Recently I was asked to post a blog on a Facebook site called Storylane. It has been set up with the idea of bringing together people who blog about their lives - in some form or another. The following question was proposed to me - a standard for anyone who has joined. When blogging you can either choose to answer one of many proposed questions or write your own account. When I woke up this morning I didn't really feel like cleaning the bathroom, so I sat down and typed this instead.
“What does it feel like to have started
your own company? How do you succeed?”
To Succeed or not to Succeed
An interesting topic, given that I have
never really started my own company. Yet
this is a topic I have given plenty of thought to. Recently I have come to think of myself more
as a not for profit organisation, in that I no longer sell a product, rather I
give it away.
I am an artist, although even calling
myself that is something I often debate.
Surely to be an artist you need talent and skill and recognition and
sales? I think my last five tax returns
I have posted a $0 income. I am at the
point where every time I pick up a paintbrush it is actually costing me
money. When I started painting and
studying art at university it was with the carefree abandon that you have when
you are young and naive. My stretches
(the wooden bars you stretch the canvas over) were hand made and never square
(right angle anyone?) and I used to score the canvas and paint over it, making
the pigment seep through to the other side (which in time will disintegrate the
canvas, a conservators nightmare). And
they sold.
Twenty years later I paint on linen (when I
can afford it) stretched over professionally made stretches and apply paint
with labored precision. Yet have no
gallery representation and I have not sold a painting in five years. Actually, that is not true. I did sell a painting at a solo exhibition I
had at a gallery in Sydney.
Unfortunately I was unaware that the gallery director did not pay her
artists and months after my show she closed her gallery and vanished without
paying the thousands of dollars she owed to her creatives. She also effectively stole one of my
paintings and when she eventually returned the remaining paintings, two were
damaged beyond repair (wooden stretcher bars smashed). But I digress; this is a story about success.
I must say at times it is difficult to
understand why I continue. I think it is
the same reason as why I began. I love
painting. Regardless of whether people/
galleries like it or not, I think it is something that is intrinsic to my
being. I have a belief that to succeed
as an artist you need to succeed at networking.
In my opinion the art world is all about the Who and not the What. Frankly, I am not a team player. I don't particularly like the 'scene' and I
prefer the corner to the spotlight.
While at times it is frustrating and annoying that I don't sell, it is
also my rationale that I don't spend the hours applying myself to the business
models. In fact, when it comes to making
money, there are a great many things I don't do. What I do is paint.
And success? Well how do you measure success anyway? Profit margins and bottom lines or degrees
happiness and personal achievements? So
do I consider myself successful? Well,
no. Would I consider myself more
successful if I sold paintings in a gallery?
That is difficult to answer because I also wonder whether I would
succumb to the pressure of producing paintings that sell? I am not a company I am self-employed and as
such I have no one to answer to but myself.
As for how do you succeed, I don't think I can answer that, but my suggestion
would be persistence. Persistence,
resilience and a bloody thick skin.
