I write this to you from my living room after spending the morning organizing our garage. I have been working my face off on client work and fell through the rabbit hole of an existential crisis when the work was over. Classic. We knew it was coming but sometimes it doesn’t stop us from falling in entirely. Some things that have been helping me in my slump:
watching basketball (and sometimes going to games solo)
running (I picked up running after 15 years off as a good way to cross train with swimming and weights- doing about 1.5-2 miles a few times a week and I am very slow)
cleaning weird drawers
organizing forgotten storage and closets
finishing half finished old paintings
drawing poorly in my sketchbook for future me to mine ideas to use for paintings
rearranging furniture
choosing new walking routes for me and the dogs
I feel myself turning a corner- and I have some mystery paintings that I have been working on diligently and am getting ready to send to their new homes. The semester is drawing to a close and I am not committing to anything social and hope to have some space and time to make work for myself over the holidays.
My friends over at Point Reyes Books asked me to make a mural for their new bookstore in Fairfax and so I was doing that on every day off I had for about a month in sept/oct. Here are some images from that!
I love making murals, and making murals for people I admire is even more rewarding. Molly and Stephen who own Point Reyes Bookshop and now also Wayfinder Bookshop were neighbors of mine almost 10 years ago and I have gotten to make murals for Green Apple Books as well as their own bookstores over the years. They always trust me to make something cool which is the best case scenario when you are making creative work. Not many clients let you do what you want to do without much intervention!
The friendship and work I have made with Molly and Stephen is an example I use a lot when discussing marketing with students. We often think of marketing as something outside of ourselves, it’s a substack post, a reel for instagram or a newsletter- and I say yes. Marketing is those things- but marketing is also just making genuine relationships with people around you, local businesses, friends, neighbors. It means when your friend asks what you are up to, telling them that you are working on getting into editorial illustration (or whatever) and they might think of you when they talk to their other friend who works at a magazine.
I think it’s really important to take a step back and ask ourselves why we need to or want to market our work. What does that mean? We can easily get lost in the urge to have likes and clicks on the things we share, spending hours on tiktok videos that have nothing to do with our work or connecting to those who would benefit from it. Suddenly we view ourselves as content creators and obsessed with likes and views and no longer have time to make our creative work- or even remember what work we were interested in making. For me, marketing means- at it’s core- connecting my work with the people who would need it and enjoy it. Period. When I root myself in that definition of marketing it becomes easier to broaden the definition of marketing from just social media to recognizing that social media is one means of connection in a whole tool box of ways to connect to others.
None of this is to say that social media is bad! I just think in the last ten years or so we have put a lot of pressure on social media to do the work of connecting genuinely with others- when talking to your neighbor can sometimes lead to some of the more fun projects you’ve gotten to do!
One thing that has helped me is to ask myself why I want to share.
I sometimes lose the thread (which is easy) on social media but when I pause and ask myself, I remember that I just love to document my process and hopefully help others to see that the things that I make take time and effort. I love looking back at posts I have made and reminding myself that I have built little worlds or images to get lost in, and it’s something I turn to in times like this when I feel a bit exhausted and unsure of what I like to make. Rather than looking at the work of other people I can look to my own work for inspiration- remind myself of questions I have been asking and exploring and find new ways to dive deeper into those things!
When I look at the core of that WHY- it becomes clear that I am sharing to connect to myself and connect with others but I am not sharing to make things to please other people. It is always a dangerous road in my mind, when I focus on what other people are interested in, or in what other people want from me.
Instead, if I can focus on questions like: What do I want from myself? What am I curious about? What interests me?- I am able to make things that are genuine to me- share things that pull from those interests and attract others that are curious about the way I explore those things too.
One thing I recently talked through with a student who works a part time job and has limited time to make their paintings is why do we feel the need to spend hours making content for social media when we barely have time to make the work we are called to make. What is that content for? Who is it for and what is the end goal of making the content?
I don’t have the answers to these questions for anyone but myself.
In my experience, the things I share and make are the things I will be asked to make more of- so if I make tiny paintings because that is the only thing I can make quickly for instagram- I will likely continue to get hired to make tiny paintings. If my goal is to make large work for galleries but I spend all my time making small paintings for instagram reels- is this marketing helping me to meet my goal? Or perhaps is this marketing a distraction? Understanding this helps me to be more intentional about where I spend my energy and what I do with my limited time to make creative work.
(This is not a stance against small paintings- I love and make small paintings, don’t come for me.)
I was reading Julia Cameron’s essay on authenticity in her book Walking in this World and how people often share their creative work with disapproving or discouraging friends as a form of holding themselves back. It got me thinking about how instagram is that friend that can sometimes be generous but can also be fickle and when we make work or content for that friend we never know what we are going to get and it is often a lose lose situation. Even if you get praised for the work you make with likes and follows for content- is it really the work you want to be making? Is it leading you down the right path? It becomes this need to be validated by a space that doesn’t often see what you are doing and easy to get lost.
This is different than making the work I want to make and be hired for and then sharing it on social platforms- content creation isn’t the same as my creative work and I believe content creation does distract me from my creative work in a really negative way.
All of this to say- sharing our creative work is not an easy task- there is a lot of pressure to do it and to fall into a rat race of sharing without stopping to ask ourselves why. When I consider and think about marketing, and as an artist who’s income is reliant on marketing, I can really talk myself out of doing it. Especially when I am not really sure why I am doing it and feel like I am just a sales person. Marketing can be authentic, genuine and connecting my work to the people who want and need it. It just requires that I thoughtfully engage with what tools I am using- when I do that I no longer feel like a sales person because sales is almost secondary to connection.
Not even sure if this is helpful or clarifying, its more like an exploration of the circles I go through when I feel lost and don’t want to send “that newsletter” or I feel pressure to post something but I have nothing I want to post. OR even better, I want to attend a gallery show and support a friend but I feel nervous. Let’s replace the word marketing with connection. All of this is connection, and connection is most rewarding when it is coming from a real place of being rooted in our curiosities, vulnerability and being human.