The Perils of Painter-Blogging

I don’t know if I am alone in this but I thought I’d like to share a few ideas about Painter-blogging – I mean the situation of artists/painters setting up blogs where they post frequent (often daily) pics of their paintings.

I am finding that although this is a good motivation to keep up the hard work and paint every day, it can get pretty tiring – and maybe also the painting process itself can get a little tired. When the daily painting phenomenon started a few years ago one strong purpose was so that painters could make some ready “small format” sales and they could do so by communicating directly with their buyers and potential buyers. It has been proven that this works for many people. Even I have managed to sell a few this way. Peril number one therefore is that we can end up painting “for the market” or “for the sale”. If we have half an eye on what is going to sell or be popular then is that going to interfere with us truly being in touch with our artistic vision.?I think some people manage both. Their work sells and at the same time they are working “intuitively” or “from the heart”. For some of us I think there is a gap yet.

Peril number 2 is the comments invited at the end of each blog post and I don’t know about other people but I do find I take notice of those. I mean for a start it’s kind of people to bother to stop by and say if they like something. Often they say why they like it and that is sometimes useful. Sometimes I don’t get any comments and then I think “why haven’t I got any comments”? It’s a bit like patting the dog on the head and saying “good boy”. We shouldn’t really need that should we? I do know of people who have deliberately got rid of the comments box and I’m beginning to understand why. It can be seen as a very scary - and very misleading - indicator of “success”. However, I am still thinking it’s a case of learning how to deal sensibly and sensitively with it so I’m not quite ready to get rid of it yet.

So sometimes as a painter-blogger you can feel that you are losing a bit of control over what you do. I sometimes feel I’m “on show” (do others feel like that?); that there is an audience and I am wondering if that gets in the way of me digging a bit deeper. There are other painters waiting to see what I produce (just as I wait to see what other painters produce) and there are potential customers (probably saying “ why is she doing these strange figures all of a sudden”). Do other people feel like that or is it just me? Do I care? Should I care?

I have read of artists taking 20, 30, 40 years to arrive at what they themselves truly want to paint and quite frankly I haven’t got that long. Therefore I am slowing down a bit in terms of posting. I’m taking more time and thinking a bit more and above all I want to experiment a bit more and just pay attention to me and my own inner motivations rather then anyone outside.

In relation to this I found a great book on Google called “Finding your visual voice; a painter’s guide to developing an artistic style” by Dakota Mitchell. After reading about 10 pages on Google with great interest it suddenly stopped scrolling and said – hey, you have to buy this now, no more free browsing. So I have ordered it on Amazon and look forward to digging deeper into it.

We are privileged to have such problems aren’t we?