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More than anything else, this journey of art seems like one of revealing knowledge about one's self. I don't mean that in a really fixed sense, as in 'I am this.' or  'I am that', but more about what sort of path your curiosity will take you on. The various twists and turns my artistic wanderings have followed certainly involved a bit of 'coloring outside the lines' so to speak.

A lot of the conventional wisdom about building a life centered around art is well documented and there's no shortage of books, articles, and courses on how to make it all happen. Probably that advice does pay off for some people but I'll present my experiences as a counterweight to that approach since in many respects the way I embarked on an art career wasn't planned out and wasn't the usual. Nonetheless it's been sufficient for me to do a little better than muddle along and sometimes it was the perfect path to be on, even though many around me might have questioned it.

 When I first started dipping my toes into the gallery business, I watched how other artists handled things and wondered in awe, how in the world I could ever get myself to model that same behavior. At the time I assumed those artists were the epitome of self-confidence but at this point I would probably say it was more like bluster. I'd hear stories of artists pointing to a wall of another person's work and telling the gallery owner they should take that artist's paintings down and put theirs up instead. Others would stop by a gallery where they were represented and go ballistic if they spotted any of their artwork on the floor. Those tactics seemed to achieve the effect they were hoping for...for a while anyway. It all seemed way past assertive in my book, yet still in the realm of what many people think of as being a savvy business person. Thinking that was the path to success in the art world filled me with angst. I loved painting, but the thought of playing nonstop hardball with the powers that be in the art world felt like it would require a total personality makeover.

Here's how I ended up handling those sorts of gallery interactions ... I didn't. It wasn't in my nature to aggressively confront anybody and it wouldn't have been a good fit for me. What I did all along instead was to paint the best paintings I could and frame them as well as I could afford to. I tried to be on time, easy to work with and have good boundaries --- common sense sort of stuff.  My motto was 'If you don't tell me how to paint, I won't tell you how to run your gallery'. If somebody did anything questionable when it came to dividing up a commission or paying on time, I packed up my paintings and went elsewhere, but that was seldom necessary because I was always pretty careful to do my homework about any gallery I was considering consigning my work with. I wasn't pushy but neither was I a pushover. As it turned out, being reasonable to work with wasn't such a bad strategy after all, since I've had comfortable relationships with the same galleries now for many decades. Eventually I also discovered that quite a lot of art sells off the floor. One gallery I was in for many years conducted business in their home and never displayed work for sale any other way. Paintings were either propped up on the seat of the couch or sitting on the floor and they made it work quite well. At the time I wasn't at all sure I was on the right path though, and if I had always measured my progress on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, I would have likely given up early on.

Trusting yourself applies in the same way to learning to paint. If you don't have some idea of what your tastes are and the discipline to acquire the skills needed to follow your own creative instincts, then you are likely to get caught in the undertow of conflicting advice on how to become a better painter. While it's important to be humble enough to learn, there's also a certain amount of tenacity and self-awareness necessary to make that knowledge your own and say what you need to say. What a good teacher does for a student is teach them how to teach themselves, with the caveat that a skillful instructor can help speed up the process quite a bit. 

It can seem like a contradiction to keep pushing for more skills as a painter and yet to also hang onto that that childlike sense of creative adventure, but that is the challenge most of us accept. Speaking for myself, all of it is scrambled in there together --- leaning first one direction , then the other, and the balance seems to be different for each one of us. Some people just want to get their paints and go, while others need more intellectual challenge to stay entertained. Although I push students to keep building on their seeing skills, it's more a matter of wanting to give people their money's worth than any judgement on my part about what they do with those skills or how far they go once they acquire them. As long as somebody is putting in the effort and trying to follow their own voice then I'm all for it. By the way, that's how my teachers were with me. They pushed me to go as far as I could as long a I was studying with them, (and to the point of tears sometimes), but never said a whole lot about my paintings one way or the other after I went off and started experimenting on my own. Fifty plus years of painting later, I still very much feel like a student, and am always fidgeting to figure out the way forward.

"We are not here to do what has already been done." -- Robert Henri  The Art Spirit

"The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know." -- Socrates