Mastery Before Marketing
Image Caption Goes Here
Aaron Westerberg in his studio
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 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/
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