Artists generally feel the societal obligation to sell their work or somehow share it with others. Many artists judge their success by the number of exhibitions, sales or gallery affiliations. Outsider artists do not feel this obligation and for the most part their work goes unnoticed until someone finds it hidden away in a cluttered studio. The traditional way to sell your work or make it available to the public is the gallery system, juried exhibitions, and art fairs. To some extent I have eschewed these methods and found less traditional methods to distribute my work. Over the last fifty-years my main distribution method has been simply giving my work away. No need for marketing or “one man shows”. Like the undiscovered outsider artist, I earn a very small portion of my income from art sales. During my teaching years, I was very cautious not to profit from the art I created in the classroom and I made a point of giving my pieces to students or charity. Recently, the internet has served as an easy way to disseminate my artistic endeavors. I have posted hundreds of high resolution pieces with no watermarks and I check Google often to see were my work has traveled. Using the internet does not get rid of the physical products of creation and storage is problematic in an apartment settings. My latest method of dispersal involves the I Pad. My images can be easily stored on thumb drives and a small space can accommodate thousands of pieces of art.
Am I a success? If you go my the numbers my success is questionable. If you consider where some of my work has ended up, I may have a shot at the success label. Recently, one of my students from the 1970s confessed, in a email, that he or she had taken one of my drawings from a stack of work in the art room and never told me. He/she wanted to know if I would like to have it back. The person had kept the work for thirty-four years! I told the individual to keep the work and I was happy it had a home for so many years. Most of the work I did in college has also disappeared over the years with moves from house to house. On my way to my wedding, I strapped several large canvases to the top of my new Corvair and somewhere on route 66, north of Bloomington, Illinois, they were blown off the roof of the car and sailed into a field of winter wheat. I will never know if the farmer saved them or baled them. When I unceremoniously abandoned my studio at Governor French Academy in Belleville, I left behind several hundred pieces of work that I created when I was artist in residence. Some of them are still on the walls and many have been left to fade in the sun. On Facebook many of my former students have told me stories about a piece of work I gave them. Some kept props from one of my set designs and one student still has a tie that I cut in half in class as a motivational device. He also has the hand painted coat I made for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I still can’t figure out who took The Wizard of Oz mask or the bloody leg from Little Shop of Horrors. The list goes on: a painted cloths pin, a sculpture made out of a deck of cards, a building made of scrap wood, several had drawn books, countless pieces of pottery, a dozen hand painted ceramic eggs and of course, many students learned to make a bunny out of a handkerchief. And finally the “pièce de résistance," someone found a piece of my work at a garage sale.
Someday in the distant future my work may be found by a collector or “garage sale buyer” in a dusty cluttered apartment studio crammed with useless scrapes of paper covered with felt tip markers, decorated plastic cups, paper boxes and of course those little USB flash drives filled with puzzling images.
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