Guild of Natural Science Illustrators International meeting
in Ithaca, New York, July, 2008.
Introduction: Why think about business?
Most of us treat business as a necessary evil. We don’t know how to do it, or we may even think it’s harmfull to our authenticity and our art, or (most likely) we just don’t want to do all that work. In some ways, it often seems easier to scrape by and struggle than to take on the business side of life. Yet, if you are to eat and meet your basic needs, maybe even thrive, that means someone does some business development. It might as well be you.
I’m suggesting that it needs to be you. That is, if you are ready to make your living as an artist. Being a businessperson will require a lot of you–the kind of effort you routinely put into your art. Let’s talk about that.
Summary
If you can understand how to create a painting, you are way ahead of the game. It’s the emotional and personal paradign shift that business-thinking requires that cause us to resist and procrastinate.
Maybe those two separate brains– the artist’s brain and the business-persons’s brain can become like two hemispheres of one more powerful mind. After all, for the self-employed person, your business is your life. And once you have created a sgtrategic vision that you are comfortable with, you don’t have to compromise your heart and soul in order to do business.