͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ This newsletter is about drawing. It goes out every Wednesday. Want to draw? Then check out my free Morning Sketches APP, 3D models, and workbook!

The Modern-Day Variants Of The Salon Des Artistes

In Cézanne’s time, you had to go through a system in which your work had to be selected for the Salon des Artistes if you wanted your paintings to be in front of the people who bought art. If you wanted to make art with your money, your work had to be there.

After his father’s death, Cézanne inherited some money and became less interested in having his work shown at the Salon des Artistes, refusing to cater to the requirements placed on him to be shown there. And he proceeded to instead go on a journey of discovery, trying to figure out how to get design back in compositions of outside scenes now that they had discovered that lighting outside was radically different from light inside studios; everything was much more evenly lit, so the artist didn’t have the shadow shapes to play with and modify for compositional reasons.

Today, we don’t know most of the artists who displayed their work at these Salon des Artistes. But we still know Cézanne and his work. In fact, much of what is made today is informed by his discoveries.

Today, we don’t have Salon des Artistes. But we do have a modern version of it: the online platforms. Places like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest use algorithms. You post your work there, and the algorithm decides whether the intended audience will see it. This is kind of like an automated version of the Salon des Artistes.

We can opt to be the Cézanne of our time, ignore the online digital platforms, and go in search, explore the vast territory of art, and maybe be remembered in one hundred years, when these platforms are probably all long gone, have disappeared like the Salon des Artistes.

Gatekeepers only gate-keep the things that have already been shown to work. There is a vast world out there of things no one has tried yet; some of it may lead to wondrous new places, and the beauty is that no gatekeeper is stopping you from going there!

If you worry that the only opportunities to be found are on social media, then let me tell you this: my comics have been published in award-winning anthologies, my cartoons are published regularly in a artists’ society newspaper, my drawings have been published on websites. None of these were through social media! All of these were from me connecting to people, usually in real life. I never had anyone reach out to me through social media because they wanted to publish something.

Everyone is looking online. Maybe the best opportunities are outside.

The comparison between social media and the Salon des Artistes is interesting; both are quite demanding when it comes to what you have to make, and with both, people generally believe you have to be there if you want to sell anything, and many opportunities are waiting for you outside of these guarded, gate-kept hierarchy systems.

Yours sincerely,

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