The Gift of Failure

“There is no such thing as failure — failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”

Oprah Winfrey

Ride the Peace Train

One of my favorite blogs I follow religiously is a blog called "Brain Pickings" - a site I only discovered because a dear friend pointed me in that direction. The author, Maria Popova, is articulate, extremely well-read, refreshingly insightful and she always writes on art and literature with such a perfect sense of what is important in the work she's reviewing.  The author herself calls Brain Pickings a "weekly interestingness digest." 

and she'd be right. I've yet to scroll through the Sunday edition without getting caught up in the valuable lessons she shares through the work, writing and art of others, not to mention her own remarkably astute commentary. 

A few weeks ago, I marked an article to read later and then, as often happens, forgot about it in the crush of springtime activities - Easter, family visits, my Mom's 90th birthday, etc. But once I had a brief moment to go back to the file, I discovered this marvelous gem amidst all the other great articles on the Blog. It's an article on a subject we've probably all encountered but often neglected to dig into - failure. We avoid the topic because it has negative connotations, particularly in a society where it's often "winner take all" and "dog eat dog." Even our television shows express clearly how we feel about this subject - "Failure is not an option." 

We reject it because it has negative associations for us - failing damages our self-esteem, destroys our dreams, labels us as less than worthy. Or does it? As this marvelous quote above from Oprah Winfrey suggests, there are a gazillion lessons in failure and as many treasures to be found in those lessons that we would not learn any other way. It IS why and how we change direction and find another way around what seem to be insurmountable obstacles. There really could be no true success without a willingness and a capacity to accept what failure has to teach us. 

Popova's blog on the Gift of Failure comes from the title of a book by Sarah Lewis - 

The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery.  Lewis is the former curator of the Tate Modern Gallery and MoMA and a member of President Obama's Arts Policy Committee. In her book, she uses the example of Thomas Edison who tried endlessly to create a working lightbulb and said of his efforts, "I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won't work." I think there are so many valuable lessons that Popova and Lewis have explored that I'd like to turn you on to the blog site with this introduction: 

Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Crucial Difference Between Success and Mastery

You  won't  be  sorry  that  you  were  introduced  to  this  wonderful  online  source  of  profound ideas  and  insight guarantee.

Speaking of failure, however, I wonder if you noticed that there is no link beneath my own artwork above. That's because it's not posted on any of my sites yet - and it may not ever be. I've reworked this piece 100 times - starting with a simple photograph that was small and not terribly good to begin with. But I loved the composition of the piece and I was listening to Cat Stevens singing Peace Train one night and decided to try to do something with this. I consider this work a "failure" in the sense that I've not managed to achieve what I hoped with it - it doesn't "deliver" the feeling I wanted it to. But each reworking teaches me something new about digital art and painting and that's invaluable to me for the future. I may not ever finish this work to my satisfaction but what I've learned by failing to do it has stood me in very good stead in other works. 

Could you give it up???

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.” 

~Robert Henri

Postcard - Impressions of Niagara

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/postcardimpressions-of-niagara-lianne-schneider.html

Over the past few blogs, I've written a lot about motivation, marketing and how to avoid burnout, particularly if our artwork isn't selling. As a result, I got quite a few personal messages from fellow artists who wrote about discouragement, about all the ways they were turning themselves inside out to be successful (financially) as artists, about the frustration they experienced when they saw work by artists they didn't feel was as good as their own selling well while they sold nothing. Most of these heart-wrenching letters were completely sincere and not a few people suggested that perhaps it was time to throw in the towel and either take some period of time off or get out of the art world except to putter at home for their own enjoyment. These friends had honestly tried everything they knew to market themselves. That's not to say there might not be other sites or methods out there that would work but at this point, they'd tried everything and had come to the conclusion that no one really wanted their artwork hanging on their walls. 

The truth is that no matter how hard we've tried, most of us are NOT professional artists. I know a few of you who truly are but most of us are not. We're rank amateurs regardless of whether we have fancy cameras with $5000 lenses, a complete studio with stacks of canvases and $200 brushes, pens and notebooks full of ideas for our next story or poem, or the best kiln and clay on the market. What we're trying to do - most of us anyway - is market our hobby. And there's nothing wrong with that at all. But we should not expect the kinds of results that a professional artist expects and strives for. And we should not be so frustrated and disappointed when we don't achieve that level of success. 

I say hobby because being a professional artist/writer takes enormous discipline. It has nothing to do with how many courses we take or how many positive comments we get on the work we present to the world. It has to do with whether we cannot let a day go by without working at our art - not just for an hour or until some distraction comes along - but literally setting aside a good portion of our day to create. It has to do with writing or painting or sculpting even if we feel no inspiration today at all (and believe me I've gone through months where I complained that my muse was on vacation!). The wonderful writer, May Sarton, and the much loved Annie Dillard both wrote about writing for hours every morning after a walk - even if at the end of those hours everything they wrote went in the trash. It has to do with working through lunch if we're on a roll. It has to do with believing in ourselves enough to be persistent in marketing ourselves through every possible means. It has to do with not comparing ourselves to anyone else - or their success - because we believe in our gift and our talent. It has to do with knowing that no matter what happens - we could not give up what we love to do.

There is a lovely succinct little blog post that struck home to me when I read it and I think you might enjoy it too. Doug Hoppes wrote recently, "However, in my mind, if you really are meant to be an artist, you won't give up.  It's part of who you are.  Rather than having the fancy paper or pens, you'll get a ream of copy paper and a ballpoint pen and draw.  Rather than having a fancy studio, you'll work at your desk... or dinner table... or wherever you can sit.  Making art is not about having the fancy materials.  It's about expressing yourself in only the way that you can imagine the world around you." Read the rest here: Ever felt like giving up? | Doug Hoppes Fine Art

If writer/artist is who you ARE, there's no way you could give it up and go back to being something or someone else. Be courageous (which means to have a strong heart) and be persistent and believe.

 

Motivation and marketing

People don't like to admit it, but it does motivate you to make work if you're selling it.

There is a drive in that. (Zoe Benbow)

Chanson d'Amour

http://www.lianneschneiderart.com/DigitalPainting/Florals-and-Macros/i-LHQ6vXX/2/L/chansondamourdesatcl-L.jpg

Continuing the discussion from the other day about different kinds of art sites and the potential for burn out from having to keep up our presence and participation in various online art venues, I thought I’d tackle the other half of the equation – the reason we do all this! As I mentioned, our first priority may not be sales, but I think it’s a bit ludicrous to say, “I’m only in it for the art” when we’re working our rear-ends off trying to market ourselves every which way to Sunday. There probably isn’t one of us who wouldn’t celebrate a sale even if just as an affirmation that what we create appeals to someone besides ourselves.

And we’ve probably all bitten off more than we can chew when it comes to self-promotion. We read blog after blog about how to market ourselves online, how to be more visible to potential buyers. Maybe we even buy packages that promise to show us how to get 10,000 Facebook fans in just weeks. Then…the next blog you read says, “Don’t count on Facebook to sell your art.” More successful friends recommend Google+ or Pinterest and so you do that too.

As artist Dan Turner says, “Too often, artists start down the online art marketing path and quickly find themselves bogged down in “how-to” details. They reach burn-out before they ever get a fundamental marketing plan in place. Trying to connect the dots in a half-baked, half-finished marketing plan is disheartening and counter-productive.” Dan’s written a simple, easy to follow art-marketing primer called, “7 Keys to Selling Art Online.” Best of all – it’s a free e-book download. Remember though, just because Dan makes it look simple with his clear, step-by-step advice, doesn’t mean it isn’t going to take work…lots of work…but at least the end result might be those sales we keep pretending aren’t important. That doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about why I create in the first place or how I measure my success as an artist…it just means that it would be less than honest of me to suggest I wouldn’t like to sell a few pieces now and then too!

You can get Dan’s free art marketing guide here: http://danturnerfineart.com/dan-turners-7-keys-selling-art-online-free-ebook-artists/  But don’t stop there…he’s got lots of worthwhile advice in his blog too!

Perhaps it's true that as Abigail Brown says, "We cannot judge our art because it does or does not sell." In the ideal world, that's the way it should be. But the real world is more likely to be like this:

A Singular Creation – a different kind of art community

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist will answer you:

I am here to live out loud.

Emile Zola

Avec Tout Mon Couer

 http://fineartamerica.com/featured/avec-tout-mon-coeur-lianne-schneider.html

Most of my readers probably belong to a number of various art sites they use as a jumping off point for marketing their artwork through social media like Facebook or Google+. There are literally hundreds of such sites though we'd probably agree that only a relative few have the kind of following and membership that make them worth our investment of the time it takes to maintain a presence on any such site. Probably among the best known are Fine Art America, Red Bubble, Saatchi, Imagekind, Society 6, and Blue Canvas as well as multi-purpose sites like Zazzle and Etsy. In every venue, there are expectations of some form of reciprocity for comments or promotion of our work. Most sites have groups or communities to which you can belong but you are probably also expected to participate in group forums, promotions or discussions. In truth, it's easy to get so caught up and then overwhelmed by the rules and expectations that participation in the site becomes burdensome rather than joyful and at the same time, that need to stay caught up on return comments or promotions can rob a person of both the time and the inspiration to create new work with anything meaningful to say.

There's also the reality that if you seriously want to make your artwork a commercially successful venture - that isn't everyone's goal, I know - you have to blog regularly (about which I'm notoriously bad) and participate consistently in following other blogs and in developing a following on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest among other social media sites. The "workload" is staggering if you belong to several art sites and all the prominent social media sites. So it is with some hesitation that I'm going to mention one more site to add to the list of places to belong. But let me be totally above board here - I have only just joined myself and the reason I did so was because of this article in ArtProMotivate, a blog I follow that deals with many different topics of concern to today's artists. You'll find the original blog that caught my eye here:
Artpromotivate: ASC – A Singular Creation – Free Online Art Commun...: A Singular Creation (ASC) is a free online art community devoted to providing resources and promotion opportunities for all artists and photographers. (Read the rest of this interview with the founder of A Singular Creation).

But I don't think the interview alone would have gotten me to add one more site to my already long list of often neglected art sites. A look at the home page of this site, however, did convince me that here was something different. Even their terminology is different. The site's creator, Joe Barrouk, says this about his unique site - "A free membership gets them access to our contest and opportunities calendar, forums, ability to enter our monthly showdown competitions, a gallery with unlimited albums and unlimited images, a community profile page and blog. The profile page could act as a website of sorts. It has room for bio, website links, contact info, gallery images, etc. All of the artists forum posts, blog posts and gallery images can be shared on Face Book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Stumble Upon, and many other social networking avenues. My site is definitely evolving into a community of artists that share, learn, teach, promote, critique and discuss." More importantly the site offers monthly contests and showdowns that not only get your work out there but pay money. And there is a quarterly contest with $1000 grand prize. Take a look at the main page and see for yourself where the focus is - on giving the artist opportunities. You can read more about A Singular Creation here:
http://www.asingularcreation.com/

For those of us increasingly frustrated by the expectations of our home art sites/groups and ill at ease with self-promotion on social media sites, A Singular Creation offers not only opportunities for exposure but perhaps more importantly, a chance to grow as artists. The forums are not like those on many sites and there are no "groups" to which one must belong to get seen. But if you have courage, you can submit your work for critique and learn from others with more experience or mastery. Truth is...belonging to all the best art sites in the world means nothing if you allow your creativity to suffocate under the weight of expectations and do not give it room to breathe.

Tough Love for Artists...an end to excuses

"Don't aim for success if you want it; just do what  you love and believe in, and it will come naturally."

David Frost

Braving the Storm

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/braving-the-storm-lianne-schneider.html

Art critic, writer, curator, psychologist Brian Sherwin goes head to head with the excuses many of us make about why we are less than successful in marketing our art - or our writing as the case may be. I admit to using every single one of these excuses at one time or another. How about you?

"Lack of action is often fueled by excuses. We can find examples of this within every angle of life. With that in mind, I want to discuss some of the common excuses artists use to justify their lack of action -- be it failure to develop OR market their art. The tough love starts now..."
Read the rest of this reblog at  Stop Making Excuses | The Art Edge

Mr. Sherwin covers the seven most prevalent excuses we generally offer for our lack of success and knocks those excuses on the head. I'd like to add at least one more...discouragement or feeling that what we're offering has been found wanting. I think it's possible to do everything right...at least in regard to Sherwin's excuse list...we can work at it daily, stop watching television, let the housework take second place, share care-giving responsibilities with other family and friends, go to gallery openings, stop worrying about whether or not we have an art degree, budget both our time and money so we have the resources we need to get it done and keep reaching out to contacts in the art or literary world both online and offline to widen our networks. 

We can go further...we can blog, create forums of mutual support for other artists, master social media marketing (there's a great big book out there called Social Media Marketing for Dummies that I happen to have bought in the face of what seems to be a time consuming need to have a presence on a half dozen social media sites!) We can do all of that - stress ourselves out with the need to respond and reciprocate for every positive comment or share we receive - and at the end of the day...or the month...or the year, be completely and utterly discouraged because we've not only sold or shown very little, if anything, but the response to our efforts is unenthusiastic at best or downright negative. Galleries and art magazines turn us down again and again and rejection seems to be the common theme day after day. I've been there...and I'll bet you have too. 

But like Sherwin's counterarguments to the excuses he discusses, I had to come up with a way to fight through that discouragement and the sense that my art or poetry had been found wanting and I do that by remembering that I don't just want a sale for the sake of a sale. I want my work to be bought and seen and read because someone out there recognized the passion behind the work, got what it was I was trying to say with it and one way or another shares those feelings. If that isn't happening, maybe I need to re-examine whether I've allowed my passion for the art to play second fiddle to the marketing of it. And then I need to honestly assess whether I've more to learn in terms of how I've expressed what I wanted to say - to get better at it every day.

Brian Sherwin concludes by saying, "In closing, as an artist you have two choices: You can continue to justify whatever it is that you feel is holding you back by spitting out excuse after excuse. OR you can learn from it -- get to the heart of the problem -- and change the way you approach art making / art marketing. You must make the choice." I say...choose passion. 

  From Dodinsky's "In the Garden of Thoughts"

How do you measure success??

“I'm a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down.”

― Abraham Lincoln

The Railroad Junction - Circa 1880

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-railroad-junction-circa-1880-lianne-schneider.html  

[My apology first that this post is longer than usual or than intended but it’s a true story and one I hope worth reading].

How are you measuring your success as an artist, a writer…a person? I suppose I’m like everyone else when they first started out with their artistic endeavors. I thought I had to measure my success in terms of sales – how many people bought my first book of poetry, Songs of the Heart’s Longing  or my second, Ecclesiastes for Sixty: Seasons in Solitude 

      The answer is – not many – and most of those sales went to friends, family and fellow poets. And when I turned toward the art world, I thought I should measure the value of my art by the number of prints or canvases I sold. Again, the truth was…I didn’t sell many, particularly in the learning curve years. But then, as I said, in an earlier post, I realized that I was using entirely the wrong measure for all of it. Sure it would have been nice to be a best-selling author – though let’s face it, that rarely happens to poets unless you're Maya Angelou! And it would be incredibly lovely to sell enough prints to tuck a little nest egg away so I could afford to do a little more with my “golden years.” 

         Luckily for me, I remembered the greatest lesson about success I’ve ever heard…and it was a lesson taught to me by the brightest, most intelligent student I ever had the privilege to teach. Bear with me…I’ll try to keep this short and still make the point. This student was a young man of East Indian heritage, the child of professional parents, an AP and honor student all through school. His older brother had been senior class valedictorian and later, his sister would be too. But neither of them were as brilliant as he was. His junior year, he scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs (before the change to 2400). He entered and won the International Science Fair, creating an entirely new math which he was invited to present to the faculty of a prestigious Texas university (and for which he got a standing ovation from men and women absolutely in awe of his abilities). This young man entered my senior advanced sociology class and said on the first day, “I’ve been waiting four years to take your class Mrs. Schneider and have a chance to really learn something new and exciting outside my usual fields of study.” 

     Well, I must say, I was a tad intimidated and wasn’t sure I could live up to that challenge! But on the very first class day, after telling students that if there was a word I used that they didn’t understand to raise their hands and ask (there’s a lot of jargon in any field of study) wouldn’t you know, this brilliant young man was the first to do that, announcing that he’d never heard a word I used in my discussion and would I mind defining or explaining it. Because he was humble enough to do that, he set the tone for the entire year for the entire class – and the energy, inquisitiveness and accomplishments of that senior class never saw an equal in my years at that school. Naturally, inevitably, this marvelous young man was his class valedictorian and as senior sponsor, it was my job to oversee his valedictory address to ensure that it would be suitable for the occasion. Truthfully, I didn’t really proof it in advance…he gave me a rough outline of what he wanted to talk about and I said, “Go for it…it sounds perfect.” And it was. His topic, “What Is Success?”

                Here was a young man who at 18 had already achieved more “worldly” success than men and women twice his age (I forgot to mention that he was a championship tennis player too!). But he stood before his classmates – all of widely varied abilities, some who had barely made it to graduation, some for whom athletics was far more important than academics, some who were arrogant about their status and some who were terribly unsure of themselves and afraid of the future – and he spoke to them of various definitions of success. He called them by name and said John (not his real name) is a great success as a friend…loyal to a fault, dependable, trustworthy. And Susan makes the most beautiful crocheted afghans something no one else in the class can do. Mary lights up any day with her smile and a joke to lift your spirits. Kevin can throw a baseball 90 miles an hour and he worked 50 hours a week all year to pay his tuition here. He singled out the kids who had struggled and found some quality or talent they possessed that few knew about and he held it up as a measure. “Success,” he said, “isn’t about accolades or awards, it isn’t about making the highest grades or the most money. Success is about being the best YOU you can be and in that sense every single one of my classmates is undeniably successful.”  I cried – right there on the stage – and so did every one of his classmates.

                I realized when I recalled that moment, that I was incredibly successful too. Not because I sold four or five art prints a day but just because I had done my best on every single work I posted. Just because I worked and reworked a poem until it expressed exactly what I wanted it to say, even if no one else got it. And I want to share that success with each of you and tell you that you, too, are successful in a thousand ways you haven’t even thought of. I don’t know which of my art friends sell a lot of art work and which don’t – occasionally I become aware that someone whose work I admire has sold a number of pieces in a row, but I’m sure there are dozens of people out there who never announce their sales or never have any. Once in a while, I hear a fellow artist worry about why their work isn’t selling and I often remind myself – and them – to look for another measure of success and be proud of sharing their work, of creating from their hearts and proud that they brought some joy or insight or epiphany to even one person today.

                In worldly terms, success is ephemeral – like fame – but in terms of one’s own satisfaction with what one has accomplished, success is lasting and can’t be bought or sold. Like the little engine who kept saying, “I think I can, I think I can…” we just keep on trying and working together to make things happen. In my book, Darren Fisher’s success is in his willingness to share HOW he creates such beauty and where to find the resources to enhance anyone’s artistic efforts. I have no idea whether Darren sells much or little and it doesn’t matter to me at all (it might matter to him!). Or why not consider a definition of success that includes how generous an artist – like Jane Small – is in supporting and encouraging others with comments that reach right into the heart of an artist’s work and speaks to the nuanced beauty she has found there. I sincerely hope these two remarkable talents ARE selling a ton of work but for myself – I measure their success by a different ruler. 

P.S. I PROMISE - tomorrow's post WILL be shorter!!!!