Art as a Business, and Skype as a way there

Having spent 15 years of my life as a practicing lawyer, I'm always fascinated by the dichotomy of treating law as a business or as a profession.

Art is no different.

Quite often we think of artists as starving artisans who do what they do for the love of it.  My recent take, however, is that any artist working full-time is essentially running their own business so that any time I try to tweak my practice of painting, I like to think of myself as a business owner first, and artist second.  If nothing else, it helps me define my market and further helps me assess the viability of my art going forward.

Which leads me to tell you about Skype and theportraitpaintingproject.com.

I've decided to start painting oil portraits via webcam and a Skype video feed.  Why, you may ask?  Well, using webcams and free Skype video software, I get to paint people all over the world from the comfort of their home while they get to visit with me in my rural art studio in Ithaca, NY. On the one hand, while painting by webcam is limited by lighting conditions and the quality of an Internet connection, it also opens my art studio to the world and avails me opportunities to meet and paint people I would never have known otherwise.  It's also rather cool that, using Skype, the portrait sitter gets to see themselves on their monitor so they actually collaborate on portrait composition.

Also, if you're a collector of emerging artists, looking to get to know artists and their work, what better way to spend time with someone whose art you admire?  As long as you have a webcam, a Skype account, and a reasonably good Internet connection, I can paint you from Barcelona, Macedonia, or even nearby Cazenovia.

So the next time someone asks you for a recommendation of a local portrait artist, if they live on planet Earth, please remember me and theportraitpaintingproject.com.