Art and commerce

“You’re not going to make any money doing art and you’re not going to go forward and do anything important.” Those are words Jeff Weir heard as a young artist growing up in Athol.

Weir, an arborist by trade, said even his father refused to pay for his college education because it was an art school, so he skipped college and devoted time to his craft, oil painting.

“If you just work hard and love what you’re doing, you’re going to do great,” Weir said. “I’m only 26 and I’m doing pretty good for a 26-year-old with a receding hairline.”

He now can financially support himself with his wildlife oil paintings he creates in his free time and exhibits in The Art Spirit Gallery in Coeur d’Alene, which through the Arts Ed Co-Lab has launched a new monthly series called Creative Conversations that pairs local arts and business leaders to speak in a public forum.

Weir will speak in The Art Spirit Gallery, 415 Sherman Ave., today at 2:30 p.m. with Corey Jeppesen, owner of SeeJepp Creative; Tanden Launder, artist and owner of Thrux Lawrence; Laurel Smith, director of the Jacklin Arts and Cultural Center; Clancy Magnuson, The Art Spirit Gallery manager; and Mason Miles, The Art Spirit Gallery curator.

“We ask for no more than five minutes prepared material and the rest just to be an organic conversation,” Magnuson said. “We want them to be really informal and just an opportunity for people to connect with others in their community and ask questions.”

Launder said art as a business initiative is a difficult act of balancing artistic integrity against the struggles of monetizing art across various media as a commodity.

“A lot of artists have to decipher if monetizing their work is the [right] direction,” Launder said.

He said once that decision is made to pursue selling artwork, the next challenge is to maintain creative vigor and continue pushing the art form, finding the right space and audience.

“You’ve got to find your people who like what you do,” Weir said.

Jeppeson said the past couple decades have changed that process of finding an audience and showing artistic work to an audience.

Jeppesen, whose career for some time was in design work, said the artistic process of sharing creative work is amplified by social media platforms, which democratize access to artists’ work and provide a platform to broadcast an artist’s intended message.

Developing a consistent personal brand, Miles said, is key to establishing an audience and attracting the attention of galleries scouting for artists on social media like Instagram.

“When you’re finding your audience, you have to stay consistent,” Jeppesen said. “You have to do it. You can’t give up, even though maybe it doesn’t seem like people are finding you. In essence, you’re actually not finding your audience, they’re finding you.”

He said artists must stick to their passion and remember why they started, and in time they will find their people.

There is, however, a new issue that comes with widespread access to creative work on platforms like Instagram, Weir said. An oversaturated market of creative work has created a new type of gatekeeper.

“You can get washed out if you don’t set yourself apart as a professional. Because now you can go look at #art and 95 percent of it is garbage,” he said. “It’s a catch-22. You can stand out or you can just get washed out and it’s kind of up to you on how professional you present yourself.”

“You need to have a certain packaged thing that people can remember you by and think of you by and that’s not to say there’s not room to grow, but you certainly have to edit and think about your larger body of work,” Magnuson said.

Miles said The Art Spirit Gallery will receive weekly email inquiries from artists who have not developed a proper professional presence.

The lack of a digital portfolio, Magnuson said, will also negatively affect modern artists seeking to host their work in professional venues.

Jeppesen said developing an online brand and presenting it to curators and collectors is just a new version of an old phrase: luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

“You now have the ability to shine and it’s just the click of a button or a post that could communicate what you do,” he said.

A challenge that comes with marketing art and creating branding is that it may distract from an intangible, sacred quality handed down through generations of artists, Launder said.

“A lot of art is not the result of what you’re looking at. It’s the process of someone’s thinking to get it to that point,” he said. “You’re trying to put something tangible or expressible in between paint being in a can and paint being on a canvas. That middle ground between being transferred is everything.”

Launder said because so many artists are producing work in so many ways — be it visual, performance or otherwise — how they approach molding raw materials into a finished art form presents exactly why the mystique and beauty of art elevates it beyond a consumer product.

He said, however, to a certain degree there is an art to most products and environments.

For Jeppesen, the advent of the digital age has presented new opportunities to deliver and sell artistic endeavors, and technology like virtual reality only accentuates the possibilities that come with art.

“It’s the feeling and emotion that I have when I’m there. That’s what art truly is. It’s how you feel,” Jeppesen said. “If I can still make people feel that way, I’ll do that by any means necessary. Art isn’t about the paint. It’s not about the pixel. It’s not about the line. It’s about what it means. And if I can still communicate that message then I will by any means.”

Launder said he interprets an Andy Warhol quote as defining the inseparable nature between art and commerce: “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

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Thrux Lawrence, 206 N. Third St., Coeur d’Alene

SeeJepp Creative, 424 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene

Jacklin Arts and Cultural Center, 405 N. William St., Post Falls