Exclusive Art
Being an independent artist is already hard enough as it is. Being someone that almost no one ever pays attention to makes things more difficult. If you mention you’re autistic, people expect a savant. Tell people about inner conflicts, they think you're crazy. I don’t think there is a “right way” to make or sell art unless you come from academia and your focus is more on technical skills and marketing than the art itself.
I struggle with several things.
I like to think that I am an approachable person. People often approach me for no reason and tell me just about everything. It only gets weird when I try to have a conversation, to reciprocate in a meaningful way. It’s not lost on me that I say and do weird things, and that the things I think about or the way I approach life can be uncomfortable for a lot of people. It’s also not lost on me that most of them don’t actually want to have a conversation, they just want someone to listen. So I do a lot of listening, not a lot of talking.
I have spent most of my life in social isolation. I have had a few friends, I am married and I have two kids but that doesn’t mean that my inner world is filled rainbows or that my social life is off the hook. I spend most of my days by myself with my dog. Most of the things I think about aren’t easy to share with other people. Few people, like my brothers, can appreciate the nuances of my mind. I like to talk to them because conversation is interesting and fun.
Outside of them, I struggle to find people who are like me. Not many are and those that say they are also get weirded out by me because my brain doesn’t stop at the stop sign. So when it comes to art, I usually only share what I think people will like, the things that are acceptable, give a certain aesthetic and are relatable on a superficial level.
I try to fit in.
Like so many neurodivergent people, fitting in often means we have to hide who we are, say the right things, make others feel comfortable even when it cost us our individuality. We spend so much time just trying to be “cool” that we resort to drinking or drugs to dull the anxiety or just cope with our own thoughts.
Of course not all neurodivergent people are like that but a lot of us are or were. I have been sober for about 20 years now but my youth was very different.
Over the last year I thought I could do it. I could hone some skills as an illustrator. To some degree it worked. I make greeting cards of my dog, Cheddar. She brings me joy and she does also get more attention. I like to draw her but that doesn’t satisfy my internal need to create in the way that helps regulate my body and mind and process things that are hard to process.
If I were better with words, I might be able to articulate what I mean better but unfortunately I am a shit writer. You probably already made mental notes about my grammar and punctuation as if those are the things that give a person value. Don’t hate me for hating you for that.
The point is, making art to please others doesn’t make me happy. Making art because it’s what is there, that does… not happy in the sense that I feel joy or elation but that it satisfies something in my brain that needs to do it.
Exclusive vs. Inclusive
I wanted to make my art affordable to everyone who found it interesting and yet, that business model is too cost inefficient and people still think that a print for 25$ is too much in this economy. I get it, that’s why I tried to make it cheaper yet all that was really doing is sucking up too much of my time. Formatting my art to fit into standard frame sizes, putting in boarders, eating the cost of expensive paper just to have quality prints that no one is buying anyways because it’s still too expensive or I just don’t understand how to make myself seen.
From what I have sold, I can tell you that I have not made a dime because the world wants cheap, on demand, fast shipping, home decor aesthetics that change every other season depending on what an influencer says is trending.
That’s not who I am. I am not an eccentric person. I am not loud, I am not trendy. I lose myself in a piece for hours or days, fascinated by my own imagination because I don’t even know what I am going to create until it’s done.
Most people only see the final piece, they don’t know every thought that passed through my mind while making it and most people do not care. I understand that because getting people to care about me has always been a struggle so imagine trying to get them to care about my art. I do have a few people who do genuinely love and care about me and I am so grateful for them but as an artist, they aren’t looking at it the way I see it. I don’t think they actually want to know everything that went through my mind because some of those thoughts are not great or they can’t relate.
Less is More
Maybe I will be sticking my foot in my ass by changing plans but I can’t compete with AI, mass production, POD or all the things it takes to make art for everyone for super cheap and at your doorstep in two days. Instead I am choosing to produce less and charge more. I want to focus on my art. I don’t want to focus on making things cheaper for others. I don’t want to focus on fulfilling every unreasonable request someone has. Yes, people make unreasonable requests that make you feel like an asshole when you can’t do it or won’t do it.
I just cannot ever seem to fit in. I never had any art training. I dropped out of community college because I couldn’t pass math or speech. There was only so many times I could fail the same classes before informing me that if I don’t get my grades up, they’ll expel me so I dropped out.
Finding the right people to buy my work is also hard. I don’t know what people want. I don’t know the names of the things that people search for. I don’t know how to properly talk about my art or my art process. I have nothing to say when they ask about my technique or genre or style. Logically, to be in business as an outsider artist, it only makes sense to make them exclusive because I will not appeal to most people.
Those are just the facts. I will still keep my greeting cards standard and art that I think didn’t really require much more than some skill, at a lower price but for the art in which I am an artist in the sense of what an artist is, those will come at a price.
To date, I have only sold 2 pieces of art. Acrylic on canvas. 1 was purchased for 200$ and the other for 250$. Unfortunately, it cost me about 60$ to ship each one so I really didn’t actually make that much money. I was however, elated that they liked my work enough to spend that kind of money on a no-named artist. That meant everything to me because when you live your life invisible, to be seen is scary but also makes you feel like you are worth something.