The State of AI Art Today
Artificial intelligence has reached an unusual position in the art world. The technology is advancing rapidly, AI-assisted work is beginning to sell, and millions of people are using image generators. Yet many galleries, collectors, and working artists remain deeply skeptical about whether an image produced primarily through a prompt should be considered art at all. […]
Keeping Books As an Artist (Not Just Taxes)
Keywords bookkeeping for artists, artist financial records, art business finances, tracking art sales, separating personal and business finances, artist accounting basics, creative business systems, Etsy seller bookkeeping, sustainable art business A few years into my accounting career, I audited a small retail business whose owner was genuinely talented at .the thing she sold. She had […]
Why Every Artist Needs a Style Guide (Not Just a Style)
A few weeks ago a printer I’d never worked with before called me to confirm a large order. Before she’d run a single sheet, she asked a simple question: “What’s your standard warmth adjustment on the shadows? I want to match what you sent me on the smaller test print.” I didn’t have an answer. […]
How to Turn an AI Image Into Something Only You Could Have Made
A few months ago I generated forty variations of the same idea in about twenty minutes. It was an old Miami storefront, the kind of subject I keep coming back to, and I typed a description into an AI image tool mostly out of curiosity. Faded paint. Hand-lettered signage. Late afternoon light. Within seconds I […]
Why Every Unfinished Project Is a Liability (What Bad Debt Taught Me About Creative Work)
For a stretch of my accounting career, part of my job was reviewing a company’s accounts receivable and asking an uncomfortable question nobody wanted to answer out loud: which of these balances are actually going to get collected, and which of them are just sitting there making the balance sheet look healthier than it is. […]
Why Every Artist Needs a Monthly Close (What Reconciling Books Taught Me About Creative Work)
For twenty-some years, the last week of every month looked the same to me. Before anything else happened, the books had to close. Every account got reconciled, every transaction got matched to something that actually explained it, and nothing moved into the new month until the old one had been fully accounted for. It didn’t […]
How to Develop Your Own Art Style (A Practical Process, Not a Personality Trait)
A while back I wrote about the moment I realized my style hadn’t been a decision at all. It had already formed quietly, in the background, while I was busy thinking about something else. I stand by that. It’s true. But it’s also incomplete, and I’ve heard from enough artists since then to know it […]
Why Most Artists Undercharge (And What Auditing Taught Me About Pricing Art)
Early in my accounting career, I audited a small manufacturing company that had been pricing its flagship product the same way for eleven years. Nobody could tell me why. The number wasn’t wrong exactly. It covered materials, covered labor, left a thin margin on top. But nobody in the building had actually recalculated it in […]
Curating a Cohesive Art Portfolio From Work That Wasn’t Made to Match
A collector emailed me last month asking for a link to my “portfolio.” I sent her three places: my website, my Etsy shop, and my Instagram grid. She wrote back a few days later, politely confused. The website felt like one artist. The Etsy shop, built around print bundles I’d assembled over different years, felt […]
Why Your Art Style Keeps Changing (And Why That Might Not Be a Problem)
A collector once asked me a question I didn’t have a good answer for. He had bought a print from an early Miami architecture series I’d made, the warm, sun-bleached storefronts I still return to now and then. A year later he messaged me about a newer piece, something looser and more abstract, built from […]