Enclosed: My secret to creative confidence
Only tell your most trusted friends
I made a couple of discoveries this week about this newsletter. First was the somewhat surprising results from the Sunday Survey, most notably the overwhelming response to the one thing you could live without. Asked and answered, there will no longer be a Second Helpings section of past posts, but not just because of the poll.
Apparently, the way I see these posts is not necessarily how everyone sees them, which is strange and possibly causing some of the emails to get cut off. I honestly don’t understand how Substack would make them appear differently to different people, but we adapt and move on. This one is shorter for a reason, but we’ll test and tune it and see where it takes us.
On a lighter note, do you have creative friends? Send them this way.
F*ck Fear!
There’s a big, scary monster standing in the corner, and he’s telling you that you’re no good, your art sucks, it’s not up to the level of others, and your peers think you’re a joke. The monster is lying to you, and you believe everything it says.
There isn’t a single artist on the planet that hasn’t dealt with confidence issues in their work. We suffer from imposter syndrome, devalue our work, and compromise ourselves for more social media engagement.
But I know something about the monster that most don’t. It’s weak, and all it takes to beat it is…
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Art Snack: Summer Murdock
As much as I love art, I don’t often get a feeling of awe from new people I’ve found through social media. Then I opened a Threads account, and the algorithm showed me a photographer who might be my new all-time favorite.
Summer Murdock resides in Salt Lake City, Utah, and she has a way of capturing human moments in a way I haven’t seen since Sally Mann. Oh, and she can teach you how she does it.
Small Bites
If you want to gain more confidence in talking about your art with others, it starts with an introduction.
This is a fantastic idea for getting to know more about people and can be done in micro-doses, like when you’re talking to potential collectors.
The 2nd half of 2023 is going to bring significant changes to how I operate, and while looking at how other artists have pivoted, I found Art With Flo, a European digital artist who is quietly taking over the world.
The AI Landscape is changing the evolutionary scale, and as creatives, it’s time to Adapt or Die!
Do you sell on an online marketplace? You may want to rethink that.
Muralist and minimalist Shantell Martin didn’t fit the model of a high-brow, contemporary artist, so she changed the model.
Katelyn Bourgoin runs one of my favorite newsletters, Why We Buy, but this tweet thread is one of the best things you’ll ever read on the topic.