The Risk of Trying to Sell Your Art, How to Be Ok in the Process

​I want to talk about the conflict of making art from the heart and trying to sell it. Or the perceived conflict.

If you are reading this, you are probably like me in being an artist who tries to make work that is real to you- that touches you on a deep or tender level. Art that is swimming in your own very particular sense of beauty and may be at the edge of your own discomfort- in the very place of your own growth and healing.

If it is working, it is powerful and beautiful and raw and very vulnerable stuff. And often it feels like you are not sure what you are doing or how to do it. It is not easy and for the most part- you have no clue how to talk about it- especially to someone who might have a wallet with money in it!

How are you ever going to be able to bring that vulnerability out to the world? The very thought is enough to make you go running for cover- blankets and teddy bears and all. And yet somehow there is an urge to share it.

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This is the thing: you are not only making it for your self and you are certainly not making it in a vacuum even if you are working in the privacy of the sacred space of your studio.

You are part of this culture. The culture is part of you. Your job in the culture is to express these very particular inexpressible things- to bring to light the bits that need to be healed- in all of us. You are tapping into not just your own creative unconscious, but in what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious- the great muck of shared internalized experience.

Your urge to share it is not egotistical or needy- it is part of your job- your calling as an artist. Be humble about it and do your part for the good of the whole!

What feels deeply personal and particular to your own private experience is something that others need to express as well and just seeing it will help them in their healing path- which is also the path of healing for the culture. Think about how a song works to ease your heart by bringing beauty to the sadness.

I have often felt like the process of making is what has the transformative power. For a maker it can be hard to understand how someone who is just looking at it can actually get anything. But the fact is that there are many many people for whom making art is not their way. They get the juice from seeing- connecting to- what has been made by others.

Your work will not be pertinent to everyone. That is ok. It only needs to be available to those who do connect to it- who recognize themselves in it. For those people it is a profound gift. It is a sacred and loving gift.

To see your pain, your disquiet, your story, your heart in the mirror of someone else’s creative work is to feel seen, held, not alone, loved. It is essential to the healing of us social critters.

So to go back to the original question- how do you stay in the heart of your work and also get it out into the world and try to sell it?  

1. Recognize that you do not need to “try” to sell it- Ick. Do not put on that slick sales blazer and go out to the shiny sales floor and strut your stuff. Eew.

2.  Get the work up on the walls, on-line, in some venue where folks can see it. 

3.  Let the work do the work. Let it speak to whoever it speaks to. The right folks will be drawn to it if you can find a way for them to run into it.

4. Connect on a human level. Just be interested in them. Ask what they see in it. Draw out their stories- connect where there is real connection.

5.  Let yourself be fed. That is right- you too should be gaining something in this interaction. You have made this vulnerable thing that you do not fully understand because it comes from somewhere deeper than words. So as you talk to this person who connects to it- let yourself continue to discover what it is that this thing is about. Their insights may bring light to what you have been up to. But more importantly, when you get a good dose of how your work brings meaning and healing to others, it will give you courage and energy to keep going.

Relax about the sales. Focus on the connection. Let your heart be in a generous  place of interest in the other and let the work that you made exist outside of yourself and do its magic of creating a safe space for people to get in touch with the incomprehensible complex stuff of life.

Thank you for continuing to make your work!

Back to you: I would love to hear how this sits with you! Do you have stories of feeling wrong or right in the sales of your work?

PS I have a few spots available for private coaching clients. If you are an artist at the edge of showing and selling or struggling to get back to your creative life, and you could use support, lets talk! I offer a free initial consultation so that we can assess where and whether I could be helpful to you. ​

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