A good friend, who I really have time for – and now, when I think about it, there are about as many really good friends in today’s world as there are other inhabited planets in the cosmos – regularly reminds me that it would be easier to market my work if I thought now and again about the motivation behind it. (He owns an advertising and design agency and, as the business has notched up quite a few successful years, I assume that he knows what he’s talking about…) Of course he knows what he’s talking about. And it’s possible that he’s right. And yes…, the others who give me well-meaning advice and give me a symbolic kick up the backside are probably right too.
It could actually work. The question is: do I actually want to?

Some of the people who I get talking to at airbrush exhibitions and other trade fairs assume that I belong more to the “serious” artist category, earning pots of money for my work. Sure…, I also have an elephant at home in the cellar who treads down the notes now and then so that I can get more of them in…! But I can put all of you thinking like this out of your misery. The only thing I definitely have is the space where I could store the sacks of money…, if I had any.

In a nutshell: I believe – and this is my personal interpretation – it is very difficult, if not thinking the unthinkable, to become rich and famous (as the saying goes) today by painting pictures of the likes of mine, if indeed they have a category at all. Why…? Because I paint what I like and because the market has reached saturation point. As I said, it’s my personal interpretation.

I could, without a doubt, just set off and flog myself and my pictures at every suitable and unsuitable opportunity (and as I am also a musician, I know what it is to rub organisers up the right way until you have blisters on your hands, only then to be unceremoniously rejected by the aforementioned along the principles of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” and be expected to vanish into thin air), but if anyone thinks I am going to set off on with my pictures under my arm and a tube of Vaseline in my pocket in order to brown-nose where the sun has never shone, then got they’ve got another think coming. That’s the point. As I have already said, I have painted thus far what I like. And I think I will continue to do so…