I saw a comedian years ago doing a bit on how weird it was to be part of the entertainment industry in Hollywood. In their industry there are always ‘higher ups’ that want more from you than what got you there. So, if you can act, they ask if you can sing, if you and act and sing, then they want you to tell jokes. If you can do all that, its like, ‘great, can you direct?’ He said, “This is kind of like going to a chef and saying ‘O.K. great, you can cook, can you farm?’”
Yeah, I know, it was funnier when he said it. But that’s kind of what its like being an artist right now. There are many advantages, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my place in this moment for being an artist in the ’80′s or ’90′s. However, it does kind of feel like, in order to be successful, you need to be able to do many things that are tangential at best, to being an artist. You gotta farm.
Farming, for artists, means planting ‘seeds’ in several fields. You need a website field. You need a facebook field. You need venues for actual real world connections, like galleries, or putting your art in public places as part of a strategic alliance, we’ll call that your gallery field. And you might need some supplemental income fields, like teaching art classes or running some kind of artistic services business (like murals, faux finishes, art consulting).
That’s a lot of fields. And its really easy to neglect one, when you get busy with the others.
I have run a murals and faux finishes company for 20 years. During the boom years in the housing industry, I didn’t paint a painting if it wasn’t already commissioned by someone. Mostly, I just painted murals and kept a crew busy applying Italian plasters and glazes to walls.
Now that the housing market has cooled off, I still have that business, but I have more time to work on paintings that I want to do as well.
So, in the next few weeks, you will see many, many posts of small new paintings known as ‘daily paintings’. These little paintings are all about focus. The idea is to do one in less than 8 hours. Sometimes its done in one day, but sometimes its 4 hours one day and finishing it another day.
The point of these daily paintings is to reach a broad market of potential art collectors. There are many, many painters out there doing these now. It’s a well established movement. Some artists are doing quick impressionist type paintings, others are doing tight realism. I like both, but so far, my daily paintings are pretty realistic. This is my first daily painting post. This painting is 8X10 inches, oil on canvas. I will be listing this soon on ebay, but to get it before the auction, just contact me. The “buy it now” price is $300. 
