Navigating the Challenges and Triumphs of an Art Career

Are you ready to master the art of painting and discover the secrets behind a successful art career? Join us for an enlightening conversation with internationally acclaimed artist Peter Roux, who takes us on an inspiring journey from his early interests in architecture to his triumphant focus on painting. Peter candidly shares the pivotal moments and influential mentors that shaped his artistic path, reflecting on his education at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and his initial foray into commercial art. Get a deep dive into his artistic philosophy, as he explores the impact of the overwhelming proliferation of imagery on our perception of the natural world.

In this episode, we delve into the evolution of Peter's artistic style, from monochromatic and value-focused pieces to vibrant and representational works featuring clouds and nature forms. Peter opens up about the ever-present tension between declaring a painting finished and the desire for continuous improvement, offering invaluable insights for fellow artists. We also tackle the unique marketing challenges faced by artists, with Peter sharing effective strategies and potential pitfalls to avoid. Whether you're an aspiring artist or an established creator, this episode is packed with practical advice and inspiration to help you navigate your artistic career with confidence.

Website: https://www.peterrouxart@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PeterRouxArtist/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-roux-a29a0b25/
Social Media: @peterrouxart

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Transcript

Laura : 0:40

Good morning. I'm your host, laura Wagenknecht, ceo of Mosaic Business Consulting, and you're listening to the Mosaic Life with Laura W. Mosaic is a bunch of pieces that, when put together, make up the whole in a really beautiful way. This show plans to discuss the various pieces of a business throughout different industries and how these pieces, when put together, can help develop a better, more efficient, efficient and effective running of your business. To reach me, contact bizradious.

Laura : 1:11

And our special guest today is none other than the internationally acclaimed Peter Rue, who is a full-time artist and teacher living in and working in Asheville, north Carolina. Originally, he was from Boston and he earned his BFA and MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has a studio in the River Arts District here in Asheville. His artwork can be seen in many galleries throughout the US and internationally, and he has had numerous solo exhibitions all over the world. Peter works primarily in oils, but also creates drawings and monotypes. Using nature as a subject, he explores not only natural forms, but also how we experience the world around us.

Laura : 2:00

We are confronted by more images on a daily basis than any other time in history, and this is invariably affected how we see and experience the world, and Peter is interested in how the language of imagery influences how we take in the natural world. And Peter is interested in how the language of imagery influences how we take in the natural world. He sees all images as windows with predetermined edges, sizes and layers of information, and recently Peter has focused on land, clouds, water and trees, often combining representational approaches alongside elements of abstraction, areas of marks and flourishes. That reminds the viewer that the pieces are not the things they represent, but instead the result of the experience of seeing them. And I can't wait to get into that a bit more because I'm a little bit trepidatious, if you will, about abstraction. So this is going to be interesting. Anyway, peter also tends to work with one-on-one with select artists to help them strengthen their work, develop gallery relationships and navigate the challenges of working as a professional artist. So welcome to the show, peter. It is absolutely a pleasure to have you.

Peter: 3:23

Well, thank you, Laura. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for asking me to do this. I'm excited.

Laura : 3:27

Yeah, yeah. When I found out you're giving a talk on Wednesday, I thought this is going to be fantastic. Or Thursday sorry, coming up on the 20th right. Yes, thought this is going to be fantastic. Or Thursday, sorry, coming up on the 20th Right. So, yeah, Well, so I'm curious what got you interested in becoming an artist?

Peter: 3:45

Well, you know it's. It's one of those stories that probably is a little bit boring to listen to and in the sense that I I don't really remember any time where I didn't want to be an artist, I kind of my earliest memories were always of drawing and of thinking about, you know, when I got old enough to sort of think about these things what being an artist would be like.

Peter: 4:04

as an adult, I didn't really know what form it would take. I think for many years, as I was a child and as I was, you know, growing into young adulthood, I think that I was kind of vacillating between different possibilities. I think at one point I thought about going into architecture, but I realized that my interest in architecture was really less about the buildings themselves and more about the drawings that one could make.

Peter: 4:28

And so really it was always creating visual imagery that was really driving me.

Peter: 4:33

And then, as I was in high school, I was really fortunate because I went to a school that had a teacher, an art teacher, who really took me under his wing and guided me. He was a working artist himself and spent a good portion of my senior year just doing independent studies with him. I had kind of gotten all of my credits together to graduate already and so that was really, um, pretty beneficial to me and I think at that point I I think I had it in my head if I'm going to try and make a living as an artist, I think I need to look at commercial art of some kind, and so I started getting interested in illustration. Um and um, you know we're talking about the early 80s. I graduated from high school in 1983. Um, this was really pre-internet and it was pre-digital and so you know you could still see lots of illustrators work on the covers of magazines and inside them and in books and things like that, and certainly that world has changed pretty dramatically. But I started at school as an undergraduate as an illustration major and then quickly, through some feedback from some of my instructors, actually saying, look, your work is very painterly. I think that you're you know you might be interested in looking at the painting department. Instead, I realized that that's really kind of where my heart was, was was lying, and so I did make the switch and ended up graduating with a degree in painting, never regretted it, always thought it was the right move for me.

Peter: 6:00

I think my interest began to really expand into what it means to make art, what it means to be a person in the world who's making art. And I heard not too long ago a distinction. Someone said something like the only difference between an artist and someone who is not an artist is that the artist makes art, and that's really sort of where it starts and stops. And that's kind of meaningful to me because I think that I think that that's that really kind of defines it. I, you know, don't think that I could exist very well and successfully in the world if I wasn't making art. It's just sort of been kind of bred into or I it, I it's so, it's so deep into me now that I can't really imagine not doing it. And I feel really lucky because I'm never. I never feel like I'm at a at a loss for ideas. Um, I, I might have the opposite problem sort of too many ideas all at the same time. But, um, but I I've never sort of at a loss for wanting to make something else and it's that process of making that I really feel so comfortable in and so fulfilled in. So that was really kind of my journey and I never really looked back.

Peter: 7:09

I did, between undergraduate and going back to graduate school, for about three or four years I worked in the retail, the retail coffee industry actually and found very quickly that that wasn't for me.

Peter: 7:21

And so, going back to school and and and got a graduate degree and and you know, I I did it primarily because at the higher ed level, um, an MFA in studio art is the terminal degree, so you need to have that to be able to be, to be to, to teach, if that's the route you want to play red, yeah, I never wanted to do that full time.

Peter: 7:46

I was always worried that if I did that I'd kind of get lost into it and, you know, find myself not able to do my own work as much. But I thought, well, you know to have it so that if I ever needed to, if I ever found myself not able to make a living and to support myself, making work that I'd have that to fall back on, which you know, on paper sounds great. The reality is is that that's not the easiest profession to be able to kind of get into as well. So and I did teach. I taught adjunct faculty at a university up in the Boston area for a few years, admittedly trying to teach as little as possible because I really wanted to spend as much time in the studio as I could. And after a few years.

Peter: 8:27

My studio practice got busy enough and successful enough that I dropped the teaching and, as you mentioned in your intro, I do work with selected individual artists. Usually it's work critique as opposed to instructional paintings. Also, we talk a lot about in some cases, depending on what their needs are, about gallery representation, how to work with galleries and navigate that whole area, as well as a little bit about marketing and really kind of ways to be able to kind of structure a life as an artist professional artist, you know full time, you know, as a goal. There's a lot of pitfalls. There's a lot of places that that are are sort of maybe less familiar. There are a lot of very particular, idiosyncratic, idiosyncratic things about being an artist, especially from the from the professional side.

Peter: 9:23

A lot of I learned on my own and I learned through a lot of trial and error, heavy, heavy on the air, and and took me. You know, took me quite a while, but I've been doing this now for a while. I sort of stopped at one point a couple of years ago and went oh my gosh, I've been working now as as an artist professionally for 20 years, which kind of crept up on me. So I went into this situation where I was suddenly I don't know, I guess a veteran didn't even realize it.

Laura : 9:52

But you know, you bring something up, peter, which I think is really important is that you know all of us entrepreneurs struggle with making errors, right? Nobody likes to make mistakes. And yet you're in an industry that you know people might see abstracts, abstracts on a wall and and think, ok, my five year old could do that or something like that. But in truth, there's method to the madness, if you will, and there's conceptually an approach for specific reasons. And I'm curious how does somebody not think, or how does somebody who's an artist determine when something is done, when you feel like you have reached a final product and haven't made that mistake, if you will or haven't made an error?

Peter: 10:47

Well, that's a really interesting question and I think that it's one that I, if you will or haven't made an error.

Peter: 10:48

Well, that's a really interesting question and I think that it's one that I, in the past, have sort of struggled to kind of figure out myself.

Peter: 10:54

I kind of found that I was developing a set of criteria for determining when a painting was finished and when I felt like something was successful.

Peter: 11:04

And I think every artist really needs to come up with that, and they need to come up with their own, and some of those can cross over into what other people you know tend to utilize and measure as well. But at the end of the day, I think we all kind of have come up with our own set of criteria to kind of determine that. And what's also really interesting, I should add, is that is that you know, I think it's probably a little heavy handed to say, oh, a painting is never finished, but there's a little grain of truth in that, in the sense that I'll encounter a piece that maybe I did 10 years ago I haven't seen in 10 years and I'll look back and still I'll have this urge to go back in and fix something or change something or alter something, and I have to keep myself from doing that if I have the opportunity, because these paintings, after a certain point, they need to have a life of their own.

Laura : 11:54

These pieces have to exist in the world and they mark time in a way is really kind of unique and interesting.

Peter: 11:57

You know, the work that I did 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, is not like the work I do now and so and there's a and there are good reasons for that and that's a good thing. They still can hold power, but they're not. They're not what I'm doing now necessarily.

Laura : 12:13

And I yeah, sorry to interrupt, I'm just curious. Can you share one example of how your work may have differed from your earlier work.

Peter: 12:21

Sure, oh gosh, yeah, there's more color in it now than there used to be. I always kind of considered myself to be not officially a tonal painter, because that is a whole category of approach to painting. As much as I was one. I really grew into painting out of drawing, and I always saw color by virtue of value, the darks and the lights, how light or dark a particular value was, and I sort of look at the world with that kind of a measure. And so my first love really was drawing, which is limiting, really. It's limiting color to just one monochromatic statement and variations of it lights and darks.

Peter: 13:00

And so my early work didn't contain quite as expansive of a color palette as it does now. I began to kind of deliberately push myself a few years ago to start to expand my palette a little bit, was finding that I wasn't giving myself the opportunity to utilize some of those tools, namely, you know, more, an expanded you know series of colors that was there and available to me, and so I started taking advantage of that a little bit more. And that's definitely one way. Another way is my subject matter has changed. You know, I make a big distinction between subject and content in art of any kind, subject is what I'm focusing on, what I'm using from the world to create the work, what I'm focusing on, the subject that I'm kind of approaching. Content is what ends up coming out as a statement about that subject, and what it does.

Peter: 13:55

And so my subjects. When I first was in school, I was a complete abstract painter. I was not what we call non-representational. It wasn't anything identifiable in my work that you could say, oh, there's an apple, there's a tree, there's a beach, there's a cloud. But that started to change after I got out of school and I started working more representationally. So the subject shifted very much in that respect. A few years ago I had been working very much in landscapes I really look at myself as a landscape artist primarily and had been working with land and sky breakups, with horizon lines. You know what you think about when you think of land. And then at one point I kind of looked up and started painting clouds and started painting them in these frames and in these paintings where there was no land, everything had fallen away.

Laura : 14:45

And if you had?

Peter: 14:45

ever told me, prior to that, that I'd be painting clouds, I would have told you you were crazy, because I thought, they're so romantic, they're so, they're so emotionally driven. People have such personal relationships with them that what can I possibly add to it?

Peter: 14:58

They're too epic on their own, you know but, I, realized that there was a lot in there that I could use as an intro into the work and that's with the cloud series, kind of how I see it. It's a very universally known subject. We all look up into the sky and we share this universal experience of seeing clouds. They're very, very familiar and I decided to use that form as an entry into the work.

Peter: 15:22

So, whereas the subject is clouds, to me the content is much different than clouds, but I'm using clouds as kind of that vehicle um so and, and as you mentioned in your intro, I work with with trees as a subject, I work with water as a subject, um and uh and other land forms, um, so it's all nature-based um. But but again that that has has kind of shifted, uh, uh based, or compared to what it was a few years ago.

Laura : 15:49

Yeah, and I'd like to go back to help some of our entrepreneurs who might be listening on this call and thinking about. Two of the things that you mentioned in particular was the marketing aspect, that the art world is unique in that industry and that marketing for artists. There are so many different avenues that could be taken and I'm curious what would be some of the pitfalls that you would encourage artists to avoid and what do you find works the best for artists in general? In reference to marketing. Sorry.

Peter: 16:33

Those are really good questions. In terms of pitfalls, I think you know, like you mentioned, there are lots and lots of different ways to market yourself and there's certainly more ways than ever existed when I first started out. You know, when I first started out the internet was still pretty young. Not everybody had a website, all of that stuff was still a little bit out of reach and there was no social media whatsoever. And in you know, 20 short years, that all has has changed pretty dramatically.

Peter: 17:01

Um and so, you know, the one of the first places that I think about when I think about marketing is uh, particularly for entrepreneurs, people who are self-employed is is social media. Um, you know, social media are these platforms which, theoretically, are free to use. There, you know, you're not charged a fee to have an account. There are certainly ways that you can pay and ways that you can sponsor posts and all kinds of things. You can spend a lot of money if you want to, but they do exist out there, and so they are a really good vehicle some more than others, depending on their format and how they're structured to be able to share your work and to be able to get the word out that you exist. As we all know, it's a super saturated situation now. There are lots and lots and lots of people who are promoting themselves on social media, on every platform that exists.

Peter: 17:53

And so then the question becomes how do you stand out, how do you get more followers? How do you get the attention? And one of the pitfalls that I think that can occur with artists is that they get drawn down into that rabbit hole so much of trying to pursue as many followers as they can get with as many as many hits on their posts as they can that it begins to change how they are making the work that they make. They start to perhaps change the work's content, subject, form, to appeal to what they consider larger audiences want, even if it's not what they want to do, and that can start to make big changes in the work itself as well. As you know, social media can be great.

Peter: 18:37

It can also be an incredible time suck, and you know you can spend all day posting and all day trying to figure out slick Instagram reels to do and that's, you know, there's only so many hours in the day that will take hours out of out of working, and so I think that pursuit can get out of control for some people really easily. I try and limit how much I'm doing on social media and I try not to worry too much about the amount of followers that I have or even the amount of likes or hits that I'm getting on any given post. I kind of think of it as a long game that these are tools. They are not the only tools that are out there, but they're certainly tools and they're available for me to use. I limit my expectations as to what they can do and I let the thing grow as organically as I can, and that takes time, but I think that's a smarter way for me to be able to do it.

Peter: 19:32

So I don't fall into that rabbit hole and I don't finding that this is literally all that I'm doing. And you know, and I think that that every week, every month, every year, things change and there are more and more opportunities. I think an artist needs to be careful about what those opportunities really are versus what they're, not what they're asking of you. There are a lot of scams out there that are directed specifically towards artists to steal their money. I've been subject to a lot of them, and as have everybody that I know, so that's a tough one too.

Laura : 20:09

Yeah, and I really appreciate what you're saying because it's so true and I want to offer I know you're giving a talk in person, which is fabulous in Asheville Can you let people know about that and how they can reach you if they want to contact you?

Peter: 20:26

Yeah, absolutely yeah. Thanks for asking. So there's a gallery that's in my building, a wonderful gallery called Tiger Tiger Gallery. If you haven't been there, we're a Riverview Station building at 191 Lyman Street in Asheville, in the River Arts District. Mira Gerard is the owner of the gallery. She's a wonderful woman, also an artist herself. It's a beautiful space. I've been showing with her for about a year now and I'm really enjoying the process, and I have work up there continually. I have a room right now full of my work, which they were gracious enough to hang all of my stuff exclusively in a room, and we have an artist talk that's scheduled for, I guess. Let me look at my calendar. I guess it's next Thursday.

Laura : 21:10

It's this Thursday. Yep, it's this Thursday.

Peter: 21:13

It's not this Thursday, it's the 20th.

Laura : 21:15

Right, it's the 20th. Right, it's this Thursday. It's it's the 20th. Right, it's the 20th great, it's this Thursday, because this show is on Monday, right, so this coming.

Peter: 21:22

Thursday, the 20th yeah and, uh, you can find Tiger Tiger Gallery online, um, tiger tiger gallerycom. They also have a great presence on Instagram, um, and you can find me on Instagram as well. Um, my handle is at Peter Rue art and my last name is spelled R O U X. I also cross post anything that I post on Instagram onto Facebook. So I am there as well though I don't spend as much time there and then threads, and there's a brand new social media platform, relatively new, called Kara C A R A, which is geared primarily towards artists. Jury's still out as to how that's going to go, but I'm there as well.

Peter: 21:59

My handle in all of those is at PeterRueArt A-R-T. And then my website is PeterRueArtistcom, so it's A-R-T-I-S-Tcom. I try and post primarily on Instagram. Any new work goes on there. Most of the work that's new goes into my website as well. Webs work goes on there. Most of the work that's new goes into my website as well. Website is where you can contact me. Certainly, you can contact me through Instagram in addition to that, and there's a list of the galleries that represent me on my website as well, and history, et cetera.

Laura : 22:31

Fantastic. Well, I really want to thank you, peter. This has been fantastic to get an opportunity to listen to you and get your expertise, so I really appreciate you spending time on the show.

Peter: 22:42

Well, I appreciate you asking and it was fun for me too.

Laura : 22:44

Thank you so much, yeah yeah, and I want to thank you for listening to the Mosaic Life with Laura W, and I want to encourage you to go to bizradious and click on shows to listen to other great hosts as well. I hope you all have a great rest of your day, thank you.