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Show Your Work!

Perhaps it's the new year, or perhaps it's a kind of synchronicity; I was thinking about a need to get works/images out to a broader audience while on the train this morning, then something comes along, actually a forth coming book, that ties in nicely with my internal travel dialogue.

Art making at times, is a pretty solitary practice, and as much as I love creating within those confines, the results and even the process of creating only reaches its full meaning once the images and or objects are enjoyed, critiqued or even dismissed by other people. No matter what the aim, be it to gather opinions, start a broader discourse on a subject or to just sell some stuff, then at some point we're all coveting some exposure. (This desire is often at odds with the quite natural loathing of self-promotion.)

I recently started opening my studio to the public, for arts trails and the like, and generally building on the successes of Gallery exhibitions. While I've been happy with the initial results, the holy grail is to get work out to as broader audience as possible, and that requires reaching out to the Internet. Let's face it though, the Internet is huge mind numbingly huge, and to plonk up a website expecting the masses to flock to it, is not a strategy lending itself to overnight success. (I've got a website, and crucially I've had no overwhelming major instant success).

There are artists and there are art lovers, how do we connect? I'm not sure of the best approach to take at the moment or if there is a one size fits all answer, it certainly helps to learn from the experiences of others. So with that in mind, and after going through some twitter feeds (also the train this morning), I came across a link to Show Your Work! by . Show Your Work is "A book for people who hate the very idea of self-promotion", and that sounds like something containing some of the answers I'm looking for.

Unfortunately I'll have to wail until March to gain more insight. If I find have major success down other avenues of inquiry before then, I'll let you know.

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Author: Austin Kleon - Show Your Work! - 2014
Show Your Work! (2013) Author: Austin Kleon.

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