Musings on Sales

         I’ve been thinking again recently about the delicate balance that artists of all sorts must find, dancing the tightrope between creation and commercialism.  I could wrestle with this for pages, but it’s summer and I’ve got lots of chores to do, as well as plenty of work for the next Strong Women-Strange Worlds author event, not to mention a backlog of no fewer than five carved blocks that need printing.  So instead I offer you a quotation from sculptor Anne Truitt, as well as just a few additional thoughts of my own.

        “Artists have to please whim to live on their art. They stand in fearful danger of looking to this taste to define their working decisions. Sometime during the course of their development, they have to forge a character subtle enough to nourish and protect and foster the growth of the part of themselves that makes art, and at the same time practical enough to deal with the world pragmatically. They have to maintain a position between care of themselves and care of their work in the world, just as they have to sustain the delicate tension between intuition and sensory information.

        “This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that artists are, in this sense, special because they are intrinsically involved in a difficult balance not so blatantly precarious in other professions. The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin their work out of themselves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned inside out to the public gaze.”

        There are certainly some authors and artists who love making work tailored to the “popular” trends and who revel in marketing and publicity.  But I, along with the majority of authors and artists I know, find a deep and uncomfortable chasm between the love of creating things and the unpleasant necessity of trying to sell it.  I don’t want to play the publicity games of making sure everyone has heard of me, or attempt to perform the marketing goals of convincing people they “need” something they wouldn’t otherwise want.  Add to that the even deeper and more difficult divide between my sense that making art and writing are a calling, in which I attempt to offer up my gifts in the service of making the world a better place… and the fact that this is my job and I’m trying to make a decent income from it.

        This weekend I had a booth at an art festival, and that format usually feels pretty good to me.  I display my art, and people can look at it and decide for themselves whether or not it makes them happy and they want to buy something.  If they don’t care for it, they walk on by and we all go on with our lives.  If they enjoy it and feel some connection and delight in what I’ve created, they can spend time looking, we can talk, and maybe they’ll decide to take something home.  Certainly I appreciate all the people who stopped by this weekend, looked, and talked with me about block printing, speculative fiction, magical creatures, doors, carving, octopuses, Model T’s, and more!  I hope the pieces you bought bring you much joy.

        For others who walk that tightrope, how do you find the balance between nourishing the part of yourself that makes art and being practical enough to deal with the world pragmatically?

[Five blocks carved in July,

booth at Linda Plaut Newton Festival of the Arts, photos by AEGN, 2023;

Quotation from Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt, 1974, by way of Maria Popova’s The Marginalian.]