The key to successful grant proposals is preparation. As an artist help it is good to know you are likely to find preliminary grant proposal writing steps to be the most time consuming as well as the most vital step of the process.
While charity events can be great marketing opportunities for you, the mix of people who attend include people with no interest in art as well as, potentially, the serious collector. Anything is possible, just be sure to manage your expectations.
As with self-promotion, fundraising can take you out of the safety of your studio and into competitive situations that won’t feel comfortable at first. It’s important to not let fear and insecurity show itself in your grant application.
The obvious answer is art supplies, studio rent, office supplies, photography, promotion, professional memberships, equipment and software. Keep all your
In theory, art is priceless. In reality, it’s not. It’s hard to attach numbers to your work. In order to have success in your art, start by reviewing the sales of previous work. This can begin to establish your prices.
When you sit down to write or revise your artist statement, it’s firstly important to understand the objective of the exercise. People who read it may include gallery directors, potential clients and journalists. Your goal is to give them some frameworks around your work with which they can better view and understand it.
Your website can, and should be your best ally. As an artist help, what constitutes good copy is not only text that reads well and does a great job relaying the key messages of your work, but text that drives visitors to your site in the first place.
If you find yourself staring vacantly into the whiteness of your page, or if you’ve already written your statement and your bio but they leave you cold, as an artist tip, limber yourself up by borrowing – momentarily – someone else’s insight.
It is best to craft a statement and bio that are fairly unique to one another to start with, however, your bio statement should be written in third person and a statement written in first person.
I personally have a number of artists statements. These range from different times in my career, from different stylistic periods in my career and are of various lengths. An example of this is with my current artist statement. I have three different versions of this statement, depending upon where I am showing it or presenting it.
Marketing and promotional materials serve you best when they are easy to update, produce and disperse and when they reflect a professional image of you and your work that makes sense. In all of your materials you should include professional photography of your work. If the photograph quality is poor, this immediately reflects on your own artistic eye.
A Curriculum Vitae (CV) is your opportunity to market your arts successfully and list all of the shows in which your work has appeared, as well as to reference private collectors and museums that have purchased your work. A resume and a CV are often very similar, but a resume tends to be one or two pages, while a CV is comprehensive.
Arts marketing for artists, can be best achieved when artists don’t only see themselves as conveyors of information, intention and feeling and are moved to communicate their messages by means of two and three dimensional objects, performance, or sound.
A fire destroyed my studio in 1983, taking seven years work with it. It shook my foundations as a person and brought me face to face with my mortality. It influenced my transition through a fairly diverse range of art practice and made the later transition to found objects easier, because I became less rigid as a person.
A study into one mans journey into the creative arts.
I started making sculptural pieces with some of the larger plastics that had been washing up on my local beaches. I made totems and installations made with thongs, coke bottles and all of these things.
Art help with responsible financial management
Artists need to organize their money and protect and save their wealth. I have met many artists who were simply overwhelmed by financial planning. Most often they are responsible for the problem by not taking sufficient interest in their finances, and it is often necessary to twist an arm in order to persuade an artist to audit their income and take control.
Artist tips to help with managing emotions and having persistence.
Never place a call or send out an email when you are emotional. Email is a volatile communication form.
Art tips for artists planning and goal setting
I recommend planning your year at a high level, setting dates for various goals. On a micro level, I have been very successful by telling myself that am about to spend the next three hours making art, for example, and that I will feel rewarded for it.
Selling art effectively means managing your time and also means placing a value on it.
Managing your time also means placing a value on it. I set aside time for silence and space. Do not assume that packing as many shows into a year is the right use of time.
A successful artist is accountable.
You ALONE are responsible for your success. How you respond to the challenges you face is entirely your responsibility.
Having success as an artist is when they how to manage their time.
You need to become very aware of how you organize your workday. Make full use of the time that you have on this planet. When the hours of the day have passed, they are gone.
