Mark E Shellshear.

It does not matter what others think of your Art, it matters what you think.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        ...

When you are selling your Art you have to help people deal with their fear of commitment. You have to work with the client as they persuade themselves to do something that will benefit them, like buying your valuable Art. This is the work of selling to someone who likes your Art piece and now you have to help them make their own decision to buy, you can’t make it for them. Buyer remorse is real, so everyone must feel that they made the decision to buy and were not pushed into it. My attitude was that I saw the customer as a friend and I only wanted the best for them and my job was to counsel and tell the story about the piece so they overcame their fear of commitment and they get the joy of investing in and owning one of my paintings.

  Most people are busy, some very busy, because busy is safe, but are they doing the important work? Creating Art and selling it, that’s the important work we have to do. Just these two, everything else we do must be to support these two functions, if it’s not, we are not working. We may be busy and many are very busy, our work is creating great Art and selling it, without these two functions none of us have an Art business. So look at what makes you busy and ask yourself, is it supporting the two most important things I do, create and sell. .

We need help to be successful, we need buyers for our Art works, people to read our blogs, people to watch our videos and our job is to please these people. Once we please them they will reward us with sales, nice comments and follow us. It might not be as fast as you want to grow, but it is growth and that’s amazing. Please one person and then five and then ten and then one hundred and then more, this kind of growth is sustainable. These are the people that we must please so they will buy from us and talk about us to their friends and spread the word about our wonderful Art work.

  We need to be courageous enough to b uild the necessary disciplines into our lives , the hard stuff, the stuff we don’t want to do but know we should do . M ost people don't want to hear that there is personal cost , but if we can get people thinking about personal change as making positive difference to their life, then there is good chance they will action it. If I tell you to do it, you probably won't do it, but if it is your idea you just might . The great value is in the realization that words will not help me unless I hear them and put them into action.

Your goal should be to get your Art in front of strangers so they can become your collectors and your friends over time and life long collectors of your work. Over time the price of your work will rise as you become more popular, concentrate on building your reputation and getting name and face recognition and your work becomes more collectable, patience it takes time. It is in your long term interest not just to sell one of your paintings to a stranger, but to build a relationship with that stranger so you sell a lifetime of paintings to your new collector. Its is not about the short term rewards, it is about building an Art career, seeing sales grow and those strangers putting the paintings you produce onto their walls. Selling paintings to strangers, turning strangers into collectors, turning collectors into friends. .

When an Artists believes that they are among the best, then they will preform at their best and create wonderful Art. If they believe in themselves, they find that good things will happen, because they expect them to happen, that is the story they are telling themselves. How we think about ourselves will determine how we act. How we will act either with courage or timidity, is shaped by our past thinking. All of us are a product of all our past thoughts, we are living the reality of those thoughts today. Change our thinking and we will change our tomorrows.