Buying Art

Intense Rains - one of the artworks I sold in my recent exhibition Dispatches from the Arctic: Ice Stories.

What compels a person to open their wallet and buy art? Is it because they are at an art opening and get energised by the event and want to remember that excitement? Or is it because the painting is the right colour, size or subject to fit into their home decor?

Maybe it is something else entirely. Maybe it’s about connection. The longing for a spark, a thrill of connecting with something outside their experience, or something that triggers a fissure of joy within.

It is a question I've been pondering over the past few days because of the annual art trail weekend in Murwillumbah. I’ve been attending quite a few opening events, some group shows, some solo shows. There was also a showground hall which was filled with niches for individual artists to display their work.

Some of these venues were a bit disappointing for the artists. There was plenty of foot traffic through the space, but very few buyers. There were other small galleries crammed with people where red spots bloomed in abundance. What worked in one venue didn’t work in another, but why?

The other night I was getting ready to go to sleep and wanted to check out Instagram reels to see if there was anything that inspired me. I wasted a good deal of time ‘doom scrolling’ so I thought what exactly am I looking for. This in itself was worth asking so I asked “Dr Google”. My fingers seemed to type of their own accord “what am I looking for”. I thought this question was so vague and inane It would generate no results.

Instead I found site after site, many of them blogposts, addressing this exact question. That’s a bit strange I thought. Maybe others have asked this same question. The blogpost I read which really interested me seemed to talk to my deepest soul.

It spoke about longing, the external search for validation, for a feeling.

“A feeling you had inside of you long ago. It is a feeling of love, joy, and happiness that flowed out of you. It drove you to sing, to play, to be curious, to have fun, and to laugh”

The article went on to propose that what you are looking for is love. I thought about this for a long time and realised that this applied to everything, including buying art. What a buyer wants is a feeling of love, a feeling of pleasure coursing through their body.

We see an artwork and it fulfils this longing. We can imagine looking at it in our own home; remembering that feeling of wonder or curiosity or happiness that it brought.

Some compositions seem to feel ‘just right’; there is a symmetry of placement, colour and form. It ‘speaks’ to you deeply, activating the sense of pleasure within.

When you are making art there is a ‘zone’ that you enter, putting your energy and trust into the process of creation. That is communicated in the artwork to the viewer.

Falling in love with what you create is important. It means you value what you share with the world. That love shines through into your artwork.

You hope that one day, someone might come along and experience this love you have communicated. Perhaps they will buy it, perhaps not. You have done your best and hopefully enjoyed the process. The buying of art is then up to the venue, the event, the price point and the viewer’s heart.

Artist Mel Bowen with her blue bird sculpture I purchased at the Murwillumbah Art Trail exhibition.