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This will be a multi part blog, not sure yet how many parts, so keep an eye out.

I just read a depressing article on the high end art market, how it is manipulated and how the high end galleries, dealers and collectors are complicit in doing the manipulation. This of course keeps art in an elitists realm whereby making it more difficult for those artists who's prices are chump change to the above mentioned. If other markets did what I read in this article it would be all over the news and the numbskulls in the U. S. Congress would conduct an investigation. I will not go into the article further as I do not wish to put myself into a deep depression which the article has dragged me picarriously close to. But it has got me thinking.

There was a time early in my career when I dreamed of making it big, to be rich and famous, now I'm glad if I make enough to just buy more art materials so I can continue to do what I love despite the fact that I am for the most part an unknown. I did other jobs early on to help support my family, painting on weekends and evenings when it did not interfere with raising kids and making sure they were loved, fed and all the other stuff that goes with family life. Let me state here that I have no hard feelings about those years even though at times it was a struggle emotionally (as I was not becoming famous) and financially ( as I was not becoming rich). When I started painting full time, well almost full time, I also taught part time, teaching adults how to paint so they too could dream of being rich and famous and having thier dreams dashed... oh sorry don't want to go there. I could go full time because my beautiful, loving wife had (has) a job that would allow it. Now, after twenty years, and the fact that I am collecting Social Security, I have decided to retire from teaching, no that's not quite right, to retire usually means getting some sort of income based on the job one retires from, actually I'm just quiting so there is no further financial benefit. But here is the problem, despite my regional reputation, a small region I might add and due primarily to my teaching, I am not rich and famous. In fact if I had to live on my painting sales I would be living in a cardboard box painting on bits of found paper using dirt as my medium. But I want to continue to paint.

Painting requires money. I need to buy supplies, pastels, watercolors, brushes, paper, frames etc, etc. I also wish to contribute to the household income, even if my wonderful wife says it is not necessary, and my teaching income basically helped pay for my supplies and our vacations. Of course now my SS will do what my teaching income did but still, deep inside, a dream that will not go away, lingers in my brain like a kid wishing for that one perfect toy for Christmas, fame and fortune. At the same time I am repulsed by how the high end art market operates, and how the low end struggles to just hold on. So what am I, us, all lifetime struggling artists to do?

I just don't know. But I have a few ideas. Some might seem weird, even stupid, some will be disagreed with, yes disagree, please, some might make others think. But now I need to give more thought to those ideas boiling and foaming in my head before I make them public, let them out to soon, to uninformed and I might look like an ass, or just stupid, neither of which I want to do. So let me ponder and form the ideas for now. I'll get back to this soon.

Peace.