In previous references I have mentioned resources. Take for example the section on copyright, where I stated: The following copyright websites explain everything in detail:
In the U.S. go to: http://www.copyright.gov In Australia go to: http://www.copyright.org.au In the UK, go to: http://www.copyright.org.uk
All other countries should have their own online website for their individual laws on copyright pertaining to their own country.
Or the public relations website: www.myprgenie.com.
I could list countless resource lists containing web addresses ad infinitum. It is up to you to find out what are the best to suit your needs.
When I’m in New York I refer to the New York Foundation for the Arts: http://www.nyfa.org/default_mac.asp to get valuable info while I’m there. They are helpful and one of many organisations that are ready to help in any way they can with your art related needs.
Resources In Australia
In Australia there are a number Continued…
Posted in Art Business, Artist Help & Tips, Artist Success, FAQ, Free Members, Selling Your Art.
Tagged with Art Business, art help, Art Marketing, art promotion, art sales, art success, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist tips, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 20/04/2013
There is an entire world beyond creativity, talent and training. You’ve done the hard work, which is why this is not about telling you how to make good art in the studio. The foundation stones are in place. You’ve got the art, now you want to enter public space with it – here is your road map.
By paying close attention to the points within, the artist will develop an overview of their career, define themselves as professionals, develop confidence, take risks, transcend fear and envision the future.
When it comes to selling your art, you will have new confidence and information about the gallery – artist relationship, you will achieve success. You will know correct pricing – what your art’s worth, and you will be clear with your decisions – if it is wise for you to do limited editions of your work for example.
Freighting your art to Continued…
Posted in Art Business, Art Marketing, Art Seminars, Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Selling Your Art.
Tagged with aesthetics, Art Business, Art Commissions, art help, Art Marketing, art promotion, art sales, Art Seminars, art success, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, public speaking, Selling Your Art, success in art, wealth.
By John Dahlsen
– 15/04/2013
I have always tried to maintain a pure commitment to contemporary art practice. I’ve rarely looked for a safe place to rest. My art generally runs parallel to my life; I learn from my art and apply a few of these insights to my life, and vice versa. When I sense that I’m becoming too comfortable in what I’m doing, I will consciously move on to something new.
Challenges in my personal life keep me on my toes and help me to extend myself more as an artist. This is how my work is in a constant state of evolution. I see this evolution of my consciousness as an alchemical one, which is also true of my work, in a more literal sense.
The initial alchemy of a man-made object has been redefined by nature’s elements before it winds its way to the shore and before I redefine it again. Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, Art Marketing, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 10/04/2013
Many artists are now highlighting environmental concerns in their work, including climate change. I am always hopeful that art can help shift awareness in a positive direction. I am also hopeful that the viewing public embraces these messages and is moved to act, for I firmly believe that at present we need all the help we can get to address the current ecological needs of our planet. If a fraction of this viewing public experienced a shift in their awareness, by virtue of exposure to my work, then all the labor and intention in the artistic process is for me justified. Our planet is in a fragile ecological position, and global warming hastens unprecedented change. Never have we so urgently needed art and activism to boldly promote consciousness shifts around the health of our planet.
Central concerns of my work now exemplify my commitment as an artist to express contemporary Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 05/04/2013
Each artist develops their own central concerns with their work. They are not handed over to them by anyone else (unless you are carrying on a particular tradition, which is highly unlikely in the field of contemporary art).
Your central concerns are a by-product of the creative process that is a given result of that process. Thankfully each artist has a unique set of concerns that they identify and relate to that no one can claim as theirs. This is another reason artists have an automatic copyright on the works they create. Your central concerns are not ever stagnant or rigid, they will change and develop as your career and work does.
The central concerns in my own work have constantly shifted and changed about throughout my career. Changes in my life have directly affected my artwork. As much as possible I have stayed flexible with these changes and have Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Free Members.
Tagged with aesthetics, Art Business, Art Commissions, art help, Art Marketing, art success, Art tips, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 31/03/2013
I’m constantly asking myself how can I leave this planet a little better than I found it. I never had this attitude when I was younger and I will be forever grateful that I had through this fire such a strong wake-up call. It has led me to become a flexible individual, open to changes and able to respond to the processes that are going on around me and with in my work.
It is this flexibility that had me suggesting to my wife when we moved into our new home in Byron Bay, that I would like to make driftwood furniture for it, because it had whitewashed walls and ceilings and I thought the driftwood would complement the interior of the house well. We were also on a tight budget and this was a cheap and effective way of furnishing our house at the same time with a beautiful Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 25/03/2013
Following a fire in my studio in nineteen eighty four and after completion of a teachers training degree at the Melbourne College of Advanced Education coupled with some extensive travel in the United States, I felt better prepared to return to my career as a professional practicing artist after having a short sabbatical.
This incident of the fire, which had deeply impacted both my personal and professional life, had enabled me to mature overall as a person. Artistically, I acquired the ability to face truths about my work, making radical, necessary changes.
Sandra Murray, the then director of the Lawrence Wilson Gallery at the University Of Western Australia, recognized this in an essay on my work in nineteen ninety-one.
“The successful artistic expression of an abstruse concept such as universality is difficult to achieve, but ultimately rewards both artist and viewer.
It is what lies beyond the boundaries of abstraction Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 19/03/2013
Upon returning to Australia, after spending time going back and forth and sometimes residing in the United States, I took up a position as artist in residence at Editions Gallery, Western Australia. Living and working with other artists is an education in itself.
Fellow painter Keith Looby prompted me to explore more painterly qualities in my work, while during the years I shared a studio with John Beard in Fremantle would help deepen my exploration into abstraction. The vitality and intensity with which both of these artists approached their work left quite an impact on me, subsequently affecting the way I approached my own art practice.
Significant support in the form of both patronage and exhibition opportunities by Alan Delaney, from Delaney Galleries in Perth, also assisted greatly to my uncompromising dedication to my art. Pat Corrigan in later years was another figure to emulate this support.
Some of the Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 14/03/2013
In the meantime, I was involved in my secondary school exam preparations and about a week before our final year exams began I was informed that I had been accepted into Australia’s most prestigious art school. My exams ended up being a breeze, as I had no pressure. I ended up getting good results and felt that I had an extraordinarily bright future to look forward to. My art school days were exciting right from the start. I met many inspiring people, both students and lecturers. I created deep friendships and as fate would have it, I ended up in a five-year tumultuous relationship with the very same young woman that I met in the cafe the year before. Her name was Barbara and she was beautiful. Just what a young man fresh out of the confines of four long years at an all boys boarding school needed.
It was Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Free Members.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 09/03/2013
My teenage years were no different than the usual, mostly centered on my various infatuations with girls and also my adventures with my friends on surfing safaris, or surfaris as we called them. I imagine this connection with the ocean, which I developed as a child, later had a strong impact upon the type of art I would end up creating. Apart from having an early influence from my dad who liked to take charcoal from our fire place and sketch whatever was in his mind, the only other early influence was an early art teacher of mine, a wonderful woman by the name of Nola, who saw in me from the age of twelve or thirteen a certain sensitivity and talent, which she encouraged in me and also mentioned this to my parents when she had the chance. She was a sensitive person herself and unfortunately ended her own Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Selling Your Art.
Tagged with aesthetics, art help, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, Environmental Art, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 05/03/2013
At first, coming from the discipline of having been a painter for so many years, I envisioned my first series as wall works, plastics behind Perspex in shallow boxes, which looked remarkably similar to oil paintings when seen from a distance. From those early days of making these wall based assemblages, the whole process orientation took shape which was to guide me through many twists and turns in my creativity, which had me exploring many mediums in the found object genre including sculpture, installation, public art, digital printing and a return to painting.
For approximately fifteen years I scoured Australian beaches for found objects – the ocean litter that affects our waters and beaches on a global scale. Sorting all of these objects became a natural extension of my process of collecting. Gathering plastics from the beach was a type of performance art on its own. The new colors and Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Selling Your Art.
Tagged with aesthetics, Art Business, art help, art success, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 28/02/2013
Work for me as an environmental artist began accidentally.
In the middle of the 1990’s I was collecting driftwood in Victoria on the southern Australian coastline. I had intended to make furniture out of my finds, as I had done as a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in the late ‘70s and throughout the subsequent years.
During these trips to remote beaches, I stumbled across vast amounts of plastic debris that were washing up on the shoreline, and I felt compelled to collect it. With my initial collection I had amassed the bags full of found plastics, all of which I had intended to take to the recycling section of the local tip.
The more items I collected however, the more intrigued I grew about their form, their color and I began to absorb the degree to which these plastics had become a scourge to Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Success, FAQ, Selling Your Art.
Tagged with Art Business, art help, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 25/02/2013
Anyone, regardless of their profession will meet setbacks in their career. For artists this will take the form of blockages in activities in the studio when things are not quite working right and this can be unnerving, unsettling.
At the same time, these occurrences can open doors for a new process of working. When you’re having an exhibition of new work and it doesn’t sell – that can be difficult. Again, I would have to talk about relativity. It’s tough if you don’t sell work at an exhibition, especially if you put a lot of time and money into the show. But that pales in significance when compared to being dealt a bad hand when you least expect it.
In nineteen eighty-three I had a horrific fire in my studio. This fire managed to destroy approximately seven or eight years of artworks, including paintings drawings and prints. At the time Continued…
Posted in Art Business, Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Free Members.
Tagged with Art Business, art help, art success, Art tips, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 23/02/2013
Now for the most important advice:
Take a deep breath.
You are an artist; no one wants you to be anything but that. When it comes to writing about yourself or pitching your work, it’s perfectly normal to feel wildly uncomfortable….
This content is available to Free members and above. To access this information, please
Subscribe Now or
Login if you are already a member.
Posted in Art Business, Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, Free Members.
Tagged with aesthetics, Art Business, Art Commissions, art help, Art Marketing, art promotion, Art Seminars, art success, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, Environmental Art, public speaking, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 21/02/2013
The essay I wrote for the United Nations, The Future We Want is reproduced here with kind permission of the United Nations Organization, having first appeared on the UN website and the UN’s official social media outlets.
Essay for the UN Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. John Dahlsen
Our immediate and long-term future is full of the promise of a golden age for humankind. We are now on a precipice, at a crossroads in our history where for the first time humanity has a collective enlightened vision…
Science and religion are almost inseparable with their understanding of the sense of Oneness, which connects everything from the smallest organism to the vast expanses of the universe – and, perhaps, beyond.
In the past these understandings and glimpses into such expanded realities have been restricted to the elite few. Up until now we have been able to count the Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ.
Tagged with aesthetics, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 18/02/2013
I shifted again back to painting after working with found objects and recycled materials for so many years.
I was asked by a significantly major recycling company in Australia to draw up certain public art proposals for works that were intended for placement outside buildings and factories throughout Australia.
When I toured one particular factory I noticed that their plastic fabricating machines were pumping out what are called purges at the end of a run.
These were like big blobs that would be squeezed out of the machine to clean the machine at the end of the day or week. I found these objects immeasurably interesting and immensely intriguing.
I proceeded to collect a number of these objects that were either destined for a landfill or for recycling and chose to exalt them on plinths in my studio. I then created a series of paintings about these plastic objects. This Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success.
Tagged with art help, art success, Art tips, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, Environmental Art, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 17/02/2013
The inspiration to consider these found objects as possible material for my art making process is a different matter. As I intended, I completed the driftwood furniture. When that project was complete, I tipped all the contents of the plastic bags, out onto the studio floor and ended up with a giant pile of trash. I had friends dropping by asking me if I was OK! Then I saw the giant palette emerge, and I began to approach the aggregate of found objects in a fairly pragmatic way.
The first series of work that I created at that time was called Contemporary Landscapes. They looked almost like a cross cut through the soil. I ended up making colorful, almost painterly compositions behind Perspex.
Eventually, I started making more sculptural pieces with some of the larger plastics. Totems and installations made with thongs, coke bottles and all of these things. The Continued…
Posted in Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success.
Tagged with art help, art success, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, environment, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 10/02/2013
One of the most profound shifts in direction that has occurred for me came about when a good friend of mine had an aircraft accident.
The light aircraft he was a passenger in crashed and he was badly hurt. I ended up spending quite some time by his bed while he was in hospital, just being there for him on a daily basis for a few months. His head had been badly injured, and he had serious burns to his body which had the doctors at the time threatening amputation. Spending so much time with him caused me to experience a shift in my awareness. This whole garish process largely didn’t faze me, and I wasn’t aware of my tolerance for it beforehand.
I would take occasional breaks from my hospital visits and garner driftwood and plastics from remote beaches in South-eastern Victoria in Australia, as a way of having Continued…
Posted in Art Business, Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, Free Members.
Tagged with art success, Art tips, artist, artist integrity, artist tips, Environmental Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 10/01/2013
I find it is beneficial in a multitude of ways to reflect on what you have done as a creator. This can help with future directions and can also act as a signpost for yourself about important and pivotal times in your career, times which you may want to elaborate about clearly in lectures or in your own writings about your work.
I have delivered many lectures over the years on my environmental art, environmental issues and other aspects of art. In these lectures I cover all of the key periods in my work. I enjoy delivering these lectures and traveling to various parts of the globe to share my insights and reflections. I enjoy the interaction that I have with the audience. The questions I receive probe and challenge me to give honest and thought-provoking answers. I’ve been an artist for approximately thirty years now, and it’s a great Continued…
Posted in Art Business, Art Marketing, Art Marketing Test, Art Seminars, Artist Help & Tips, Artist Integrity, Artist Success, FAQ, Selling Your Art.
Tagged with Art Business, art help, Art Marketing, art promotion, Art Seminars, art success, Art tips, Art writing, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, Selling Your Art, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 10/12/2012
The response of the public to my work with found objects has often been challenging for me. Certain people are uncomfortable or over-demonstrable when they see me walking along the beach collecting rubbish, because of their own positive or negative projections. They sometimes have an external reaction or projection, purely being a specifically personal response of their own and how they see this activity. Most of the time for me it was as though I were doing performance art, collecting rubbish was also my daily meditation.
My work continues to grow in different directions and finds new shifts in emphasis. I’ve just allowed each next shift to happen organically. It’s been quite interesting to feel the doors open and find myself moving through them into something always new.
Cynicism from viewing audiences always feels like an obstacle, one that can pull you away from your centre. The challenge is returning Continued…
Posted in Free Members.
Tagged with art help, art success, Art tips, artist, artist help, artist integrity, artist tips, success in art.
By John Dahlsen
– 10/11/2012
