Commercial success?

This is a cafe I spotted on a sunny day in Paris. What caught my eye was the design of the space; the dark areas against the light.

Yesterday my family and I drove an hour to visit my sister, her family, and my mom. I took a lot of photos of the countryside (again!) and I was excited to see a huge field of hay bales.

One of my art teachers once told me that I could be commercially successful if I concentrated on painting barns. I do love to paint barns, but I don’t want to paint them just to be “commercially” successful. I want to paint them because I love them. I think many artists struggle between painting what will sell and painting what they want to. I am so relieved not to have the shop anymore, I have no pressure now to paint things to sell in the shop. The pressure was all self-imposed anyway, I felt I needed to cover my rent and then some. Ha! That’s difficult to do, no wonder the term “starving artist” was coined.

I guess I got on the subject of barns because I look at this little painting (it’s 8″x10″ oil on canvas) of the Paris cafe and really, I wonder, who will ever buy this? Whereas when I paint a barn, I know someone will eventually buy it.

I am more interested in being happy with what I paint than being commercially successful. Of course I like selling a painting, it’s nice that someone actually will pay money for something I did and then want to take it home and live with it. That’s great validation for me. But right now I’m trying to push myself to paint better, though I’m not sure exactly what that means or what it is I want to paint. So, you might not be seeing any barns for a while.