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The two major components needed to be a successful professional artist are mastery and marketing.

A rule of thumb for building a successful art business:  "Mastery before Marketing."

What I'm saying is this: achieve a baseline level of competence in your craft before moving on mastering the art that is marketing.

Think about it:

Would you frequent a restaurant with mediocre food because they impressed you with a great website?

Would you spend an evening with friends listening live to music by an off-tune band with a singer who flubs the lyrics, just because they had a cool logo?

Would you hire a web designer who used harsh colors and janky typography simply because he had mastered search engine marketing?

Obviously, your answers to these questions is "no."

It's just the way of things.  A guitar player who can't tune his guitar and hasn't mastered all his chords won't be able to sell his music.

Let's apply this idea to art:

Would you purchase mediocre art by an artist who had lots of website traffic, used a popover form to maximize newsletter sign ups, had a number one ranking in Google, and was the most prolific Instagram poster you follow?

You already know that the answer to that question for most people is "No."  

Like our guitar player above, an artist who can't mix paint and hasn't mastered drawing, composition, values and brushwork is going to struggle to sell art.

Look, I'm not saying you have to be a Master with a capital "M", I'm saying you have to achieve a basic level of competence with your paintings to build much of an audience.  Then once you've reached that baseline level of competence you'll continue to spend time cultivating that competence into a mastery of your craft while you start building your competence with marketing.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

FASO Founder Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic

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Footnotes

The photo is of Aaron Westerberg in his studio.   He's a true modern master and, at FASO, we recently created a masterful site to showcase his art.   You can see more of his work at https://aaronwesterberg.com/