I had a nice conversation the other day with painter Robert Genn about the struggle between making your art and making a living as an artist. I have hit upon this issue before in a recent article called Who You Know versus What You Do

Robert, as many people know, puts out a wonderful newsletter, called The Painter’s Keys – that is always fun to read but we were taking about marketing your art and the often disdain with anything related to art and money and commerce.

And, if your not worried about it, that’s fine but what if you are. What if you do want to sustain a living as an artist. Should you NOT be thinking about that?

Robert shared the sometimes fine line between being a producer or art and wanting to get it out there in the commercial marketplace. He mentions this principle frequently which can be summed up as – “Go to your room”

So what the heck does that mean, “Go to Your Room”? – My interpretation of it it is to go into yourself. When trying to formulate a career strategy and trying to promote yourself and getting on all the social networking sites and trying to get your work “out there” you might be best served by going to your room or going into the silence of yourself.

There you will find everything. Silence can be very pregnant. It can give you power and clarity and direction. Yet a lot of us “run” from it. It doesn’t make us comfortable – as if comfort is now our new metric.

So if your struggling as a beginning artist about wanting to produce art and making a good living at it – first of all, it can be done and IS being done by many, many artists – second, take this time to really ground your work and to spend your time and creativity on the work itself.

Robert’s advice (and mine too) is to put your focus and your energy into the work itself – and you need time and silence to do that. Don’t worry about all the peripheral stuff at this point.

You won’t HAVE to do all this other stuff when your work is so strong people cannot help but take notice and be inspired by your work. You can’t do that AND be on social networking sites all day.