DARE TO MAKE YOUR LIFE A WORK OF ART!
You painted, you wrote poems, you sewed your own clothes,
you grew flowers and made bouquets, you cook like a 4 star chef and did this all
your life. You wrote fabulous stories and got A's in Creative writing in
school. Your greeting cards were hand made, the POEMS all by YOU! Your home is
decorated so ingeniously it looks like the atelier of a great artist yet you
got a job as ….. WHAT????? You got a job as a bank clerk? WHY?
CUZ It paid well? ? There you are --so super talented that folks beg to buy
paintings off your walls and all you do all day is add up strangers’ checkbooks
for free? Honey, you're dying on the vine! Take a stand. Leap off a cliff. DARE
to join VAN GOGH, MATISSE, ROUSSEAU, HEMINGWAY! DUFY (shown here ) TALENT is a
curse if you can’t explore it regularly. It bangs on the inside of your head.
Nothing sadder than having it and burying it in the ground. I mean one COULD --
but that would be taking the first three or four decades of our life and all
those great, developing artistic sensibilities and experience and burying THEM!
Showing no reverence for the God-Given talent that is yours!
What would
you be concentrating on that's so great? Being a bank clerk? Buying
property? Driving new cars? TALENT is a river and it will burst out of all dams.
Having
submitted books, articles and scripts to all sides when I had postage money, I
FIND THAT moving art into the public eye takes more work than creating the art!
You have to know how to hit the street, hustle, pitch and SELL. Get represented
by an agent. Etc. What can we resolve about that problem?????
Do
A LITTLE ART and sell it to friends TO EARN A LITTLE STAMP MONEY,
maybe even some encouraging local (or internet) fame, some friendly praise,
your family’s applause! Or just to save your soul from working at the BANK!
DEVELOP
A TRADE ITEM! Ponder, what do you create
that’s the most marketable? Have a trade item! It could be a pillow. One velvet
pillow can bring you forty five
dollars, or if you have a neighbor who is a chicken farmer, as I do, a year of
fresh eggs.
Your penchant
for thrift store beads in unique colors, a buck a piece these days, but giving
you dozens of beads from the 50’s,can become something startlingly VINTAGE! Yet
modern. A HUNDRED DOLLAR NECKLACE that is unique, made of THRIFT STORE beads
from a dozen old pieces that weren’t put together as right as you could do it! 
OR
SAY…your COOKIES are superb, your
brownies chewy not dry. Consider a subscription delivery route for those
babies. Your pals get the chocolate sweets delivered every Friday night. Their
parties are covered. Use the cash to launch a catering biz, doing parties or
THE MOVEABLE FEAST, carrying Red Riding Hood’s basket of sandwiches to
corporate offices.
My
neighbor Dorothy the cat lady does meticulous paintings of horses and kitties,
and then transfers them to textile at the Xerox shop, and pumps out pillows!
And sells them at different pet outlets. She is a member of every CAT rescue
group around.
I
used to tie dye lengths of velvet, in psychedelic patterns, then back it with
PUFFY pillow FILLING, and then quilt it, the entire thing, but in pieces. First
I’d quilt the sleeves, then back, front, all quilted. It became puffy, opulent
huge cocktail jackets, lined in silk, with satin frogs on the front. Woulda
made a great trade item. You looked a little like the PILLSBURY DOUGH BOY on
ACID, wearing one.
MUSIC
IS A THOUGHT! Compose ballads you
can play at a party, learn to burn them on CD’s and put them on line as MP3’s.
Start a garage band or a stringed quartet. Explore back alley record stores to
find fifties folk music records and learn the songs, to sing at a party. Who
knows, that record producer at the bar may want to release you to the public.
PAINT CANVASES. We may be in the cash free zone and cannot afford oil paints and oil brushes,
but to SKETCH costs nothing. CHARCOAL sticks cost nothing. And each SKETCH YOU
SELL of your FRIEND, each PORTRAIT brings you SIX BUCKS, which is the cost of a
single tube of OIL PAINT! Sketch on cheap paper -- newsprint quality, real
sketch paper, cheaper than anything. DO NOT sketch on fine-grained papers. FOR
PRACTICE, we get junk mail by the ton with blank backs! PRACTICE on the back of
printed ads! Any blank paper will do. THE REAL ARTISTS developed in the
beginning by working on their skill in sketching. Learning to draw with
the 'right brain' they call it, is a skill.
THEN
when you have a fine sketch, you can keep your model and switch into doing a
painting. We pain on canvas. Frugal way probably a linen type or duck type
FABRIC, even blue jeans...or stiff canvas, primed with rabbit glue or some
other PRIMER. My mother used to use plain white water-based house paint to
PRIME A STRETCHED CANVAS. FABRIC must be stretched firmly over stretcher bars,
FIRST, as a primer will 'shatter' if it can move.
AFTER
primer dries, paint the picture. NOT A LOT OF COST for merchandise but a
picture can bring 70$ wholesale. 500$ if it’s good. A gal I know traded a nearly
new SUV for one of her paintings. She was asking thirty k but decided
a car was fine. Her work is geometric shapes of particle board, there’s a
special name for it, MASONITE…. it’s thin and very hard. And these squares are
colored but then there are brush splats on each piece. A sixteen year old with
a band saw could copy the concept. She spray dotted it with inkblots, similar
to the splats of DeKooning. Last I
heard, she had a Big L.A. gallery hustling her constructions/paintings, a
manager guiding her career and the head guy at our L.A. County Art Museum has
been trying to buy one of her splatthingies.
The
idea is, between jobs, between
marriages, give art a try. REGULARLY explore your top art forms. Paint on
Canvas isn't the only one. Do you have any idea what they’re getting for a jar
of jam these days? My pal does! She has a booth at the farmers’ market, gets 8$
a small four inch tall jar of her kiwi-lemon peel jam. It’s a mouth zinger and
a true work of art. And she sells VINTAGE EBAY tablecloths at her stall, for
twice what they cost her.
The
LAST RESORT for an artist who is all thumbs is to import gorgeousness from
exotic climes. Do the
IMPORTING ARTS, The entire seminar on import/export as a biz will be
found at THE ARTISAN
WEBSITE, also visit the website of MARLA MALLETT an Atlanta woman. She
did this career to the nines and has links to every important art magazine,
e-zine or school. This is like walking thru a museum. GO THERE.
Last,
start making your apartment real gussied up. MAKE PILLOWS! Put big
handmade tassles on the four corners. To be inspired in other textile arts,
study the great decorators, MICHAEL TAYLOR, TONY DUQUETTE, Syrie Maugham.
Google them, there are pages of the first two’s work, really posh creations
online.
BACK
TO THE BAZAAR FOLKLORICO BE A
MILLIONAIRE IN IMPORT/ EXPORTS WEBPAGE