On the weird freedom of not selling anything
2025 is almost at an end, and I don't know about you, but for me this time of the year is always a period in which I do a sort of inventory of what's been going on, especially as far as my work as an "aspiring Artist/Oilpainter" is concerned. So let's do just that: What's been going on in the last 12 months?
-In 2025 I got the chance to participate in more exhibitions—privately organized ones, group shows in galleries, larger art fairs—than I have in the last 4-ish years of me trying to become a full-time oil painter. I more than doubled my social media following (it is still modest for sure, but I choose to look at it doubling instead of the actual number, haha).
-In 2025 I sold exactly one small painting.
-In 2025 I made around 250€ from my personal work.
Devastating, right? Yep, absolutely. I am going to be completely honest here: the sheer amount of people, both "art professionals" (artists and gallerists, etc.), who gave me an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for my work, paired with the fact that I am not able to sell pretty much ANYTHING, has been one of the harshest experiences of my life, and I am not even close to being over it.
BUT
I am starting to get there.
How?
While I spend a lot of time breaking my brain about what I've done wrong (because OF COURSE I immediately have to go to the place where I ask myself where I have failed as a person, a grown-up man, a soon-to-be father and husband, and so on—sure, bring all of that on), I had this weird realization just a few days ago.
Commercially I failed, but I still painted. It never even really occurred to me to stop painting. Sure, I questioned the direction I was going in, if I should make more "pleasing" work and all of that stuff, but I never thought about not painting, and I never stopped doing it. As a matter of fact, I do believe that I created some of my best work so far this year.
Out of this realization I noticed that selling my work actually does not matter, like at all. Sure, I want to be a full-time fine artist, but for me the one condition for it has always been that I wanted to be that by painting what I want to paint (as much as possible). Not selling work would never result in me changing my work in order to be more pleasing to look at, more decorative, more of something that everybody would like to hang over their dinner table.
I want to create the work that I like, that I feel is worthwhile creating. Sure, it might be financially more "useful" if I was super into copying AI-generated reference photos, but it so happens that that's not quite my thing. And that's great, actually.
As it is now, my work does not seem to sell. Why? I don't know. Probably a ton of reasons. Wrong audience, audience too small, prices too high, paintings too ugly—probably a mix of all of the above, haha. There is hardly a way to know for me, to be honest. Maybe I am just too dumb to notice the pattern that leads to my situation.
There is one thing, however, that crossed my mind, and that's basically what all of this comes down to:
As far as my sales are concerned, things could pretty much not get any worse, we've established that. I don't see myself adjusting my work in a direction that I don't like in order to create something more "sellable". What I chose to do is quite the opposite, frankly. I am doubling down on creating what I want to create, how I want to create it. I want to let go of any type of restraint I held on to in the past, born from a feeling of insecurity and a desire to please people in order to sell work.
I want to do what I want, I want to try new things, I actually want to create the art I would create if no one was paying me to do so, because no one actually is paying me to do so right this moment.
What does that mean for my work? Frankly, don't know. I have a couple of ideas, a couple of suspicions what it might mean if I actually painted the way I like, just for myself.
I feel like an incredible space for discovery opened up there, and I have no clue where it might go. I might try something completely new, or I might find that the track I have been on for the last two years has actually been the right one for me.
