A few days ago I have sold a painting. It’s a rare thing for me as it is for many artists and creatives but we are all kind of ashamed to admit it because we live in a system that requires everyone to hide the fact that they are not “ successful “ It was a beautiful experience that has prompted me to write about it and the result is this piece of writing that was actually not totally planned for.
I am in a nice visual dialogue with a beautiful and inspiring place that I am lucky to live
nearby. The place is the old city of Szentendre near Budapest.
It has a beautiful promenade on the Danube. I usually try to avoid painting panoramas but I felt some attraction to the wide expanse of the skies and the reflection of the river as it flows gracefully surrounded
by mountains and forests.
After finishing this watercolor, which I enjoyed painting tremendously, I packed my stuff and headed to my car
parking nearby. All of a sudden, a guy from a window on the first floor asked me to wait for him since he’d like to ask me something.
He came downstairs and told me how he enjoyed observing me paint the scene that he sees from his window all the time.
I was of course glad that someone has seen me working. We exchanged Facebook pages and the next day he called to inform me that he decided to buy that painting.
Selling art is not easy.
It is actually impossible.
The simple reason so many artists and creative people have a hard time selling their art
is that it is directly related to their inner selves. How can you sell yourself?
A good work of art is not a product like so many other products that are sold on the market.
It is a piece of the artist’s soul. If it has any merit is due to a combination of basic talent, many years of disciplined study of the craft, and a balance between the vision and the ability to express that vision.
Since it is totally unique creation there is no market for it. What is a price of a product that has no market?
Precisely zero.
Interestingly, great art like that of the Old Masters of the past that hangs in our museums, has also no market value at all, because it is outside the false value monetary system that puts a price on every commodity.
So, great art has also zero value as a commodity.
This fact is of course contradicted by the outrageously high prices of art that is deemed a good investment.
Of course, almost every artist is striving somehow to get to that place where his art reaches posterity and is released from the burden to make a living from selling his art, from selling himself, selling his soul.
Van Gogh died broke without seeing a penny for his genius.
So did many artists, poets, writers, musicians, inventors, and creative people of all fields of human endeavors.
Today, as the cruelty of the capitalistic system is getting exposed on all levels, we are beginning to awaken to a new realization.
It is the reality that the scarcity principle upon which the whole economic system were built is totally wrong.
The commoditization of every value that we deeply cherish has turned human life into a brutal competition for the scarce resources that are rapidly vanishing,
Creative people of all ages show us that there is an endless source of abundance that comes from within.
And that source has no limits.
Abraham Maslow was wrong.
His pyramid of human needs is upside down. Artists and all creative people show us that we do not start from the basics of human needs that are concerned with the basic needs of the Body.
Yes, it’s true, a baby needs his mother’s milk and a warm place to be protected from harm.
It’s true that as we grow older we need a feeling of a secure home and a loving family, belonging to a tribe
grow our identity until we reach maturation and at some point self-actualization whatever that means in a world that is obsessed with entertainment, greed, and competition.
But every artist’s life is a testimony to what Jesus said when he preached to strive first for the kingdom of Heaven.
What he meant, I believe, is that life that is based on the principle of abundance and sharing will bring fulfillment and self-actualization of our highest potentials as humans with a soul that is in need of spiritual light and love as a source of every other need.
A life that is based on the principle of scarcity as in the pyramid of needs by Abraham Maslow, will inevitably lead to competition over limited resources.
And this is precisely what we see happening in the World today.
A brutal competition for what is left after the plundering of once abundant Earth.
We receive life from God as a gift.
I know that many people do not believe in God.
God as a living Spiritual Creator has been hijacked by religions.
But of course, I do not refer to the God of the Religion.
I am referring to a basic Gestalt principle that every creator and artist knows and it is the fact that you cannot
create a whole from its parts.
I will not go into the futile argument of the existence or not of God but I do want to make it explicit that all what I am saying here is based on the fact of his existence for me on a personal level.
This of course will spare any atheist reader from needlessly going any further. with reading this.
Life, like Art, has no value that we can somehow measure and compare to any other value.
It is the basis of all value that gives every other value its meaning and relative worth.
But right from the very early stages of our life, we are told that life is not free and that we have to pay for the most basic needs of our survival with some kind of currency that is invented by the greedy who dominate the World.
I will not go here into the history of the World and how the greed for power turned human life into the slaves of the few who learned how to manipulate others to choose scarcity over abundance.
Today, as we stand on the brink of total destruction of our one and only home planet that was also given to us for free it is becoming ever more obvious just how insane is the system that brought us here.
How cruel and evil its intent is to dominate our lives at all costs even if it means its own destruction.
The education systems are all based on this one basic need that is geared to make us ready for the battle of the survival of the fittest.
Science has betrayed its true purpose of finding the truth by disconnecting itself from the Good and the Beautiful.
The reason we live in a dystopia right now is precisely the fact that we allowed the greedy to disconnect the True, the Good, and the Beautiful and convince us that scarcity is real and any attempt to reverse the pyramid is futile and unscientific.
Science is supposedly based on facts but the fact of the human need for Love, Life, and Light is deemed a pure superstition. At best, it is relegated to the realm of Myths that could be studied as a form of a primitive way of thinking in the past but never real stories that survived the times and could teach us something about the magic of the human soul
when it is connected to Spiritual abundance.
In the frantic search for the solution to what is termed Global Warming or Climate Change, we are leaving out the need to reunite the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Artists and creatives of all kinds need to be included in finding the solutions for the balanced restoration of the Whole.
How to find the balance between all the parts and the Whole is the topic of my next article so thank you for reading this and thank you Zolie for helping me to close the circle of the creative process by responding from your heart.
restoring the balance between the true, the good and the beautiful
Exhibit in if cafe jazz club
Playing an angel of mercy
Life is a miracle
Morning in the studio
Musings in Dalmati Szamar cafe
Gutentor Simple Text
Gutentor Simple Text
Working on the terrace
What can be learned from sketching in cafe.
Watercolour sketching of a couple
Using GoPro camera to record myself sketching
The Sound of Form
The opening of the exhibit in IF Cafe
The opening of exhibition at Maimano cafe, Budapest
The end of summer
Gutentor Simple Text
Gutentor Simple Text
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