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Art is a very subjective thing and there are far too many people out there willing to pass judgement on somebody's work. So often, art is viewed as a precious comodity purely for the enjoyment of the elite. This is an attitude perpetuated by the professional critic whose judgement can make or break an artists reputation. What gives a critic this power that can deny the artist a living from his skills? One thing and one thing only. His/her opinion informed by years of studying what the perceived model of acceptability is. Unfortunately, this sort of opinion excludes a great swathe of excellent work for a variety of reasons often hinging on snobbery. If an artist falls out side of these boundaries, it becomes increasingly dificult to break into the world of professional art with agents and galleries less inclined to take them on.
The criteria that really matters is; do you like it? If you've created something that you genuinely like there is an extremely strong probability that there will be a lot of people who agree with you, and some of those would be willing to buy your work of art - irrespective of what the critics may say. If you try and second guess the market and create something that you think will please the critics, you run the risk of satisfying no-one... including yourself. Keep the faith, plough on with your gut instincts, and the results will be honest and probably way more saleable. Lots of people will be there to give advise on what you are doing wrong - listen to them and take in those points that you know deep down are right, but keep faith in your original vision and you will get there. Who knows, the critics may agree too - but don't worry if they don't!!
If like many people, you feel that you want to bypass the old agent and gallery system and get you work seen and bought by real paying customers, there are a whole host of avenues open for you via the internet. A new breed of E-Galleries exist who will let you show your work for a small fee, or even free of charge irrespective of your style. You simply upload your images through the gallery's own interfaces and, hey presto, you're online for the world to see.
Most of these sites will let you sell your work on line through them. Some may charge a commission for this service but you can usually set the price you want for the artwork. Type "sell art online" into your favourite search engine, and you'll be able to find a whole host of these galleries. A major tool in selling your art can be through ebay, just about the biggest market place in the world with millions of potential customers. The good thing about the web is there are new visitors everyday who don't know about what, where, how or who created the artwork. They make their own judgements and if they like what they see enough, they might be tempted to buy!
As an artist, don't feel that you have to restrict yourself to one type of media. As long as you can photograph it, you can upload the image to the internet. If you want to make quality prints to sell, one of the most popular print reproduction processes is called "Giclee" printing. These are high quality digital prints made on archive quality paper using long lasting inks. The definition is incredibly faithful to your original, and often have a light fastness in excess of a hundred years. If you're artwork is up to or less than A3 in size, there are a range of high quality printers and materials available to make home printing viable. For larger scale prints, type "Giclee prints" into your search engine and you should be able to find a list of companies offering the service.
The biggest growth area by far in the visual arts is computer generated art. In the early days, the only things computers were capable of producing were simple geometrical shapes. Today's generation of design software is completely different. Chances are that if you have looked at any image in a magazine, it will either have been generated or manipulated by computer software. The King of the static computer image software is undeniably Adobe Creative Suite. This encompasses two legendary image creating programs - Photoshop and Illustrator. despite its name, Photoshop is far more than a photo retouching program. With it you can create original artwork from scratch, and using a graphics tablet and pen, you can draw, airbrush and paint as intuitively as using pens and brushes. Illustrator creates vector images which, although not as realistic as Photoshop's Raster images, have the advantage of being crisp and sharp at whatever size you want to blow up/reduce the image to. CS also has Acrobat professional for producing PDF's which can be opened across universal platform - Windows, Mac etc., the industry standard publication design software called In Design, and a web design package called Go Live. It is an expensive collection of software but, once mastered, you can realistically pitch yourself as a professional designer. A cheaper but fairly effective software collection is made by Corel. This has some great features but doesn't enjoy the same level of industry recognition.
If you're looking at web animation software the king is Flash as part of , recently taken over by Adobe(that name gets around!!). Flash MX is becoming increasingly important in both web and presentation environments, and is vector based which means that the animations it create can be blown up to huge proportions without loss of image quality. For 3D, the big boys are 3d Studio Max and Maya. Both have been used for major blockbuster movies but are still workable on personal computer platforms.
So, there you go.. you have the talent and the tools are out there - many of them free - that can expose your talents to a global market.. even if you don't want to leave the house!!
Article by Robb Williams
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