Selling art , selling your soul
Someone asked me if I would like to sell one of my paintings the other day. I felt cold shivers running down my spine reading his mail.
Of course I have thought about selling my artwork, since my aim in the long run is to live from creating it. But at that particular moment, when this guy asked me if I wanted to sell that particular painting, he scared the heck out of me.
That’s when I found out that to me my art is a catharsis. For the moment, I paint because I need to do so. It’s a real necessity, not for the money, but for my inner little me. That is also why I say “I paint emotions”.
I paint my emotions. And the ones you can see on my paintings are often emotions I don’t even have words for. By the way, most of the titles are simply crab. I shouldn’t even give them a title, because putting words on those paintings is already misleading the spectators. They are misled by the sense they give to the words in the title, according to their own life experience and to the signification the words have to them.
I should name my paintings “untitled N°…”
Paintings should always be looked at with your guts and your soul rather than with your inner calculator trying to figure out what the heck that dude wanted to tell you. I don’t want to tell anything to anyone. I just put my inner self onto paper and canvas. I spill out and vomit emotions I stuffed into my brain storage box called “not worth bothering” for 50 years. Now that the box is full and spills over, there are no words to describe what I find. How could there be words for things I never took care of?
But in my pictures I can see each one of them clearly and in multiple colors. They’re right in front of my eyes. Some are beautiful and calm, others are awkward and weird to look at. But they’re all mine. I always thought that I had them inside, but never dared looking at them or showing them to others. Why? Probably because I feared the judgments of those seeing them, and I sure feared my own judgments. That little voice saying “that’s nonsense”, “that’s no good”, “you’re ridiculous”, …From time to time I can hear it, that voice, but I learned to accept its existence and that helps a lot. It still took me 8 months to be able to show my work people other than my wife and my children.
So when this guy wanted to buy one of my paintings I felt as if he asked me to sell him my daughter or my son. I suddenly felt in danger. As if someone tried to “steal” my soul for a few bucks. Not really encouraging for someone wanting to become a professional painter, is it?
On the other side it may be a good thing to feel like that, because it proves at least 2 facts: I paint with my guts and I haven’t adapted to the market yet. I am sure that painting what sells is a bad idea in the long run. It may work for a while but then either people get tired of what you do, or, and that’s worse, you get tired and sick of doing so. That’s not what I’m looking for. So let’s hope I’ll be ready one day to sell some of my original paintings, because my attempts to sell posters, T-shirts and mugs with my stuff is a real heartbreaking failure: not one single clients so far.
