Painting Orders!

A child is delirious at Christmas-time. Little heart all flip-flopping with excitement. Presents are coming! Well, that's what it feels like for me when I get a painting order.

I'm sure that the more serious, "fine" artists - pondering their next great work - contemplating how many months to completion - do not permit themselves such bare-faced enthusiasm. After all, we paint because we must. We paint because we seek truth in beauty (perhaps it's the other way round). We need to gain stature with our art schools, win prizes, have lots of showings, hone our craft and find our muse - not necessarily in that order.

Well, I enjoy selling. It's not the money, really, although that's extremely nice. But I like to get that little piece I'm so pleased with into the hands of someone who loves it too. In fact, I give paintings away. Very bad business woman.

When I hear that someone "has" to have one of my paintings, I am delighted. Heart all flip-flopping with excitement, a little breathless, again, like a kid at Christmas.

I find some (a lot, really) artists a bit too serious, as if they are not really enjoying the process at all. As if what comes from that amazing daemon, that process that takes us over briefly (or for much longer, months at a time?) is somehow a bit of a nuisance, a sort of wart we can't have removed. To be honest, some artists are a bit grumpy.

Well, I got a couple of orders, and it feels very, very good. It is the equivalent of writing yet another book, and finding an agent who loves it, or a publisher who says to send more chapters. Not selling pictures is the equivalent of throwing the manuscript in the drawer and trying to forget it.

Your work needs to be out there.