Working for Hire: What to Consider about Commissions [34]
Art Juice: A podcast for artists, creatives and art lovers
Louise Fletcher/Alice Sheridan
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2019
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week's discussion was sparked by a question we received from a listener. AJ asked this question about commissions: “I am an up and coming artist with a handful of commission requests. I would love to learn about the professional way to handle commissions. How do you and Alice do this? How much do your charge? What do you do about edits? Should the client pay upfront or give a deposit?”
The question led us into an interesting debate about how formalised a commission process should be. Alice sets clear parameters and her process has worked very well for her, while Louise has found that any kind of commitment feels heavy. She is therefore taking a much more informal approach (including refusing commissions unless they feel just right).
We discuss practicalities (pricing, process, deposits etc), share our successes (as well as those that didn't go so well), and debate the pluses and minuses of allowing client input during the creative process.
In the end, we both agree that there is no one-size-fits-all "professional" methodology and that the most important thing is for each artist to determine an approach that works for him or her (and make the parameters very clear to the buyer in advance).
This week we also share some exciting studio news, celebrate the success of a fellow artist, and (literally) get a little bit potty-mouthed (!)
Mentioned:
Zandra Stratford's show at https://afternynegallery.com (Until Sept 21st)
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@alicesheridanstudio
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Credits
"Monkeys Spinning Monkeys" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | because she wanted something that looked like the big one |
| 0:03.4 | and I don't even know how I came to that. |
| 0:06.0 | So to try and recreate it. |
| 0:08.0 | Hello everybody and welcome back to Art Juice. This is honest, generous and humorous conversations about making art that will feed your creative soul and get you thinking with me Alice Sheridan and me Louise Fletcher and this is episode 34 and today we are going to be talking about commissions, poetry, new studios, but first of all tell me what you've been working on this week. |
| 0:41.0 | I have been painting like Fiend. I have studio full of big sheets of paper, small pieces of paper, |
| 0:50.3 | different shapes of paper, and I've just been having the best time and it's been |
| 0:56.5 | really it's the first time I've ever worked this way so I've never worked with a |
| 1:01.5 | clear intention that I intend to carry into quite a |
| 1:07.3 | sizable series of work and I've and therefore I've never started off exploring in the way I am. |
| 1:15.3 | So normally the way I start off is to start a series of boards |
| 1:20.2 | and they will all be kind of playful and exploratory and not knowing where they're going, |
| 1:27.5 | but not having a clear intention in mind either. This time, because I know what I'm exploring, then I'm spending a lot of time making, I suppose you |
| 1:36.7 | call them studies, but just, you know, just messing about with paint and seeing what happens but keeping in mind what I'm trying to convey and so what's been so exciting to me is it really seems to suit me and it's there's two things I've noticed one |
| 1:57.4 | everything's developed in a direction I wasn't expecting and it keeps going in |
| 2:02.2 | different directions and that's exciting so I just keep |
| 2:05.4 | following where it feels like it wants to go next every time I have a little thing that says |
| 2:09.6 | oh what if I then I just do that, and that's exciting but the other thing is I'm noticing that alongside that there's this poll to |
| 2:18.8 | get started and make some paintings now and it's only two weeks and it's like I don't need to do that yet. |
| 2:26.7 | That's really interesting because I was going to ask you do you think that there's a danger that you could get stuck in this kind of exploratory study mode and starting the big thing. |
| 2:40.0 | Fear of actually, what did we have? |
| 2:42.0 | H-tag Fear of of making natural painting would kick in and you wouldn't be able to kind of |
| 2:46.9 | lump out of this stage and into the next but obviously not if you're feeling that type already that's good |
... |
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