When the business person is an artist

How easy is it for a successful business person to also be an artist and vice versa?

I was lucky enough to be at “Potfest” yesterday at Scone Palace in Scotland. In case there is any doubt about what this entails, it featured around eighty ceramic artists, displaying their art and aiming to sell it to the general public in a beautiful setting.

Apart from the fact that Scone Palace is stunning and the weather was great, it was really uplifting to talk to these artists and see their creative output.

You could say that it was a lesson in abundance. Or you could say there was too much choice and confusion. Fundamentally, these artists are taking the same commonly available raw materials and producing entirely different and often stunning results via a mysterious alchemy. 

Artists love their ideas and their art and there was amazing talent on display. Anyone browsing these works would find something to like.

I wonder though how many of them though are really being rewarded to the extent they would hope to be. Few things are more common in life than unrewarded artistic and technical expertise. Even the greatest technical skill is not enough to ensure you can make a living -

Mastering business skills is not optional even for the greatest artist who wants to make a living.

Each artist seemed to have strived to develop their own distinctive style. Im sure this is development of a style is considered by most artists to be the key to success, but it may be a flawed assumption when taken to the limit. There comes a point when the artist has to give way to a business perspective if they want to enjoy commercial success measured as sales growth.

I talked to a man who was made redundant from his job in offshore oil exploration. He decided he would start to make and sell pots (as you would). He described how his first attempts to sell his work were “a little challenging”. Loving what he had created - after all he had put his heart and soul into creating it - he expected that others would love it too.

Displaying his work at a small craft fair in Aberdeen he overheard a lady say to her friend about his work - “We could get the same down at Asda for about 50p each”.

Having put all his redundancy money into creating his studio he had one of those “heart sink’ moments and realised he was out of his depth.

As luck would have it, someone suggested he apply to attend Potfest a couple of years ago. It seems this was a great turning point for him from a number of points of view. He found himself part of a genuine market that brought potters like him together with a section of the public that actually appreciated his art. If he had not discovered this, Im sure he would have gone down the route of believing that he needed to keep developing "his style" when what he needed was a better market.

He no longer felt alone - he discovered a community of other makers on the same journey as him and able to share their successes and challenges.

It may be that many businesses start with that spark that the artist brings. Do they have to rein that in to survive? Artists tend to be control freaks (or is it just me) but unfortunately growth and control tend to have an inverse relationship. The more growth desired the less control we can have. If we are lucky we manage to retain the joy that comes from manifesting our art but learn to balance this with some business reality.

Potfest https://potfest.co.uk/scotland

Scone Palace is in Perth, Scotland - https://scone-palace.co.uk

Derek Jones PhD, MBA is a Director of Anatomical Concepts (UK) Ltd