To Succeed or not to Succeed

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.