If you're going to paint portraits....where is the best place to live?

[Timothy C. Tyler]

My bags are packed.

[Michael Fournier]

I feel that except for the emotional reasons for living somewhere and of course finding housing you can afford, where you live matters less then where you sell. And where you sell matters even less the how you sell.

This is the 21st century; we have fast travel, the Internet and a global market. Of course it is up to us to create a market for our work - not easy, but it can be done.

Far from a scientific study, but it seems to me when I look at the big names in portraiture they mostly started in a metro areas but they can be found all over the world. I see artists with studios in New York, London, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. But of course these cities have a large market. These are major cities with huge markets for just about anything. Also areas with a larger market will more than likely also have more competition within that market. The more established you are, the less where you are matters. Clients will travel to you or pay for you to go to where they are. Also if you are an artist that sells gallery work as well as being a portrait painter, you can live anywhere. Your paintings can go all over the world, once you establish a market for it. "Think globally, act locally," they say, but I feel as an artist you must think and act globally.

Let's forget for a moment that the product is art, and look at this as a business. First you need a product with a market. You need to do R and D for this product, and then produce this product. R and D for us is all those hours at an easel and the many failed paintings we do over the years, but once we have done that and have mastered our craft, we have our product.

OK, we have established a product and we know it is a product people will buy. Now, how do we get others to buy our product instead of a competing product? Well, there are as many answers to this as there are people, but I feel we actually have an advantage over other products in many ways. Why? Well, there are two types of products: ones people buy because they need them, the others because they want them. Those who need products want to buy at the lowest price, and care little who they buy it from as long as the product is good, and, key word: PRACTICAL. Little or no emotion involved here.

Now we produce a product no one needs on a practical level. So we are selling a product that is bought for emotional reasons. And that is great. Why? Well if you look at this as a businessperson, there are many advantages to selling to persons' emotions. One, people will often pay ungodly amounts for things that move them emotionally, but rarely on practical things. And marketing to emotions is the easiest way to differentiate your product from another. And we have a product that is bought completely on an emotional level.

When advertising a product, businesses spend millions of dollars to try to make you forget all the practical reasons for buying their products, and get you to buy on an emotional level. Just look at the bottled water business. Now here are a bunch of people selling a very real need - we all need water - but they don't sell us on that fact. After all we can get water out of a tap or from our own well much cheaper. No, they sell us on a emotional level that their water is cleaner, colder, fresher then not just our tap water but then any of their competitors' water. Their product, water, emotionally says little, so all the emotional response is to it is marketing. And that marketing must make you forget all the practical reasons you need water, or at least get you past them.

Now we have a product that can, by itself, evoke an emotional response. It differentiates itself from all similar products. We have an advantage in that no two pieces of art or two artists are the same. And each person's emotional response to your art will be different.

All you need do is get that product of yours in front of as many eyes as you can. And it makes no matter where you live. You goal should be to sell to the global market.

How to create a market for our art? Well, that is a topic that would take much more than this post, which is getting too long already to answer.

In closing, the best place to live is where you are if you are comfortable there. You may need to sell elsewhere, but that just means you need to market yourself there - not move there.

[Michele Rushworth]

Thanks, Michael, for some really interesting insights. Especially the part about the emotional sell!