Create a Business Masterpiece

Your art business is an artwork

Create a business masterpiece

Every week I write a brand new article for members of our four wonderful art groups on Facebook, The Artists Directory, The Artists Lounge, The Artists Exchange, and The Artist Hangout. This week we take a look at running a successful and sustainable art business and deep dive into how running a business is a lot like painting a masterpiece.

Before we begin this week, I have included a number of images from my brand new Big Skies and Adrift Collections. All of these works are available on a wide range of print mediums and other art collectables, and there will be more of these works added to the series in the coming weeks and months. If there are any specific colour schemes you would like to see, please contact me and let me know and I will pick out the best schemes and make them available for purchase. Every purchase from my Fine Art America and Pixels stores contribute towards the ongoing costs of running this website and means that I don't have to hide behind a paywall! You can view the entire range right here. There are also three pieces that you will get to see first, Adrift On Silent Waters, Adrift Under a Neon Sky, and Adrift Under a Fading Sun. These pieces will be released on or around the 28th of September 2019!

Before we begin...

Some readers might have noticed that I have been a little bit quieter on the Facebook for the past couple of weeks, alas my kidney stone has become increasingly problematic and no one can seem to decide on quite what to do with it. It’s like my body is replicating the Brexit debate in sympathy with an entire nation and the pain levels are roughly the same. Mainly I have had to wait around a lot for test results and on Monday night, I ended up in the emergency room on the advice of my general practitioner. To cut a long and totally boring story short, I had been prescribed some antibiotics which I had a really bad reaction to and which inevitably made everything a whole heap worse.

Now I am taking some different antibiotics and getting back to my usual self, albeit I am taking things much more slowly at the moment. I’m booked in to see a urologist on the day after my 50^th birthday in October, so while the stone is being managed in the interim, there’s little else I can do for now other than to try and get back to doing stuff, making sure I keep hydrated and taking naps when I need to rest and trying hard to resist the urge to use Google to provide a conclusive diagnosis.  

So I haven’t had a lot of time this week to prepare. I did though write an article a few weeks ago that touched on the fact that you need to sometimes approach things as if you were painting a masterpiece. You have to take pause and let the coats of paint dry before you apply the next one, and this week reminded me that to paint a masterpiece you have to be on your 'A' game as an artist.

Adrift Under A Fading Sun - Brand New Release!

You are human…

I have Crohn’s disease as many of my regular readers will already know, and according to my doctor, kidney stones can be more common when you have an inflammatory bowel disease. Often, the stones can be formed from not staying hydrated enough although they can be caused by lots of other things too and some people are just more susceptible to having them than others, for some people, it could even be to do with genetics but kidney stones are medically mythical, they are often misunderstood especially online. Never believe what you read on the internet because no amount of cider vinegar will make these things magically go away and spending thirty-bucks on some online remedy, well, you would be better off buying a piece of my art.

There’s a heap of sciency stuff on the internet about them, the problem is that most of it has been written by people who have never had the misfortune to feel just how insignificant a  3mm piece of rock can make a fully grown human feel.

I on the other hand, have become a bit of an authority on the subject of stones. It’s not something that I take great relish in writing on my resume but I do know first hand that these things can do a bit more than smart. I have naturally passed a 3mm staghorn, seriously they’re just pithy little annoyances compared to something bigger but they still hurt, and then I went on to do what my doctor thought was impossible and I passed a 9mm stone while staying alone in a hotel room, still managing to turn up to a 9am meeting. Admittedly, I didn’t look my best and I was thankful to eventually get home.

I’ve lost count of the number of stones, I have passed naturally over the years and I have had an obstinate 6mm one surgically removed, and this one I have right now will need some adult supervision and an anaesthetic to remove it. At 1.4cms, there is no way on earth that taking a natural wait until it passes approach is going to work and even I’m not that dumb to think that I won’t need at least some moral support and probably lots of morphine.

In the meantime, while the asteroid size rock sits around not bothering to try to make a run for it, it’s not really causing me any major problems. The antibiotics are making me tired but beyond that, life can go on as normal. Except that I now frequently recall the epic pain that a 3mm stone once gave me so I am slightly more aware that if this thing does decide to make a break for it, I am going to crumble and probably immediately turn to Facebook for some advice.

The real risk right now isn’t that the stone will attempt an escape, it might or it might not. It is that I become complacent and start running marathons, not that I would but you get the drift. If the problem can’t be seen or felt, there’s always the risk that you become complacent about it and fall back into the grind and forget that we humans are just humans.

That’s the moment these things like to strike, it’s as if the kidney stones know exactly what they’re doing and they know how to cause maximum chaos just at the moment they’re out of mind, serving as a reminder that a lump of rock that’s smaller than a grain of rice can crush your spirit even more than an amateur art critic trolling a group on Facebook.   

So my message this week is to do exactly what I didn’t do. If you need to take a break to mend, take it and go and see a doctor.  If you do ever have a kidney stone, my thoughts and prayers are most sincerely with you. If you aren't on your 'A' game then know that you need to deal with it head-on.

As artists, it’s easy to fall into the trap of just a couple more hours will see this piece finished and then we carry on for another couple of hours which inevitably turns into another couple of hours and we forget that we are indeed only human. We forget to take breaks and because artists tend to be a focussed bunch, we’re usually amongst the first to overdo everything. Perfection is 

An artist’s role is difficult enough, we have to be experts in running a business and marketing and then we have to be on our creative ‘A’ game when we produce our art. Being an artist especially an independent one is often like being the CEO and every staff member of a huge multi-national company in terms of the roles and responsibilities we have as temporary custodians of beauty.  Just occasionally, it takes someone else to tap us on the shoulder and tell us to slow down or take a sip of water, or to remind us that we are indeed only human.

I think another trait of the artist or at least one trait I have consistently noticed over the years is that we really aren’t the best when it comes to giving ourselves permission to take a little time out. Just one more, not good enough, always done it that way, always worked lots of silly hours to get work done, words that constantly nip at our heels in everyday life, and all words and phrases that fight back any notion of us taking a lead and saying no, me first.

In all honesty, I am more likely to slow down and put my own health front and centre if I am reminded to do it, it’s as if I need some kind of permission or validation to take pause and I know that there are probably a lot of artists out there who do the exact same thing. They keep going until something gives, and it’s not always a good something that gives, in fact, it’s rarely if ever a good something that gives. 

I’m sure there’s some psychological babble or some solid research that supports the theory, that unquestionably, there are times when we do need to be reminded that we are only human before we do anything about it and sometimes we’re reminded not by other humans but by the very things that knock us sideways when we put of dealing with them. In my case, a 1.4 cm lump of rock spoke loudly enough for me to take some notice, my family and friends translated its message for me which turned out to be, get some help.

So this week we all need to remember that it is okay to take a break or take some time out and focus on ourselves too. We can come back to art tomorrow or the next day but sometimes we have to take a day away, maybe even two. In fact, it’s not just okay to take time out when we need it, it is absolutely essential if we want to keep on producing our best work.

Taking time out or at least the ability to recognise and act when we need to take time out is the most essential tool any artist needs to master. Forget how to master a paintbrush or how to prepare a canvas, the very foundations of being a successful artist or successful at anything else requires that you start from within. 

Hopefully the stone will be removed after I have seen the specialist. There’s no doubt in my mind at all that I am likely to get another one down the line, but I have made myself a promise. Next time I will take the doctor up on the offer of removing the thing before it gets this big and unruly and I will remind myself regularly to take a moment, take a sip of water, and not to get complacent. Whether it is a kidney stone, creative burnout or any of the seemingly millions of combinations of bodily oddities and ailments we all experience as we get older, we all have to remind ourselves and each other that sometimes, just sometimes, we have to take a moment to put our creative vessel first because only then can we truly paint a masterpiece.

Adrift Under A Neon Sky - Coming Soon!

Painting the masterpiece...

Being an independent artist is both wonderful and stressful and never in equal doses. It gives you as much creative freedom as you can afford but it also comes with the headaches usually delegated to others if we were in any other business, and often others who are more skilled in certain areas. If we were to run any other kind of business we would get to a point eventually where we would have to consider taking on staff, but for an artist, that point can be many years on from when they begin their practice as a professional business.

There was a time when you might have only ever painted for pleasure and you only ever had to do a handful of things. Buy art supplies, paint, and then save up for more art supplies. Now you are in the business of selling your work those three essentials still exist but there are now the added of complexities of having to do what we as artists are not immediately equipped to do. Things like marketing and selling, invoicing and balancing books, and speaking to real people who might one day hand us some cash. It puts a whole new slant on everything including how we approach our art. That sometimes means we take stock and evaluate every work we create and look at it with commercial eyes, but that's not always the right thing to do. 

Suddenly we find ourselves pouring through page after page on the internet trying to figure out where our people are and what they’re buying and there’s a real danger that we start to lose some of the passion that we had for creating art in the first place. Turning art into a business isn’t easy at all, it is forever a balancing act between turning a profit and maintaining that passion you always had.

I have been creating art professionally for a long time and I can say without any hesitation that while today is the best time to be an artist, this is also one of the most challenging because art is consumed and purchased very differently than it was even just a few years ago.

Buyers today expect much more in the way of everything than they once did. As independents, we’re not competing with other artists, only those who copy our originality and do it better, but we are competing with massive online retailers and the larger traditional art selling spaces, discounters and mega-galleries. All of these are able to offer speed and efficiencies that can be generated by their size and the amount of cash flow they have access to and most have entire PR and marketing departments who worry about the optics and the marketing. They're places where creatives can be mostly creatives, for us independents, we have to be everything. 

Where independent artists can make ground though is in providing a quality, personal touch and exceptional customer service. People do still buy into those principles and often don’t really mind the overhead in terms of cost but they do have to feel like they are getting some extra value. We can be just as quick as the big players when it comes to providing our services, indeed we can be more agile because we have less red tape and bureaucracy to wade through.

So while the business of art can be a dry subject that can suck away the passion of what we do creatively, it doesn’t have to. We can even turn the business into an artwork that we feel just as passionately about as we do with any of our paintings. Your business can be a seamless extension of your creativity and it can be the vehicle that gets you to your career aspirations much quicker than treating the business side of art as simply something else that we have to do.

Adrift on Still Waters by Mark Taylor

Be Business Creative…

Because you are an artist we can safely say that you are definitely on the creative spectrum and you need to be able to convey that to anyone who might come into contact with you. First impressions count and often that means handing out a business card, but why does your business card have to be the same as every other businesses card?

I’m not suggesting you differentiate yourself by going down the Apple Card route, a piece of titanium that looks beautiful but doesn’t do either denim jeans or leather, but having something that is different from every other business card will have a much bigger impact. The small details of how you conduct your business and how you present it are the key optics from which your skill level as an artist will be immediately judged by those yet to see your work. 

Spend a little more on having some bespoke cards professionally produced or use silkscreen printing to give it a slightly raised texture. Use alternatives to card and paper and try to make it from sustainable sources. Little touches like this make an impact and surprisingly, they're more likely to be saved than thrown away.

Sure the cost will be higher than the hundred card discount deal you might get online but you don’t have to hand these beauties out to absolutely everyone. I have two business cards, from a distance both look the same because consistency is important but both feel very different. My next plan is to look at Bamboo cards across the board which have more of a tie-in to the landscape and nature-themed works I create. You can even create these on Zazzle and they feel sublime to hold but more importantly, they’re way more memorable than less sustainable options. 

There really are no standards that you must follow when it comes to marketing and promotional materials and that is because you are the standard when it comes to this kind of stuff. Invoices are a great example and every single invoice I have seen recently could have been produced with the exact same Microsoft Word template but they really don’t have to be like that.

I followed the template method of creating invoices for many years but when I redesigned them one of the things I did notice was that people began to pay them earlier. I had created them so that they stood out, they are printed on slightly thicker paper so everything about them looks and feels a little different. It might be that I’m just lucky to have great clients but I do think that slight twists like this make people remember.

I also ditched my reliance on using spreadsheets to keep track of invoicing and went with one of the many app-based invoice generators available through the App Store and Google Play. Some charge a small fee each month, others a not so small fee, but there are also plenty of good free apps that will give you the basics and which will allow you to upload your own designs, and as a bonus, I even managed to grab a new card reader to take payments with the option I picked and it has a competitive fee that still means it becomes as cheap as listing on Etsy. 

When it comes to receipts I followed Apple's lead and went paper-free last year. Now clients receive an electronic receipt and when they provide their email address they are also asked if they would like to hear about my latest works and offers, along with a promise to never sell or pass on their details and an absolute maximum of two emails per month.  When people realise that you hate spam as much as they do they tend to be way more inclined to say yes and there is no benefit in adding gimmicks that themselves can become a major administrative burden if and when your list grows. 

Think of these marketing and promotional materials as you would when choosing a canvas for a painting. They are the things that will give your finished piece of artwork the detail that buyers are constantly looking out for and they add a much more professional image to everything that you do, and if you go down the paper-free route, you will be doing a little bit for the environment too. 

Adrift on Purple Waters by Mark Taylor

Outsource sparingly but necessarily…

As the business grows there will be times when you really don’t have enough time to do some of the simple things that every business has to do. If you have a leaky pipe and knew nothing about plumbing, there is a fair chance that you would either spend a lot of time on YouTube watching tutorials or you will do what inevitably needs to be done and call in an expert.

The same is true when you run a business even in the start-up days. Accepting that you as yet haven’t got a full toolbox of skills that you can apply to any given situation means that you might have little choice other than to offload some of the more mundane tasks that would take you forever or would cost you more time and money to put right than they would have if an expert did them in the first place. The knack is to know what needs to be offloaded and what really needs your attention, and what you really can get away with doing without paying for outside help. As artists, if we are unsure of a technique we will do what we can to learn that technique before we apply it on our best canvas so we need to approach learning business skills in the same way. Our business is our public-facing canvas and is often seen before any of our works. 

When I first ventured out into business I tried to do everything on my own just as anyone who starts out tries to do. But twelve-months later and not even considering that spending a little in the right places might pay dividends, I was still trying to do everything on my own. The result was that I let some important stuff slip and some not so important stuff took preference.

I ended up in a position where I finally finished all of the easy and quick wins, spending a heap of time on things that would have been easier and quicker for someone with the right skills to do instead, and then all I had left was a list of major things that I needed to deal with that had grown exponentially while I had been focussed on those much less me-critical tasks. During that wasted time I had lost way more sales than I would have done if I had outsourced some of the most basic things that I wasn't very well prepared to do.

You don’t have to outsource elements of your work immediately and to be totally honest, there’s not always that much that needs doing once you have some really solid foundations in place, it then becomes about the ongoing work needed to maintain the business just as you would maintain a piece of artwork, but things like outsourcing your online ad spend or hiring a web developer will save you a lot of time and money in the long-term and you will begin to see the results much quicker. Making decisions to outsource some elements of what you do is a lot like applying a brush stroke in the right place, it's knowing when you have to apply a highlight and knowing where it needs to be placed. 

If outsourcing is still a distant financial dream, there are other options. Collaboration with other artists and sharing costs or sharing the workload can be hugely beneficial. But collaboration is a two-way street and everyone needs to be just as committed to creating the masterpiece. If you do collaborate, think outside the box. When I started out I collaborated with a new restaurant who needed art and I needed somewhere to place my art. That collaboration quickly grew and many years later I still get the gig when it comes to supplying new artworks and even handling the artistic redesigns of new seasonal menus. Talking of food…

Adrift Under A Burning Sky by Mark Taylor

You have to be hungry for this…

When you paint anything you paint with passion, that’s how masterpieces are created. The same is true when you are creating your business, you have to approach with a hunger and a determination that yells I want this so much. You have to be hungry to succeed and you also have to expect that the road will be long and arduous and that cooking times can vary.

Running an art business is just like creating an oil painting when it comes to managing expectations. First you have to select the art supplies and then you have to prepare the canvas, then you have to wait for that to dry before you begin to apply the paint, and then you have to wait around some more before you apply more coats of paint and then you finish off and maybe give it a frame. Running a business is very much like creating a piece of art, there’s a lot of waiting around at least initially, and there are always some minor details that you forget to add.

And just like paintings, a business can suck up hours of your time, sometimes long gruelling hours that will make you question if it is really worth it. It’s at these times you really need to be hungry for the vision that you have and remember why you are doing this.

The time between applying the base coat and the final coat of your business masterpiece will vary, but whatever time you do have can’t be wasted. You have to prioritise what really needs to be done and get on with doing it and often and that will mean making sacrifices.

Just as you do when you paint, you have to look after the canvas throughout the process and when it comes to business that means that you have to look after yourself too. Too much, too quickly always equates to burn out and the painting runs the risk of becoming spoiled.

Give your masterpiece a real home…

Every masterpiece needs a home and when it comes to business you have to have somewhere that is accessible to everyone. Buyers are a varied bunch who don’t always use social media but you still have to reach them because those who shy away from the social side still collect art. Putting all of your eggs in any single social media basket narrows down the potential audience even further, what you really need is an anchor, a place where anyone can go but it doesn’t have to be a physical made out of bricks and mortar place.

One of the best anchors you must-have in business is to have a website that people can visit regardless of whether they are on social media. The upside is that a website is then in your control and you are not beholden to the social channels that constantly want you to buy into ads, or force restrictive marketing rules and algorithms on you. With your own website, you have a place where you can not only sell your latest masterpiece but somewhere that you can send people to. You can then use social media as a funnel to get the traffic to the website.

That’s not to say that selling on social media alone is impossible but it is certainly going to be more restrictive and more difficult in terms of audience and in terms of what you are able to do in the long-term. You can read more about creating and building a web presence in an article I wrote back in 2018, and which you can find right here. 

Low Tide by Mark Taylor

The top ten art business tools and supplies…

Just as you need art supplies to continue creating your art, any art business needs a constant supply of actions to be applied to it and here are some of the most business-critical elements you need to have in place in no particular order:

• Stand out - One of the biggest challenges when creating art is to make the artwork stand out above every other painting a buyer could choose and it is the same with business. Businesses need to differentiate, to stand out and be just a tiny bit better, add a tiny bit more value, and be a tiny bit more memorable than the others. Just one percent better than everyone else will guarantee more customers as long as they know you are one percent better. 

• Add Value – There are plenty of businesses that say that they offer outstanding customer service but there are plenty of businesses who are still to figure out what that really means. Your clients are your number one priority over and above everything else and going the extra mile for them seems obvious but so many businesses today seem to only pay lip service to customer service. You need to put the customer front and centre. You shouldn’t be only providing good customer service, you should be providing legendary customer service, remember that your business is your masterpiece too. People do buy into prestige and service at every price point, good customer service isn't the reserve of the overpriced mega gallery. 

• Commit time to your masterpiece – I can’t even begin to tell you just how much time and effort you need to put into creating any business but an art business needs to be very focussed. Be prepared to spend time creating social strategies and content for your website and make enough time for the everyday business must-dos. You will still need to carve out enough time to create so you should be disciplined in your approach. My usual day beyond the day job is to spend at least two-hours answering emails, messages and social media, two hours writing and marketing, and any remaining time is time to be creative. That’s every single day, seven days a week, and on weekends the hours can stretch way beyond a normal day. But remember, you are only human, take the time you need, it's really not a race.

• Show your art in the right space – I’m not talking about galleries here but just as some art galleries focus on single styles of art, you have to know where your people are hanging out and concentrate on displaying your work in the right space so that they are able to find it. As great as the temptation is to plaster a new work in a Facebook group for cat lovers, unless your work is heavily focussed on cats then you really are wasting your time. Instead of scrolling through cat videos take that time to carry out legitimate research, your people will be there but you have to dig very hard to always find them.

• Don’t be everything to everyone – When you try to be everything to everyone there is a real risk that you end up in the position of being nothing to anyone. It makes no sense on one hand offer a $10,000 original and on the other hand offer a $10 print. What might be better is to offer a $10,000 original and a $1000 limited edition print, but if things like your pricing aren’t narrowly defined it looks very much like your business is scattered to have something for everyone and has no particular market. Sometimes it becomes more about the optics. Never undervalue your work to meet an audience that might be there, instead go after the audience that is there. 

• Be quirky and weird - Being quirky and a little bit weird isn’t a really bad idea. Feel free to throw conventional wisdom to one side, send out Christmas cards in the middle of August to your collectors, create fun social media posts to lighten the mood, if it has a fit with your personality and your art then it is fair game and if people are receiving Christmas cards in the height of the summer they might just share that kind of stuff on social media and bring more exposure to your work and your business. In the past, I once had a few hundred likes for wishing everyone a happy new year in August. Quirky is awesome, quirky is memorable, quirky is your friend, embrace it. 

• Be honest – take commissions as an example and there is every chance that you have at some point given a client a totally unrealistic date that the work will be completed by. The risks are great in that you are now not just putting yourself under pressure but your entire business is under pressure too. Be upfront with clients and let them know that you have a waiting list, and then if you can, over-deliver and bring the project in sooner but if there are any delays, make sure these are communicated as soon as you know.

• Document your masterpiece – Not too long ago we looked at blogs as a way of promoting you and your art and just as you should be documenting your paintings, you can also use the same principles to document your business and build meaningful connections with your client base. Remember though that purely promotional text will make clients run for the hills and the search engines won’t be far behind them. Hard reality time here, blogging is blogging, it’s not social media so make sure you have a real blogging presence and don’t rely on social media to bring you the numbers you really need. You can read my blogging article right here. If your print-on-demand service gives you an option to post a blog on your store use things like that instead of relying on social media. Use social as the driver to take your buyers to your store. 

• Be authentic – If you are doing everything above then you are on your way to being authentic and that really is the buzzword now. Social purpose is something that many of the big-name companies have in buckets. Being caring and responsible, having good intentions and following through on them and making sure that your marketing materials paint a true picture of whatever you are marketing are the core underlying principles that define you as being authentic and set you above others, but you also have to be authentic in a way that people trust what you say, and what you do. You need to be authentically you, not some Insta-authentic you. 

• Be unique and original – I am often asked what art sells better than any other art and the answer is that no one really knows for sure. Galleries have a better idea of what seels for them because they have done their homework, for independent artists, what sells best will depend on where you are and what you do and how well you do it. We know that landscapes and seascapes and nudes have all had their trending moments throughout art history, not forgetting abstracts and the other hundreds of styles, and each of those styles has managed to find levels of commercial success but not every artist painting those styles has. But one thing that I am sure everyone in the art world can agree on is that the work of an artist that has the best chance of selling is work that is both unique and original. 

Adrift on Silent Waters - Coming Soon!

Keep that determination…

Maintaining the determination to carry on can sometimes feel overwhelming especially when things don’t quite go to plan. The minor setbacks can feel mountainous at times and it is easier to walk away than navigate through the mud. Whenever new artists ask me how long will it take to get from A to B, there’s not really a standard answer I can give. It took me the best part of ten years of building my business to the point where I could start to choose the work I did, for others it can take months, and for others, it can take much longer. It’s a hard slog but when as anything to do with art ever been easy eh!

When things seem tough, remember that this too shall pass. Like a kidney stone sometimes, but it will pass. Just remember why you are doing what you are doing, keep the faith, have the determination to carry on through the difficult times and be patient because sometimes the coats of business have to dry just as coats of paint have to dry on a canvas. This is your masterpiece, love it, nurture it, and own it and never ever be afraid to ask for help and sales. 

About Mark…

I am an artist and blogger and live in Staffordshire, England. You can purchase my art through my Fine Art America store or my Pixels site here.

Any art sold through Fine Art America and Pixels contributes towards the ongoing costs of running and developing this website. You can also view my portfolio website at https://beechhousemedia.com

You can also follow me on Facebook at https://facebook.com/beechhousemedia where you will also find regular free reference photos of interesting subjects and places I visit. You can also follow me on Twitter @beechhouseart and on Pinterest at https://pinterest.com/beechhousemedia

If you would like to support the upkeep of this site or maybe just buy me a coffee, you can do so right here.