Difficulty Of Self-Promotion

I have retreated within myself the past couple of days to mostly focus on the design of my new website. What a process that is to fall into and become lost. I am using the new Adobe Dreamwaever 5 and wow is it a fun process; I was completely absorbed and spent the bulk of yesterday working on the layout. This morning I have the shape and look of it fairy well in place. It’s kind of a learn-the-program-as-you-go process so it’s a little slow in some areas. I have been planning this phase of the project from the beginning and it’s taken me three and half months to actually begin to put it together. The images are working fantastic with the design; it’s totally me. I think it will become quite interactive when I am done. It seems marketing myself has always been my weakest point; I think most artists have a great deal of difficulty with self-promotion. It’s the hardest part of being creative, especially in the beginning of your creative life style. Though the creation of art can become difficult and time consuming, you see the direct results of the process when it is complete. Marketing, on the other hand, always seems to be a bit of a gamble. Trends and tools to interface are changing so rapidly that you constantly have to adapt and the process becomes an on going process you are trying to win. Therefore when it is all said and done, all the effort of energy doesn’t necessarily mean you have something to show for the effort. Yes it would be nice just to hire someone to do all this work for you, but in the beginning stages, artists never quite have the funds for this kind of self promotion. Pre-established or group sites on the internet may become a viable means of getting your art out there, but it has become so saturated and not all sites sell or have the means to distribute what you are producing. When they do, they generally want to take a big percentage of what you would make. The artist really walks away with very little if anything, but their artwork can become known or lost in the scores of other artists trying to produce the same types of materials. Photography is particularly bad that way because the entire internet is loaded with free images for the taking. If you don’t mark or ID the images nobody even know they’re yours. I see so many people trying to sell or pass off other artist images when I go to look at artist profiles. I am beginning to wonder if we have become so saturated with the media that there may be nobody out there that really wants to collect artwork anymore. I do, I must admit, have some very valuable stuff still stowed in storage that I have not yet or don’t have a place to hang. Perhaps the only thing that retains any kind of value is after we are dead. So you might be asking what is the purpose of going to all this time and expense of putting together a website? I am not entirely sure yet. Perhaps it’s to validate myself as an artist and allow others to share in the remarkable beauty of the world as I see it. Perhaps there is a market out there for some of the stuff I do. Only time will tell. Meanwhile it is a way to explore myself and find a meaningful way to interact with others.

VIEW FULL IMAGE: Travis #634