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Episode 46 of Art Talk is all about the power of telling stories with art. Stories are a great way to communicate and engage with your audience.
Telling stories is what captivates audiences. People love stories, and it may not sound like it, but everyone has a story to tell, multiple stories even. The world is built on stories.
Switching my music practice to the painting practice I found the same. Once a storyteller, always a storyteller, hence why I paint portraits as a story. In my work, you find vibrant colours. These colours resonate with music, the palette I used whilst playing the flute is now the palette I use for my art.
Recently I read a brilliant book by Lisa Bloom: The Story Telling Advantage. Highly recommended btw. This book showed me that stories rule, that telling stories in your art marketing is what people like, what draws people to you. If the stories are true to you, they express your voice and not someone else’s.
I always say and write Your Story Matters. It does, people love to hear, read or see your story. The impact of an impacting story is what brought me to currently painting the portrait of Frida Kahlo. Her story is one of unfathomable pain, but also of endurance and an incredible zest for life.
The power of telling stories with art
Let us talk about failure. Let’s be honest. Not every painting is right immediately, and sometimes you have to set it aside for a while to see what is off. In the written story too, my friend told me she throws chapters away and starts all over again. It is a process and telling people about that and how you deal with that is important.
Perfectionism doesn’t exist, and many can relate. It is so easy to see the finished painting, hear the finished composition or read the finished book. In that journey of the artist are many moments she feels she either failed or can’t see or read it, simply because they were too close for it for such a long time.
I think many can relate to these things, nevertheless, awareness is important to understand the power of telling your story or stories, the daily mundane ones too, not the big life-shifting ones only. Telling stories is very rewarding for you as well as your audience.
A story about what you do can be equally compelling for people. As visual artists you can also show this, the time laps, the work in progress and close-up shots are what people like. Also what you do and with what kind of materials, how do you describe it and how does it relate to your values. All these can attract the people who relate with what you do.