Money where my mouth is

For the last few years I’ve been telling artists they should start blogs to help them promote their work and connect with the customers and peers. It’s easy and, with certain caveats, it works, I would say. Look at this example or this example. Hell, look at me – I’m standing here getting paid to talk to you because of my blogs.

Which is all well and good but what exactly have I been doing for the last year or so that can earn me the right to be listened to? Not a huge amount, it seems. My big personal case studies (kick starting Flickr Birmingham and Created in Birmingham) are at least 2 years old and, more critically, took place is a very different landscape to today. It’s easy to be a successful arts blogger when there aren’t any other arts bloggers. It’s much harder once all the artists are blogging.

So, following on from my terminal disillusionment with the Social Media scene I’m going to pack it all in and become an artist.

During 2010 I will attempt to earn a living as an artist supported by my blogging activities.

My main trade will be in prints of my TTV photographs which I will sell through online stores like etsy and by taking stalls at craft fairs in Birmingham. Most of this will be traditional stuff but I’ll augment it with a strong online presence using the peteashton.com blog to tell the story of what I do and why and, more importantly, as a motivation to do better work. And with any luck the process of doing all this will lead to more interesting things that I can’t imagine right now.

I’ll also be using this ASH-10 blog to get all meta and talk about what I’m doing, looking at different ways of recording my process without getting in the way of it, weighing up the pros and cons of online stores and so on.

Of course I won’t just be relying on sales of my photographs to pay the rent – at this stage that would be very stupid indeed. Other than my personal reasons for wanting to dedicate more time to my photography I also hope it will inform the work I’ve been doing in Arts Development, specifically the DCD consultancy and the Blogging for Artists talks and workshops. I’m also hoping to run another Metapod course for arts and culture organisations with Helga at Fierce next year.

As for other areas I’m going to be pulling back and focusing more on DIY media. This is where I started (one of the first things I wrote on this site was lessons we can learn from zines) and its where I think the Internet has the most potential to be interesting. That means less, if any, events about “digital” or “social media” – as has been notes from my twittering from such things I’m kinda burnt out on all that. I’ll be more likely to be at events where artists like myself (for I am now an artist, donchaknow) are talking about whatever artists talk about.

In summary then…

• My photography will be my primary focus throughout 2010.
• I will continue doing consultancy in the arts sector for digital communication and social media.
• I will be developing my Blogging For Artists talks based on the work I’m doing for myself.
• I won’t be doing more general social media (or whatever) work and will be on the periphery of that scene.
• My framework will be DIY media, building on my experience with zines and a decade of blogging.
• I will probably do other projects, some arty, some bloggy, some paid, some for the hell of it. But I’ll try and keep then relevant to the above.

And next December, when the inevitable happens and I’m bored with being an artist, I’ll try something different.

I’m going to re-jig this site a little and revise my fees and services (probably boil it down to a flat hourly rate) over the next week or so and then over Christmas work on turning ttv.peteashton.com into a fully functioning artists website. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.