Who do you know who makes a living as an artist? A full-time salary.

Being an artist is not easy. Artists are usually people who operate outside of the box most of the time. In order to make a living, they either need to work for a company and make the company's artwork to their specifications or they need to be in essence an entrepreneur artist.

As just about everyone knows, being an entrepreneur is difficult too.

I work both as an artist, and a gallery owner dealing with other artists. There are many challenging things about both of my jobs. Owning a business brings with it lots of new responsibilites and risk taking that a regular job working for someone else doesn't. It can be very freeing but also scary. Artists often create very personal pieces of work. It is hard to divorce yourself from your creation enough to sell it to someone else. Rejection of your work is often seen as rejection of yourself.

One of the hardest things to do as an entrepreneur artist is to find the time to continue your art.  It is so easy to get bogged down in the paperwork, taxes, daily chores of running a business.

In order to really be an artist who makes a living selling their work, you or an agent needs to continuously sell your work.  And you need to continuously make your work.

It helps if you have a repetitive product that you can sell, but even then their is a production time that you have to consider.  Plus you need to have enough product to sell.

If not, then you can't fulfill the need for a full time salary. 

My biggest challenge as an artist is to keep going forward consistently.  I often find myself working in batches, then not working in batches.  It is extremely challenging running a gallery and being a creative artist.

Money is always an issue, because in order to free up more time for me to create, I need to hire someone to run my gallery that I can trust. But inversely, in order to hire someone, I need to make enough money to pay them. 

No matter how challenging it is, I completely love my jobs both as an artist and as a person who promotes local artists.

I get to see the most amazing work every day.  I am tempted all the time to take things home with me.  I love to find new ways to promote my own work and other artists' work.

And I love making both jewelry which is my primary art, and watercolors which is secondary.  Working with my hands, with colors and textures is just the ultimate in experiences.

In 2009, I will be focusing on moving my jewelry into more and more areas outside the Cleveland, Ohio area, so you never know--you may turn around and see my work in a gallery or store where you live.