Alyson B. Stanfield
Stanfield Art Associates
500 Cascade Drive
Golden, CO 80403
303.273.5904
alyson@artbizcoach.com

For those artists of you who want business savvy help...contact Alyson Stanfield.
She has a website called artbizcoach.com .She posts helpful advice for artists who would rather make art than do the business end of the art picture. Her advice is from a background of working in the museum field.
Practical advice for moving forward in our art.
Charlie Spear

I went online and found the good advice I was looking for to keep going in my own direction. This is really good advice from artists who have reached a level of respect that makes them good mentors. These are professionals in the art world. The following is paraphrase.

• What kind of artist do you want to be?
• Find your subject.
• Keep looking at contemporary art; keep your eye sharp.
• Make work that contents you: that gives you motivation and satisfaction.
• Make work that makes you ‘happy’ (sustains yourself with the way you make
work.)
• Trust your instincts; find your voice.
• Don’t engage in famine mentality (cheap supplies, victim artist, etc.)
• If your art is pleasing to you, vital, exciting scary, or exhilarating,
Why do it?
• Believe in your own unique vision.
• Take your work seriously, sometimes your satisfied with it sometimes your
not.
• Make more time for making your art than just talking about it.
• Dialogue and theory are good but studio time should come first.
• Pay attention to the ideas of other artists but look inside yourself to find
your own ideas.
• Why they are making art? Look at their reasons. Focus then on your own art,
love it, fix it or change it.
• Search out your peers, other artists you respect near your level. Talk about
both of your art.

Writing this Blog has become therapeutic and a good way to sound off ideas. Lately, I have come through a dry spell and am doing better and starting to paint again. The spell came after January of this year. I went to a show in Indianapolis and saw some work by my Prof. Al Pounders and his wife Loren Olsen, good work both of them.

The voices started again, you know ..."Why are you painting again?” “Their work is much more mature than the stuff you have been doing..." "Do you really have anything to say?" On and on...same old crap.

Well I went back to my sketch book trying to redeem an old idea. The idea came from an old cartoon (1940’s to 1950’s). I believe it was called Lets All Go Down to the Beach. It was a campy idea using old toys made of wood. The imagery stuck in my head from then ‘til now. So I am working on some drawings, then to the canvas and paint to follow.

Where do the ideas go to? Where do they come from? Mostly they are derived from our past and some from the present reworked in some manner based on something we've seen before. What I find really great is two different people derive a 180-degree viewpoint on the same subject.

That's why I spend so much time looking at art. I figure it's the looking that adds the lubricant to the brain’s creative center. The depression I feel in a creative dry spell is more like a rest between sessions so I don't clutter my brain by thinking too much and robbing my inner instincts for freedom in the tactile response in painting.

That's enough. Feel like you've run out of ideas? Get out and do something else. Let the Muse grab you … again.

PS Apply and enter a variety of art-opp(ortunitie)s. Jurors and judges are people like us and they have specific tastes. Eventually the odds are in our favor to “strike it rich” if we persevere.

Charlie Spear