What is your wonderful art nerd superpower and gives you great joy in the doing? Do you have a lot of "shoulds" chattering away in your brain, telling you that you need to make one kind of art over another? Is it motivated by the glittery prospect of surface rewards that have nothing to do with the deeper satisfaction of actually creating the work? Is there a voice in your head that keeps telling you that if you follow the latest style, trend, or hottest subject matter that you'll finally find commercial success? Or does the voice come from your childhood past and others' expectations of you? What unaddressed old biases keep you from creating the most authentic work you can?
Let me whisper it gently into your ear: Your authentic work will always be your best and most rewarding work. Your authentic voice is what makes you unique; it's what makes you stand out from the crowd and get noticed. When you're letting your hair down and being you, you're going to stand out and that makes you attractive to art buyers, art directors, and other clientele. Authenticity sells. Let your freak flag fly.
People don't just buy art. They're buying a piece of you and they buy it because of how it will make them feel: they're buying a connection with the artist. You, the artist, are establishing a heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind relationship with each buyer and your art fills a need they have for human connection. If you're a DIYer maker on one of the big platforms or sell on your own website, you have likely experienced others telling you that you need to make X, Y, or Z in order to sell a lot, fit in for a holiday, be popular, etc. But one tends to outgrow a guilded cage when you get bored and frustrated making work that really isn't who you are at core. How much more fun and rewarding it is to have people give you money for the product of your mind that you are all in on?
A decade ago or longer, I fell under the spell that I "should" be painting people and working in the more lucrative fantasy genre in order to take make more money. So, I made a deliberate move to slide into that market and plotted my path by getting really good at painting and drawing the figure. My "shoulds" told me that the high fantasy market was taken more seriously than the children's educational market because it paid more; more male artists worked in the fantasy market and therefore I should attempt to get into it and become a contender in the industry. Perhaps to prove something to myself? To them?
For 6 years, I ran a community figure drawing session at a local college and was sure to make the sessions happen as often as possible. Weekly. For 3 hours each session. I made hundreds of drawings and studies in paint. I wanted to cement a lot of the observation into my memory so that I could draw the figure at will, in any view or perspective I needed to. The strategy really worked but did I love it outside of the actual observational sessions? I guess I seemed to at the time. I was certainly invested in making the shift in my practice and made lots of art involving people as subjects. I was attending grad school at the time and my thesis was centered around stories we care about and how those stories get made into law (a topic for another post) ...so yeah, you could say I was really invested.
The botanical work kept creeping back in though. Slowly it showed up here and there in my fantasy work and of course, I was still getting botanical commissions from one of my publishers on gardening. But as more and more of the plants and animals kept appearing in my work, the more I had to admit to myself that this was something I needed to accept. I understood that the subject matter of the living Earth is a deep part of my art-making and I must embrace it to be fully authentic. Does that mean that I'll never make work with the human figure again? No, it just means that the natural world is a primary part of my artistic expression and I can't be resisting its dominance in my imagery.
I'm finding my footing as a fine artist and my work is fitting nicely into different illustration markets (including fantasy). I have found a consistent voice but I'm not afraid to grow and challenge myself. I'm not pretending to be anything but who I am. This art career of mine has had lots of interesting twists and turns in 30 years and I hope to have another amazing 30 without getting too sidetracked.
~K2
"If you're not being appreciated for who you are, you're only being tolerated for who you're not." ~ Simone Grace Seol.