hope that along the way I’ve made it clear that I very much hope your story as a visual artist will have a truly happy ending. It can be done! But to get there, you’ll have to be patient, adventurous, and even daring in the decisions you make in the privacy of your studio! Most importantly, learn to roll with the punches. And once again, it is you — and only you — who have the right, the privilege, and indeed the responsibility to choose what you paint and how you wish to paint it. After that, for all of us, it’s strictly come what may.
— Ross Alan Bachelder
July 16, 2022