News:  This Saturday, 10-12 AM at the Bricolage, 206 S. Main, in Goshen.  Arts Coaching Group!  $5 for 30 minutes of art/life coaching, you can't beat it anywhere and we are guaranteeing it or your money back.

Megan is working on a mural in Niles, and Adam has had a breakthrough in the process of working on his fiction and is into the second half of that rough draft and beginning to think about finding an editor and possibly even a publisher.

Notes:  Today is the third blog in the series on the Artists' Growth Cycle.  See below to read in order.

While we all love to say that making art is about the journey or Process, the reality is that we become increasingly frustrated if we don't actually finish some work at some point.  Some pieces take years, others a matter of hours or minutes, and yet we can't seem to get there.  With some coaching, or as the Beatles said, "I get by with a little help from my friends," eventually we do get there. 

However it is that you decide a piece is done, now is the time to take it to an audience.  Your audience may be the one person the work is created especially for, or it may be millions of filmgoers.

Recently we've been tweaking our target market for our painting business.  I spent some time this morning with Russell in customer service at ServiceMagic.com figuring out the best way to get the most business for the least expense through their advertising.  We cancelled advertising some of the services where we routinely lose bids, (regular house painting,) and increasing advertising for things we're more likely to win: mural jobs and specialty painting.  Really the principle for finding your audience for artwork is no different, even if you aren't selling it! 

There are a lot of issues that go into the Completion phase on the Growth Cycle.  Besides marketing and sales, we also talk about finding the X-Factor, and in fact there is an element of feedback here as well.  We discuss feedback more in the next phase, suffice to say for now that as this is a cycle, feedback is one of those things that could enter the picture somewhere between the beginning of the Process and the period after Completion.

What's the X-Factor?  We have some differing views among friends I think at this point, and we're hashing that out.  But basically, the X-Factor is finding the thing that makes the piece or work really sing.  There is a chance that not every piece you finish will sing for everyone who experiences it, and that's a chance we all have to take when we say the words "it is finished."  One of the biggest fears artists face is the fear that not everyone will "Get it" or "Like it."  Let's just eliminate that from our vocabulary right now because I've done enough work that I considered "good" and enough I considered "Bad" and put it out there enough to know that exciting everyone is impossible and perhaps not even desirable.  Some of my "worst" work still gets positive comments.  (Did you know I once produced an entire album of original music?  Wow.  The recording was terrible, making it impossible to mix or master well, the musicianship was worse than mediocre, and the themes and styles were all over the place.  And yet every once in a while some friend tells me, as I wince, that they listened to it the other day and found something to enjoy in it.  Yeah, I say, I had fun doing that.)

Completion is the phase where I get to coach people on exhibition and marketing, and that's always exciting for me.  But there's more to it.  Some people aren't ready to exhibit publicly or market their work, and yet they do want to know they've finished something, and improved.  You need to know that's okay, and that I still think it is worth doing.  We're halfway through the Growth Cycle because when we've finished a work, we now have something concrete to build upon!