Finding Your Brand – Nicholas Wilton – Ep 87

There are so many parallels between making your art and making a business that sells your art. I deliberately don’t spend a lot of time talking about the business side of things because I believe that the creative solutions I teach on the canvas are universal for promoting our work as well. Join me as I share a different way of thinking about your art business that will help you gain clarity around your personal brand as an artist and help you get your art out into the world.

Listen if you are interested in…

• The challenge of promoting our work [1:47]
• Reframing the business side of art-making [7:06]
• Taking steps toward personal brand clarity [15:50]

Get your art out into the world

Making art is a personal and vulnerable process. This is why so many artists struggle with the business side of their art practice. It can be pretty challenging to see the thing you’re making objectively enough to champion its sale. Especially when you’re not sure how you even feel about it. How can we sell our art if we’re not confident in the work? The short answer is you can’t. Not very well anyway. And certainly not in a healthy and sustainable way that fuels our creativity and our practice. Vulnerability comes with the territory of being an artist, but it can’t run the show when it comes to running an art business. There has to be a point where we say, “This is good enough ”, instead of constantly waiting to be ready. The more clarity we have around our personal brand as an artist, the more paintings will feel ready to go out into the world.

Reframing your art business

One of the reasons artists struggle with the business side of art is that it feels so separate from the work. If we look at promotion as this begrudged hat we HAVE to put on now that the fun part is over, we will always see both sides of our practice as separate. This is why we need to reframe how we run our art businesses and clarify what our brand is. Yes, I can feel you cringing as I write this, but the reality is every artist has a personal brand whether they know it or not. From the outside, Art2Life is an art teaching business. It’s what we do, but it’s not our brand or even our why. The brand of Art2Life is about discovering one’s authentic self and artistic potential through creativity. It’s about endless possibilities. It’s about freedom. I can’t talk about teaching art for longer than an hour or two, but I could talk about those things for the rest of my life. When you realize promotion should just be talking about what lights you up inside, it gets so much easier.

Taking the first steps toward brand clarity

So how do we get super clear about our personal brand as an artist? Brand has nothing to do with your style, the materials you use, or even what you’re making. It all comes down to your WHY. Start by asking yourself: What is the one word? What’s the phrase that gets you up in the morning? Why are you here? The cool part is the answers are already inside of you. Self-discovery doesn’t cost you anything but time, intention, and maybe the envelope on which you furiously scribble down your revelations. But I find that’s where the best stuff gets captured anyway. Using myself as an example, let’s say the idea of freedom is a big motivator behind your work. THAT is a personal brand! If the theme is freedom, the sky’s the limit because anything that gives you that feeling is on brand. You can have poetry, videos, performance art…there aren’t rules. Just the expression of what lights you up inside. That is your art. And that is what this thing is all about.

Resources & People Mentione

• Adam Wolpert (Artist)
• Ansel Adams (Photographer)

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