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Success in the World of Art

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Who would have ever thought getting fired would be the best thing that ever happened to me? After solidifying the decision to turn professional in my mind, I called my two biggest supporters, my mom and my sister. They had always been a great encouragement to me, and I wanted them to be among the first to know. 

After that I joined a local art guild. The president of the guild said I should join the board, but I said there was no way I would do that. That was a Friday night and the next Tuesday they held nominations for the next year. Wednesday morning they called me and told me that I had been elected president. Whoa! Here we go again.

At my first board meeting, I met a lady there named Judy. She looked at my art work and asked me to start teaching her. Can you believe that? Why was all this happening to me? That was in September and I taught my first class in January.

I began to read anything I could get my hands on about marketing, not just art, but all marketing. I was a sponge.

I entered as many art exhibits as I could. I remember one time I drove to an art show and I didn’t even have one dime in my pocket for the drive home. I knew if I wasn’t committed to it, it was never going to happen.

I was blessed to start out well, winning a lot of awards, but also brought back to earth through a lot of rejection. I did outside shows, inside shows, and in-between shows. Throughout it all, I had a lot of support from my family, which kept me going through the hard times, and also through the self-doubting times.

That’s when I REALLY got into teaching, realizing that travelling every weekend to shows was not the way I wanted to go. I started to book more and more classes around the state. During that time, I also investigated  getting into the limited edition print market and began to read about publishing, and what it meant. I didn’t have a clue. I found that information about publishing art was fairly scarce. Finally, little by little, I started to gain some understanding about what it was like to be a publisher.

I released my first print in the early 1980’s and continued trying to find leading printers of fine art work, all the while continuing my study of fine art publishing. In 1987 we relocated to Indianapolis, IN, and I formed my own publishing company called Artistic Expressions. I started to run small ads in trade magazines, newspapers, and radio spots. At this time, I was also entering national and international art exhibits.

It was then, in 1990, that I was accepted to exhibit with the Phoebus Touring Artists at Hellenic Art Institute in Athens, Greece. I was selected as the most popular artist of the 14 artists by the public. That year I was also accepted into the prestigious “Who’s Who in American Art,” after being turned down the previous three years.

I was beginning to experience success in the world of art, or more precisely, the fruit of success. I think I became successful when I began to do what I knew all along I should be doing. Not only “should” I have been doing it, now I wanted to do it. I thought I was on top of the world.

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