5 steps to building a professional life for your art

Arash Shahnavaz, founder of Kei London Visual Art Agency and tutor on our Art Practice and Business Short Course, tells us about the practical steps that turn a body of work into a career.

Most artists are not stuck because the work is not good enough. They are stuck because nothing around the work is set up to carry it.

I see this constantly. An artist has 10 or 15 years of serious practice behind them, a studio full of work, and no way for anyone outside their immediate circle to find it, understand it, or buy it. There is no clear statement, no properly photographed portfolio, no coherent pricing, no record of what has happened so far. The work is real. The professional life around it does not exist.

Art schools teach making, and they teach it very well. What happens the day after the degree show is largely left to chance, and the artists who suffer most are not the recent graduates. They are the ones 10 years further on, who have quietly built something substantial and have no route to market for it. I call this the mid-career gap, and it is what the Art Practice and Business Short Course was built to close.

Recognition can arrive very late. The photographer Madeleine de Sinéty found a wide audience only towards the end of her life. That is worth knowing, but it is not a plan. The goal is not to be discovered at 92.

Here are the 5 steps I would give any artist who wants to change that, in the order I would do them.

1. Document before you promote

This is the first thing I check and the most common failure. A strong body of badly photographed work loses to an average body of well photographed work every single time, because almost every decision made about your work is made by someone looking at a screen.

Before you write to a single gallery, photograph everything properly. Consistent lighting, accurate colour, plain background, plus one installation shot where possible. Record the title, date, medium, dimensions and price of every piece in one file. This is not admin. It is the asset your entire career runs on, and it is the cheapest professional upgrade available to you.

2. Write 1 sentence you can say out loud

If you cannot describe your practice in a single sentence without apologising for it, no gallery, curator or collector is going to be able to describe it for you.

There are 4 ways artists usually get this wrong. They overclaim, using inflated theoretical language that promises more than the work delivers. They stay undecided, describing 3 possible practices instead of 1. They are self-deprecating, undercutting the work before anyone else can. Or the work is simply under documented, so there is nothing concrete to point to.

The test I use in class is this: describe your work to someone outside the art world in 60 seconds. What survives is the real idea. What falls away is borrowed language.

3. Price deliberately, then hold it

Pricing that moves around tells buyers you are guessing, and buyers are extremely good at spotting a guess.

Build a rational structure instead. Set prices by size, medium and edition so that any 2 works of similar scale sit at a similar level. Write it down. Apply it to everyone, including friends. Then raise it deliberately, on the back of a show, a sale record or a change in demand, rather than hopefully.

The point is not to be expensive. The point is to be legible. A collector who understands your pricing can imagine buying again.

4. Build relationships in the years when you are not asking for anything

Almost every opportunity an artist gets comes from someone who already knows the work. Not from a cold email, and not from an open call.

That means the relationship building has to happen before you need it. Go to shows. Follow curators as their careers move between institutions. Support other artists publicly. Be useful. Then, when you do have something to ask for, you are asking someone who already has a picture of your practice in their head.

And when you ask, be specific. The most common reason an artist gets no reply is not that the work is weak. It is that the request was unclear.

5. Keep a record

1 file. Every exhibition, sale, commission, award, residency, piece of press and collection your work has entered, with dates.

This feels like the least creative thing on the list and it is the one that changes most outcomes. Funders ask for it. Galleries ask for it. Institutions ask for it. Artists who cannot produce it lose opportunities they had genuinely earned, simply because they could not evidence them.

A career is built from a record, and the record is what people ask to see.

And finally

None of this asks you to make different work. The most common worry I hear at the start of the course is that thinking commercially will compromise the practice. It does not. This was never about making your work less artistic. It is about giving your work a stronger professional life.

Arash Shahnavaz teaches Art Practice and Business Short Course at Chelsea College of Arts. This inspiring short course is designed to offer emerging artists a comprehensive guide to establishing a strong and sustainable presence in today's competitive art market. Learn more about the course.

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