For art collectors, your creative process is a critical piece in connecting with your art. It’s a genuine element of your studio practice and the story behind each piece of art you make.
When you decide to sell your work, it can be helpful to think about the connection points that come from your creative process that you’ll have with your buyers. This may include telling your story, highlighting the unique differences your work brings, sharing your accolades, and ensuring that the purchase process is a pleasant experience for your buyers.
What Is Your Artist Story?
The story behind you and your work is significant when you’re building a connection with your art collectors and potential buyers.
While your art speaks for itself, it’s still important to give your viewers an entry point to understand your specific perspective and the messages your work conveys. People are busy and distracted so giving them a door to enter your work through is helpful, and often necessary.
Collectors are highly creative people, which is why they’re drawn to art. When they look into buying a piece, they not only look into the artwork but also how the story of the artist resonates with them.
When art collectors think of Pablo Picasso and his Blue Period (1901–1904), they know it occurred after the death of Picasso’s best friend when he became depressed. “This was the period in which almost all paintings by Picasso had monochromatic shades of blue, blue-green, and sometimes gray. He mostly painted beggars, sex-workers, homeless, and blind people.” (source) The body of work was from a particularly dark period of the artist’s life. Looking at his art, viewers are allowed to tap into their own thoughts and feelings around human suffering, friendship and mental illness.
This is an excellent example of Picasso’s story for this specific series of paintings during this period. He moved on to other concepts and stories with each body of work he created. Having the background behind his work is immensely helpful for people to understand and appreciate his thoughts as well as the era in which the paintings were made. The same can hold true for you.
Unearthing the story behind your art definitely can help you connect with collectors. Here are a few questions that you can ask yourself to help bring the story of your art to light so you can find and build understanding and connection points with your collectors.
What emotions did you feel when you created that work?
What story are you telling?
What influenced your creations?
What was happening in your life when you made this work?
An art collector will want to know your answer to all of these questions because they want to know if they resonate with the piece and the story behind it before buying it.
What Makes Your Art Unique?
You can debate whether art is original all day long. Even if you feel like originality doesn’t exist, there are likely some unique qualities about your specific work. Take a look at what differentiates your art from other works created in your genre or medium to help your art to stand out with art collectors.
Examples of unique elements may include using high-end, rare, or difficult to work with materials such as gold leaf, vintage or recycled items; large-format analog photography; oil paints; sculpting with marble.
Something else that can make your work unique are the concepts, subject matter or process.
What comes to mind when you think of the unique elements to your work?
Reputation Calls In Collectors
When you build your reputation, you can ask your art collectors to create testimonials, essentially becoming “brand ambassadors” for you. This builds up your credibility when others vouch for your work. Using social proof like this can really attract art collectors because it’s easy to be influenced by what other people see as valuable.
Testimonials can come in the form of quotes, recommendations, photos or even kudos from others in the arts who have worked with you before. You may have recieved reviews for your shows, art critiques, online features on blogs or podcasts, or recognition from art competitions or awards. Even a simple social media post mentioning you and your piece is already a form of testimonial. Social proof can be written or spoken praises about your art.
While social proof may come to you unexpectedly, you can also be proactive about getting it. For example, pitching yourself to a podcast or asking for feedback from a buyer are both ways you can work to get street cred and testimonials for your art practice.
These kinds of word-of-mouth recommendations are one of the most trusted tried and true forms of marketing. In a recent Nielsen global study on trust in advertising, an average of 82% of people from all generations trust recommendations, or word of mouth, as a factor when deciding to make a purchase.
In art, where community is vital in finding buyers, social proof can go a long way with influencing art collectors.
Enhance The Art Buying Experience
Enhancing the buying experience for art collectors is a simple but significant way to boost your sales. It’s an added bonus that adds value to the buyer’s purchase.
One simple thing you’ll want to include is specifications about your piece. These are the details that potential buyers will want to read to know more about your art. This can include your name, title, medium, size, price of the piece, and even a short story to accompany it.
But you can take this further by asking yourself, what would make it really fun for a collector when they buy a piece of my art? Ideas might be that you ship it wrapped and tied with a neat ribbon or string so it feels gift-like and exciting when they unbox it. Or maybe you offer to deliver the art or install it to make it easier and a better overall experience for the buyer. Maybe you offer to let them test the piece in their house to make sure it works with their space. What can you do with your purchase process that makes it an even better experience for the collector?
And, how easy is it for art collectors to purchase your art?
In my Artists Guide For Holiday Sales article, my top piece of advice when selling your art is to make sure you have a sales mechanism in place. Make it easy for buyers to pay you for your art.
Prepare For Your Art Collectors
Selling your art to collectors can be a light and fun experience. Buyers purchase art because it evokes a particular emotion within them or because they feel a connection to the work. Looking at and preparing yourself in these four areas: your story, uniqueness, reputation and buying experience, can set you up to attract and connect with art collectors that love your work and want to buy it.
You’ll feel great selling to people who understand you and your art better because of the attention you’ve given to sharing more about your work. It starts with one person who believes in your art and your story enough to purchase your piece and recommend you to other people who appreciate art who can become your fan base.
If you’d like help to unearth your story and your connection points with collectors, let’s hop on a no obligation call and start to flesh it out so you can start connecting with the people who are most interested in buying your art. Grab a spot on the calendar for this here.