I’ll try to keep up the newsletters but honestly, only those art gurus NOT creating art are the ones who go on and on about how YOU too can be an artist . I like to think that those of us who do live our lives as self employed artists, share the same highs and lows that artists from every previous century have faced. None of them had the time nor was it even an ideal, to wonder about “what is art?” They worked at the craft they were best suited to and that helped them make a living. Period.

So in keeping with evaluating the ROI on our time writing articles on making a living as an artist, it will be easier and more cost effective to share a few things here and there via Facebook. Because honestly, if you have not taken up the challenges to become an artist in the 5 years we have been sharing our knowledge, then you simply aren’t going to.  This lifestyle is not for the faint of heart.

SO pop over, add your comments, get inspired.

Theresa and Steve

Facebook is one of those marketing areas that is new enough to have vague “rules of conduct.
Most of us grew up with the Golden Rule of conduct, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.”
And in its learning and growing pains, Facebook is now pro-active in giving us the tools in dealing with lewd, malicious or hateful intent and posts on Facebook. We can report, block, unfriend or otherwise eliminate the offending party.

For artists, photographers and musicians, there is another arena of behavior, along with the Golden Rule, which, although not written in stone, should be observed. It is assumed that if you opt to friend or like an artist or his page, it is because you like that artist or his work. To friend or like an artist with hopes of piggy backing off his possible success is unethical. There are plenty of sites on Facebook that are expressly there to encourage artists to interact with advice, tips and ideas without going through your artist friends pages and hoping to score a commission from their friends.

Observing the following “Code of Conduct” will insure that the respect that you show an artist will be reciprocated. Feel free to add more!

1. Do not post photos of your work on another artist’s page without permission. Private message or email him first. This applies to those 1:00 am posts with photos that will stay up for hours on another artist’s site until discovered.

2. Do not comment/post on another artist’s work and then add links to your work.

3. Do not try to get around #2 by commenting on how you “do it” (work in a articular medium, apply shadows, whatever, etc) in the hopes of having viewers click on your site through your avatar.

4. Do not try to make the artist’s friends “your” friends for the express purpose of showing them your work (in hopes of luring them away or getting a commission.)

5. Never contact another artist’s friends or friends of friends with promises of “doing it better” or “cheaper.”

If you have done any of the 5 “Don’ts” above, either intentionally or unintentionally, start living the “Golden Rules of Facebook for Artists” and keep your friends for a long time!

By respecting your artist friends and their hard work, you are also respecting yourself and what you have put into your art and your livelihood.

This past year I have made more of a transition to  our Facebook page …and that’s to help me out. I pretty much work all the blogs, newsletters, etc.  single handed. So if there are far fewer posts that is the reason! Of course all of you are all welcome to add your comments, recommendations, etc here and on our FB page!

The other reason I have not posted as much is, yes, you guessed it, work!. As artists whose every bill is paid solely from the sales of our art, our priority is creating and selling our art.

So I have about 20 minutes this morning, here in front of the fire with hot coffee on a cold rainy (and not sure why it’s not snowing!) 37 degree morning here in NC. We plan to leave to see family in Pennsylvania tomorrow where I KNOW there is snow and return just after New Years.

We worked our tails off this month! Steve painted enough to need ice on his shoulder each night a week before Christmas and I kept just as busy with the portraits, the deliveries , the art classes and the displays. We both were zapped with some creeping crud around Thanksgiving and hacked our way through the studio for two weeks…but hey, we got through it!  There is an old saying “Make hay while the sun shines” and for every month where the sales are overwhelming, there are two months where they are so so and 1, sometimes  2 during the year where I wonder what a regular paycheck would feel like! Then I remember the days where I did not want to work and drove through the countryside at random, walked wooded trails or took out a kayak or spent the day working in my herb and flower garden or just messed about with random art for the fun of it….and I think “Nah-h-h!”

So we’ll be sending out Jan newsletter when we return and I will share just HOW we are able to “live the life of an artist”.  SO if that doesn’t keep you on pins and needles, nothing will
To see that Steve and I are real people, below is a list of our FB pages. Don’t like or use FB? You should…many of our collectors respond quicker to our messaging through FB than even the phone!

Happy NEW Year!

Theresa    www.facebook.com/MTheresaBrown
Steve         http://www.facebook.com/stephen.filarsky

www.facebook.com/artcareerexperts

I don’t think I ever knew if my dad was naturally neat or if his years in the military honed his skills, but the fact remains that his legacy is with me always when I am tempted to leave the yard tools out, not unload the dishwasher or more importantly for my art business, after using supplies in the art studio.

My dad’s workshops, wherever we lived, had vast expanses of pegboard with items not only hung up but outlined with marker. His rationale, when asked, was that if there was an empty hook,  he knew what was missing by the outline and could look for it or  find the culprit who borrowed it and did not put it back. Nails, screws, wire, electrical thingies, all were sitting in clear plastic (“they don’t break,” he said) instant coffee jars on shelves. Everything had a place, and everything was in it’s place.

It’s hard to argue with that logic.

I think I rebelled for awhile. I am not anal neat. But I am, I discovered, anti-clutter. Weird. When it gets to the point where I feel there is too much clutter in every room, everywhere….my brain rebels and the “clean slate” mentality takes over and my family hustles. Ask my 4 kids who knew that if mom says she was going into their rooms the next day with a big black trash bag, ( after repeated, useless efforts to get them to do it themselves)  she WOULD fill it and she WOULD take it to the dump.  The amazing result of this happening, get this, one time, was that it never happened again (go figure).  After the first event, I would only have to give fair warning and it was like I switched on  hidden kid motivation motors and the room cleaning activity by four kids went into 4th gear.  They were too bent to the tasks in their rooms for me to see the eye rolling or hear the muttered comments, but I didn’t care. Everything was going into….some place.

The kids are all on their own now and there are only two people to blame if the clutter gets bad. My artist husband does not have my father’s sense of cleaning up behind himself. He too has seen the results of my anti-clutter blitz. He may think that as a spouse he is exempt to my one woman war on “shit everywhere”, but he knows better. Just like my kids, too much stuff means you don’t really know what you have, even when it is gone.  And the Goodwill is all the better for it.

Now let me clarify that it takes a lot to get me to the blitz mode. It is bad. It is 2 days of dirty dishes in the sink, paths through the studio,  unloaded art supplies from the vehicles from shows, classes, exhibitions…..all set inside the door like the area around the top of some attic stairs. When it is too cluttered, there is an area in my brain that is cluttered. Most importantly, it affects my creativity. There is something to be said for reaching for whatever supply you need and having it right there.

Perhaps the one iconic moment that marked the end of my “oh it doesn’t matter” attitude was searching for my car keys one day. My dad used to refer to such moments as  “the great treasure hunt.”  When I found the keys where I had tossed them upon entering the house, it dawned on me as clearly as the sun outside that if today had taken twenty minutes to find this one item, I had probably wasted at least a year of my life, over time, trying to find something that had not been put back in it’s place. It was one of those “Ah Ha!” moments. I could say that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, or I was truly my father’s daughter but the truth was that I was tired of disorganization that affected my life. The car key problem was solved easily (and I might add for the whole family of driving teens) by putting a key ring hold by the front and side entrances to the house. Every time someone walked into the house with car keys, any keys, they were hung up in plain site. It worked.

I think it was like losing weight-once the first few pounds come off, the motivation to keep doing whatever you’re doing, intensifies.   So I set about organizing everything, all the paperwork files for the business, appliance warranties, insurance papers, kids’ papers…and the feeling of needing something and being  able to lay hands on it was…..miraculous.

Oh it creeps back and you have to stay vigilant. Yesterday I attacked the studio. It was actually unplanned. But I have a student art camp coming up soon and was not getting my act together to plan what I needed to do. My “list” was not growing. So one thing led to the other and I moved, tossed out, hung, secured, dragged and otherwise organized the art studio back to a positive, creative, “want to be there” space and I am happy. My brain is not cluttered in the art corner part of it and I am ready to attack my plans and organize the activities. It is a good place to be.

Funny thing is that the trend today is to hire someone to unclutter your life, organize your closets, design the perfect clutter free environment, or join on line groups that make your lists for you .

But in the long run, you have to have the self motivation to do it yourself.

And it really is as simple as finding a place for everything and then putting it all back in its place.

Thanks Dad. You would be proud (mostly)

Today was one of those days where we were able to check off yet one more thing on our perpetual “to do” list!

And what we checked off was the fence in front of the Art studio! As with any big project we’ve put a lot of time and effort into our art studio. We spend a lot of time in here and we try to make it not just a place to work, but a retreat.  Visitors love the look and feel of our studio.

We built it a little over ten years ago from recycled materials gathered from a 1910 house being demolished, a warehouse of construction leftovers and good old fashioned muscle and help from family members! …it took us almost two years  because  we paid as we went along. No debt .

So today, we were able to step back and admire our new section of fence. It’s the same kind of fence we have around our rose and herb garden. Tobacco stick screwed to treated wood…and the sticks, if not touching the ground, last as long as the treated wood!  We had to first tear down the picket fence we installed at the beginning as the invading wisteria (yes we stupidly planted it on purpose!) had started to pull it down. Putting up the fence was the easy part. Attacking the vegetation with chainsaw, clippers and Round Up, was a the hard part . Oh well the original concept was good…we just picked the wrong plant for an arbor!

Artists often need beauty and quiet times for inspiration…. it’s a perfect place for many of our classes and our art retreats. Sure you can find the beauty elsewhere as an option. But being a part of it, nourishing it and reveling in it…well now, that’s the artist’s life!

Same type of fence around herb and rose garden

Guest post by Valeria Bornstein of Fame House

Pinterest has quickly become one of the fastest growing social media sites, now boasting over 11.7 million unique visitors per month and 17.8 million registered users. Pinterest’s rapid growth is the result of a few key factors. First, their platform is visually appealing. Users select items of interest based primarily on imagery, so there is very little text to read, ultimately retaining a user’s attention for much longer.

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2012/05/using-pinterest-for-artist-marketing.html

I have already received some orders from having  done this BUT that was not my original intent. Some publicity? Well sure but this article was written quietly, after the presentation (and lol-bad photos from it) and my first inkling was a call from a collector who clued me in on the article

I am happy to have been a part of securing memories and we made prints available to the firefighters themselves.:-)

News – Raleigh

Angus was the beloved firedog at the Durham Highway fire station.

Kellner: 919-829-4802

I confess to not being much into psychiatrists  and further confess that I think half of them are full of BS. (my apologies to those who think otherwise) but I think this guy has a good handle on reality and so many artists need a bit of positive reinforcement that they may not be getting elsewhere!

Furthermore, many artists are NOT doing well in this current economy judging from my emails, so branching out and adding new elements to what you already do involves a commitment (There’s that word) of a new type!

<This (following) is not a popular concept, just a true one:

Anything worth doing (e.g., living a mentally healthy life) takes commitment.

When I refer to work I mean a real commitment — not just involvement. You may be wondering about how these are different. This was explained to me once by a salesman I met years ago — I’ll try to get his accent just right for full effect:

“Sunn [sic], the difference ‘tween involvement and commitment is the same as the difference ‘tween eggs and bacon. The chicken is involved. The pig is committed.” It’s hard to argue with that.

Commitment is key for making and sustaining real change in your emotional life. I don’t expect you to go ahead and turn yourself into bacon, but what’s needed is not just a wish to change in five sessions or less, or to have a therapist “fix” you, but an actual commitment to do something different — to push through when the going gets tough, because unfortunately it does.

A true commitment to personal change requires three things:

1. Vision
2. Promise
3. Energy

Let’s look at each of these things in turn.

Vision: It’s wonderful if you know exactly what you’d like the New You to look like, but it’s not necessary. All that that you need is to be open to imagining yourself and your life as different than they are now. You can explore the particulars along the way.

Promise: When you commit to change you implicitly make a promise. The promise is not to your husband, your sister, your kids, or even your Labradoodle. The promise you make is to yourself. It’s like writing a check with your mind. The way you cash that check is with work.

Work: Yes, work is a four-letter word, blah, blah, blah… But when you truly believe in something, when you are moving with purpose, work is not just not bad — it’s good. Work means throwing your energy at something you believe in to make a change — to make it the way you want it to be.

Commitment is the recipe for change. When you commit with your vision, promise, and work, it pays off in something better than bacon (if there is such a thing)… real change.>

The new thinking is that the word “committee” is no longer in vogue and perhaps it conjures up Congress or the PTA.  Whereas TEAM conjure up teamwork, or the “go get ‘em” mentality. Corporate worlds have replaced the old words with the new for awhile now. But the question is : Has anything changed? Or is it still just one or two people looking for their little moment of authority?

We found it interesting when our county art council, funded by the state and memberships, began to shift towards the team mentality. Oddly enough that mentality was already there in the form of common good as a group of hardworking, unpaid volunteer Board members gave up many a Saturday to bring an obselete building and dying membership back into  the light. There was that “just roll up your shirtsleeves and get it done” mentality and comraderie that did not need to be enhanced or clarified  by a “committee” or “Team” tagline. The work got done in amazing time with amazing results.

Fast forward to a few new members fresh from corporate America (oh my we know how that works), with a Napoleon syndrome, and all of a sudden we are looking at charts and graphs that look like a family ancestry page and new papers to sign, rights squelched and TEAMS.   And now, nothing is getting done but a lot of talk.

What just happened? How could someone take a good idea, a working grass roots plan and  indoctrinate it with corporate laws, bylaws, adendums, control intellectual rights, muzzle  ideas and smother creativity-all in the name of “TEAM growth?” Worse of all, only we saw and spoke up about the “emperor’s clothes.” How could sane people not see this for what it was….and is?  There is always a danger in removing the checks and balances in a democratic art environment….

Oh wait, we’re taking about Art right?