I’m not going to bury the lede—2023 was not a great year for me, especially financially. In fact, I think it was one of the worst years I’ve had since I became a solo creative, and for the most part, it was nobody’s fault but mine. One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity (get the book here) and in it, there’s a scene where Rob (played by John Cusack) is going through a particularly frustrating time and says, “I’m sick of the sight of this place. Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country A through K" rack out on the street and go work at a Virgin Megastore and never come back.” I can definitely relate to that and it’s kind of where I was at the end of 2022. But I thought I would give it one more year to see whether I could come up with some new ideas and new work and maybe figure out a way to navigate the changing landscape of trying to eke out at least a partial living by being creative. And I know that phrase “being creative” is pretty loaded and it means different things to different people. For me, by and large it means painting, writing, and podcasting, or some combination of the three. Photography is in there somewhere too, but I’m still not really sure where.
I’ve mentioned before that I get ideas for projects all the time, but my biggest problem has always been acting on them. I feel like over the years I’ve put a ton of time and energy into projects that I thought would be wildly successful and instead they fell flat. So as I went into 2023, I was already operating from a position of uncertainty and fear around not wanting to sink myself into anything that would ultimately fall on deaf eyes and ears…again.
I think the desire to believe that we’re doing something original (and maybe even important) is something many creatives struggle with. And I’m using the term “struggle” here intentionally because I think we all realize that the creative landscape is changing—in some cases dramatically—but we feel like if we just keep making, we can somehow change it. But when I talk to photographer and painter friends, rarely am I hearing that they’re selling more work than in past years. In fact, it’s the opposite pretty much across the board. Book, zine, and print sales are down. The number of clients and the amount clients are willing to spend are also casualties of the “changing creative economy.” I think the struggle comes from feeling like they (read: I) put just as much time, care, and effort into the work as we always have, but the market just isn’t there like it was. I think one of the other factors is that “good enough” is becoming the new standard. The extra time and money required for expertise or excellence is seldom able to be justified. What are we to do?
I’m trying to navigate being a creative professional, not just making for fun. I know that being creative—making for the sake of making—should be enough, and I know people for whom that’s exactly true. It might even be the place that I’m ultimately trying to get to myself. But it’s that Venn diagram of where creativity and monetization overlap that’s the problem for me and I’m having a real come-to-Jesus moment over it. Soon I’ll be making my art available for purchase in a way that I really haven’t before and I’m trying to reconcile what it might mean to me if it doesn’t sell. I put too much of me into it to simply limp along and sell a painting every other month. I don’t think that I can do that for long. It takes too much of an emotional toll on me in terms of how I equate monetary value of the work I make to my own sense of self-worth. I simply don’t have the tools yet to separate the two, and until I do, they are inexorably linked. If the work that I put out doesn’t sell, then I really feel like I have to do something else—whether that means changing the type or tone of the work or making a dramatic pivot to something else entirely. I can (and will) keep making that other stuff for me, but on a personal or existential level, I can’t deal with putting out work that I really believe in just to have it go nowhere.
Let me be clear about something: I don’t believe that just because my work doesn’t sell means that it’s bad or uninteresting. Far from it. What I do believe is that I can’t keep filling my house with more of my own work that doesn’t ever leave. It’s all about your particular why, but one of the whys around my paintings, for example, is to sell them. While somebody—maybe even lots of somebodies—will likely find my work interesting when I start actually putting it out there, the odds of anyone who is making anything finding an audience willing to buy what they are making in any significant quantity, given the number of things that are made and shared, are astronomically low. Everyone is competing with everyone else who makes anything for the same eyes, ears, and dollars. And statistically, the number of people (and dollars) available is shrinking. So I have to accept that whether my work does or doesn’t sell is largely out of my hands and has little if anything to do with the quality of the work. One of my mom’s favorite sayings (about quite a few things, actually) was, “it’s a numbers game.” Being a creative professional is absolutely a numbers game. The game is finding ways to get the work in front of the right number of people who are also willing to give you the right number of dollars in exchange for that work so that you can keep making more of it.
Last year, I didn’t produce a lot of new work, but I did do a lot of thinking about the work that I had made and the work that I might want to make. I started thinking about my paintings as two unique “product lines,” if you will. One as art and the other as decor, which I’ve talked about a little before. On the art side, I have my narrative work such as The New Propaganda, Juliet and Romeo, and One Nation Under Ground. Those are some of my favorite pieces, and I think a big part of why is because they are so personal to how I see and experience the world around me. On the decor side, I have things like Cell Damage and Grid Variations. These pieces of work still feel like me, and if you look at some of them side-by-side with the narrative work, there’s definitely an aesthetic through line. But because they’re not as personal, I don’t have as much of an existential attachment to them. They don’t take as long to produce, and I think they may ultimately have a broader appeal than my narrative work because they aren’t quite as “heavy,” for lack of a better word.
But if the work that I make is not going to sell, I think I have to ask myself whether it’s still the kind of work that I want to do, at least from a more “commercial” perspective. Does it bring me enough joy for it to stand alone as an exercise or a creative pursuit, even if it’s not going to provide any sort of appreciable financial return, which is something that I have decided that I need to make it worth my while? I don’t have an answer yet.
I do hope the upcoming experiment works well enough to keep going because if it doesn’t, I’m not really sure what the next step looks like.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, I’d love to know why. Hit reply, leave a comment, or email me at talkback@jefferysaddoris.com.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for sharing such an open and honest reflection. I can relate to your comment about many ideas not executed. I have a series of podcasts, with not one word recorded. Series’ of illustrations, with no lines drawn and photographic projects that may have a few images, but no momentum. What all these ideas have in common is desire, intent and most have titles, logos and a paragraph or two describing them. What stopping them becoming reality is probably fear of failure. Yet, contradictory, I would tell anyone else to just do it, set those ideas free. See which ones fly and which don’t. Treat it all as an experiment… If only I would follow my own advice. Keep creating, keep sharing-for you or for someone else, but not for everyone.