Qualifications: great multi-tasker; organized, dedicated, creative, skilled, average to above-average accounting abilities, able to maintain inventory, packing and shipping aficionado, with ongoing ability to meet multiple deadlines. Willing to be rejected, criticized, endure money droughts, and paint-stained clothing. Sense of humor a must. Qualifications changes; ongoing…

Who in their right mind would willingly sign on for this job? Me, for one. I didn’t originally go into this with a business mindset. I started off, like many, with a love of creating; which morphed into a love of painting, which became a desire to sell my work. It sounds so simple when I type it, and in the beginning, it was. Eventually, however, I began to shift the way I thought about things and realized that what I wanted was to treat what I do as a job and a business. Saying something is a job often brings to mind drudgery, the dread of Monday morning, and working on the weekend. However, it is possible to love your job, even look forward to it, and ultimately isn’t that what we all want from something we spend a good portion of our lives doing?

In this multi-part series, I will be exploring what it takes to turn what may have begun as a hobby into a business, whether full-time or part-time. I will be covering all of the issues listed at the beginning of this article plus many more; things I’ve learned along the way, and things I’m still figuring out.

Let’s begin with the mindset. It is one of the most important factors in the success of all of the other aspects of the job. You have to decide your art, your work is a serious endeavor; which has nothing to do with your art being serious. You may be creating humorous cartoons rendered in scribbles…it’s how you think about what you do with it and how you present it to the world that should be taken seriously.

To begin a shift in the way you think of your art, from a hobby to a business, begins in your own mind. Declare to yourself first that your art, no matter what form it takes, is important and it deserves respect. You begin to show respect for what you’re doing so that others will, in turn, do the same. Stop apologizing for the time you spend on it; the mess you make, the space it takes up…which is difficult in the beginning, especially if you have a full-time job outside of your home, because these things do impact other people. To that end, have a conversation with whomever your new job will affect and hopefully get them on board and gain their support. Once your loved ones understand how you look at your work; perhaps the time, mess, and space won’t matter as much. Hopefully, the coming articles covering those topics will help, and in the mean-time please read my article A Space to Create for suggestions on how to wrangle your supplies and carve out a niche for your workspace.

Being committed to what you are trying to accomplish goes hand in hand with your mindset. I am committed to working on my art business 5 days a week. Are there weeks where that doesn’t happen? Sure, but I try not to make a habit of it because that’s a slippery slope. The more I’m away from the studio or other aspects of my work, the easier it is to skip things altogether and a snowball effect happens. I’ll discuss how I manage my time and organization in later articles, but for now I’ll say that especially in the beginning it is critical to set a goal of how much time you are going to spend on your art/business and do everything you can to try and achieve that goal each week until it becomes routine. To that end, I wouldn’t pick 5 days a week as your initial goal. Start with something achievable, and only you can decide that for yourself. If you can manage just one consistent day to carve out dedicated time then that’s a great start. This isn’t a race and setting your goals too high may lead to frustration, exhaustion and suck the joy from the very thing you love.

If you are serious about taking your art to the next level and turning it into something that will hopefully bring in money and maybe one day turn into a full-time gig, then you need to be thinking towards that goal. Certainly, there is a lot to consider, but the first thing I will suggest is to focus on the art first. When I was first beginning the process of considering approaching galleries and selling my art, a friend arranged a lunch with an established artist in the community so I could pick her brain. She was honest with me and told me I wasn’t ready. She looked at my work and said I was all over the place with no recognizable style and didn’t have enough quality pieces to even begin to think about approaching a gallery or having a show. Ouch! While it really stung to hear her blunt honesty, I took it to heart. I refocused on my art and spent a lot more time in the studio.

Seek out the opinion of an artist you admire who is “living the dream” and see if he/she would be willing to do the same for you. Be brave; lay it all out there, and be willing to hear a harsh truth or realize you’re on the right path. The bottom line is; any successful art business starts with the art and flourishes with commitment and a serious mindset. Until next time-

Read additional articles by Amy Hutto here.

Pretty brash title, right? What could possibly qualify as “the most important music”? Mozart? Beethoven? The Beatles? Gregorian Chants?

Nope.

“Intuition,” shares Mary Ramsey Keasler. “If I think it looks good, it’s good…I do this because I love to do this.” Marisela Rumberg explains: “I’m bad at following the rules. I like to break them and see what happens…I like to do things my way.”

Color is one of the most exciting aspects of painting; be it grays, black and white, or in-your-face big, bold, pure pigments. It can also be one of the most challenging, often vexing, conundrums of life in the studio.

In general, I’m not a fan of the term “Writer’s Block”. Art can be a seasonal thing. Maybe it’s been raining for months, and creating has been a fluid and easy process. Or maybe you’ve been in a dry spell for a while now, and inspiration seems harder to come by.

Recently I had the opportunity to once again explore life as an artist on vacation. (See my article “An Artist Goes on Vacation”; parts one and two, here on Live An Artful Life). I managed to paint a few small abstracts and a landscape that I feel particularly proud of.

There are novelists, painters, poets, knitters, composers, drawers, sculptors, filmmakers, choreographers…which one are you?

Nope. I shall not take the answer “I’m not creative” as an answer. Uh uh.

Artist Elaine Weiner-Reed wants her art to be a starting point for dialogue, community-building, and creative collaboration. Elaine believes that through dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration, the arts come alive and people connect - often in inspiring ways. In that vein, she invites others to imagine more and tap their own muse, asking what they see or feel in her work. How would someone write the stories she painted?

I’m grateful to have lived thus far what many might characterize as an uncouth life. This different life is marked by two components.

First, the life of an independent singer/songwriter; I define my career, my routing, my time, and my structure in the context of one of my passions. It suits me well, but I sacrifice the stability and safety of a traditional place in the working world.

Dusk had fallen in Leesburg. Virginia. Night air, neither too hot nor too cold, wafted through the propped door of the Clay and Metal Loft. Bill van Gilder was kicking off his weekend pottery workshop with a warm-up PowerPoint. Lifetime learners sipped wine and nibbled cheese, listening raptly. Now, van Gilder can PowerPoint and social media as well as any Millennial, even though he's been making pots since before there was an internet.

Imagine strolling through your local bookstore (if you’re fortunate enough to live in an area where those still exist) and stumbling upon the self-help section. You quickly peruse what’s before you, and you see titles like “The Power of Negative Thinking”, “How a Little Bit of Cynicism Goes a Long a Way”, and “Ease Up on the Self-Esteem”.

Inspiration is one of those elusive, fleeting sparks that we as artists attempt to capture. Like a butterfly that lights upon our finger; it is often a flutter, a flit and then we watch as our inspiration floats away, wishing it had stayed a little longer.

Ah, inspiration.

You can be strolling on the sidewalk, minding your own business, when it unexpectedly comes up and knocks you upside the head.

As creatives, it is absolutely critical that we stay true to ourselves and not hop from trend to trend. That being said, it is also critical that we lift our heads up from our work and take a look at the art world around us and see what is trending in order to stay relevant.

“Within the span of a few months, I was demoted from a leader – to a follower – by a tiny baby boy with large lungs.” With these words, writer Patty Apostolides describes her transformation from a scientist and musician to a stay-at-home mother. Her son ignored her work at the Cleveland Clinic experimenting on cancer cells.

There I was, watching an old Youtube video of Barbra Streisand so passionately singing Andrew Loyd Webber’s show tune “Memory," from the musical Cats. In this HD version from 1981, Streisand is singing the character Grizabella’s story as if it was her own. Yet she is relying on Trevor Nunn’s lyrics lying on a stand right in front of her.