Tips for Finding Your Balance in Art and Commerce

So, you’ve done a little soul-searching and brainstorming about your art and commerce balance.  Here’s a few tips I’ve learned over the years to help find the balance.  As I’ve said before, its not always achievable without drastic measures and nothing is absolute in art, but hopefully these tips will help a little.  Let’s dive in!

Tips to maintain your creativity while being an artistic entrepreneur.

• Make a list of the reasons for selling your art in the first place.  What’s your reason?  What’s your purpose? If the goal is strictly monetary, can you find another way to make a living- remotely related to your art- and sell the finished product?

• Write down each task, both artistic and business, that you perform on a regular basis to keep your business a float.  Taxes, accounting, marketing, production, shipping, etc.  Leave a blank space next to each task.

• Analyze and understand which parts of the artistic commerce process you like, hate and must have.  Make a small notation next to each task indicating your preference.

• Next to each task, estimate the amount of time each task takes, use hours per week or percentages.  If you are having problems with creativity, pay close attention to the business side of things and the amount of time spent on these tasks.  Also note the time in-between the art tasks and business tasks.  Are you balancing your accounting books prior to painting your masterpieces?  Problem.

• Look at your lists and make a decision- can you take the hate section/time suckers and hire someone to do it?  If you’re unfamiliar with outsourcing and hiring virtual assistants, take a minute and go read some info on the 4HWW.  Delegating some of the menial business tasks will help alleviate the pressure on your creative juju.

• Can you separate the money making aspects enough to protect the creativity?  If you produce a product, can you hire someone to run the business side of things completely?  If not, can you produce for a certain time period each week or month and then designate one day or one week to just business?  Maybe selling at festivals and trade shows would provide a balance and separation between production and commerce.  Is there a portion of your art that can be sold on the internet as passive income- requiring no activity from you to generate sales, such as e-books, print-on-demand artwork or selling patterns in an automated PDF download format? Get creative and separate the art from the commerce.

• Take a long hard look at your hate/must have list and start to eliminate.  We’re steering towards Pareto’s principle here, or the 80/20 principle.  Pareto, an Italian economist created a theory in the late 1800s that 20 percent of your efforts produce 80 percent of your results.  After looking over your list, do you see anything that is taking up large amounts of time and producing little rewards?  Are you spending too much time keeping one client happy who only produces 20% or less of your income?  You may find that in eliminating some of your activities and slow producing income streams, you’ll find more time to focus on the activities that produce rewards.  Take some time to read this theory and find a book or two which apply Pareto’s principle to business.  Seriously, its pretty damn valuable.

• Does your art have multiple facets that can be separated and make only a portion of it for sale?

Be sure to do the following on a regular basis…

• Produce art for the sake of art.  Just be an artist- as much as possible.

• Find another artistic endeavor totally unrelated to your commerce art and engage in this when you come to a creativity block and on a regular basis for rejuvenating creative juju.

• Find a group of creative souls to share your time with. Both business related and just for fun.

• If you’re really stuck, or just want to learn more about the mind of the artist, check out the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

• Teach. Teaching your craft is an excellent way to fall in love with the beauty of it all over again.  Seeing someone learning your craft and seeing their creativity is an excellent way to rejuvenate your own.  There’s a saying which I hate that is sometimes used as an excuse by artists not to teach.  “Those who can’t do, teach.”  Not true.  Just because you are being of service to others and sharing your craft through education does not make you less of an artist.  Remember this when the little cynical gnomes pop up on your shoulder and degrade your decision to teach rather than create.

A view from hole 14 at the desert golf course in Quartzsite.