Most of you know that attempting to be an artist who supports themselves through art and art-related jobs is insanely difficult in the United States. Those of you who offer support of all kinds are tremendously appreciated. If it were not for the support of my spouse, I would not be able to do 90% of the work I am currently doing. My goal is to have a self sufficient income long before I die. This sounds like a reasonable goal except I have no idea how I will actually achieve it. Business plans and such don’t really apply well to the creative life. I offer this newsletter for free (it is a newsletter after all) and a very small percentage of my work is available to look at (for free) on my website, Instagram and Facebook. I decided to kill my online shop as the fees of maintaining it are more than it earns.
Figuring out how to make my work available to both look at and to buy is actually really hard. I live in a very remote part of northern Maine where there is no art scene, no viable galleries and no museums.
What’s really hard is that there are not many artists here, either. Which is why I am very grateful for my long-distance artist friends, whose presence is maybe more supportive than each of you realize. Having a community of artists who support you, are there to talk with and even to simply help you feel like the work you make is valuable is very helpful and important.
One of the artists who I work with long-distance is Yvonne Dalschen, who lives in Tennessee. We have been working on a collaborative diptych project for a couple of years. The project started with a weekly diptych that we made and posted on Instagram. We would alternate sending an image to one another and creating the diptych. At the end of the year and 50 diptychs later, we began an new stage of sending prints back and forth, paired with writing about the images. Now, we are in a third stage. We’ve each picked out our top 15 favorite images, printed them at 8x10 inches and are writing directly on the prints, anything that comes to mind.
We will send these stacks of notated prints to each other and add more notes. Once done with that we will move on to another stage. Hopefully all this will end up in more than a long-drawn out creative process. A book and some shows would be great. This is what making things that require time, attention and collaboration looks like. Yvonne and I met through the Kinship Photography Collective, which hosts weekly photo talks on Wednesday evenings. It is free to attend the talks and very low cost to become a member of the collective.
One of the ways that I deal with my need to actively find ways to stay motivated and inspired is by listening to podcasts. The Art Biz podcast with Alyson Stanfield is packed with a lot of genuinely helpful information. Episode #176 with Susan Abbott was interesting and worth listening to:
https://artbizsuccess.com/series-abbott/
Speaking of long-distance friends, it’s hard not to mention Zoom fatigue. This NPR podcast on the subject really made me think about how much I needed to make some hard decisions about how much time I spend on Zoom:
NPR, What Zoom Does to our Brains
Since then, I have agreed with one person to switch to mostly letter writing and with another to focus more on emails and letter writing. I’m old enough to remember when the ONLY affordable way to stay in touch with people outside your zip code was to write letters. I love receiving postcards and letters. I am also finding out that I am a little rusty when it comes to writing them. Which means that I need to write more letters, right?! Well, this newsletter is a letter, it’s just for anyone who wants to read it. Thank you for being here.
Ways to support me:
Subscribe to this newsletter even though it is free.
Attend one of my workshops. Next one is online through LACP and is about working with text and image: https://lacphoto.org/events/the-alchemic-union-of-text-and-image-with-morgain-bailey-liz-titone-2024/
Buy my art or zines. Artemis Gallery in Maine currently has some 16x24 pieces that are available through Artsy.
You can buy my latest zine directly though me, it’s a performance art piece about colonialism and hippie culture. I have a handful of them left.
Hire me to photograph your loved ones or do some visual storytelling for your magazine or organization.
Work with me on a public art project.
Show my work in your gallery.
Collaborate in ways that I haven’t mentioned here.
I am an over-50, queer, working class artist who lives in rural America. It gets weird out here, folks.
Lastly, feel free to let me know what you want to hear about.
XO -Morgain