We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Leslie Parke. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Leslie below.

Leslie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your career and how did you resolve those issues?

There are many myths around artists making a living from their art. “Starving” and “artist” are mentioned in the same breath all the time. Artists who make a living from their art are accused of being sellouts. I don’t buy into either of those characterizations. The challenge for an artist is to create the circumstances under which they can produce their best work. For some that means having a day job, for others, having a beneficiary, for me it was to embrace the business side of my work. I’m lucky, I enjoy that. It is a puzzle and a game. I set the criteria – producing my best work and selling it – then I see if there is a way for me to do that.

You can plan all you want, but, as Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan, until he gets punched in the mouth.” I’ve been making my living from my work for 46 years, and now I have a plan for when I get punched in the mouth.

My strategy from the beginning was to keep my expenses low. When I did well, I reinvested in my career – buying materials, consulting with experts, learning a new skill. I would also fill the larder and pay bills ahead. With that done, I knew that I had a certain amount of time taken care of and I can free my brain to concentrate on my work. But then the punches came.

A recession in 1985 made me wonder if I would ever sell a painting again. On top of that, just as I began to think that it might be good to get a day job, I realized that no one was hiring. I was bailed out by family, but I never wanted to be in that position again.
When the recession of 2009 hit, I was better prepared. I had consulted with SCORE, an organization of retired businessmen who advise small businesses. They had zero comprehension of the art world, but they asked me to do one thing that has served me well over the years. They asked me to track my sales against the stock market. After collecting over 20 years of data, this is what I found: When the market drops 2000 points, I am pretty much assured that I won’t have any sales for two years! The market goes down and two months later my art market crashes. When the market picks up again there is a delay of two months and then my market returns. If you wait until the market has turned to start producing work, you will be too late!

Yet all of this is quite counter intuitive. When we live in a time of scarcity and all our efforts come to naught, we become depressed, we hoard, or we give up. But I look at this, or any limitation, as part of the puzzle. In 2009 I thought, What opportunity is uniquely available to me in this dire situation? No one is going to bother me for two years, I can take this time to do a large project, ambitious pieces, that I might not have the concentration for when I am prepping several exhibitions.

I knew that no matter how small or inexpensive I made my work, no one was going to buy it. So, instead, I concentrated on the project most compelling to me.

I read the situation correctly and two months after the market started to improve, I was given an exhibition in Houston. Still a little shell-shocked from the downturn, I offered work in a variety of sizes and prices. To my surprise and delight, it was the largest, most expensive work that sold first. Collectors who had stopped buying during the downturn had a pent-up desire to resume their collecting.

This entrepreneurial approach saved me from despair during tough times and ultimately saved my business as an artist.

Leslie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My paintings feature complex layers of color and gesture that are worked until the surface vibrates with an energetic field that reflects and refracts light…. an Aurora Borealis in a zip-lock bag.

I attended Bennington College in Vermont, an institution steeped in the tradition of Modernist painting in the 1960s and 70s that was an intellectual hub for the so-called Second New York School, or Color Field painting. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and upon graduation found the perfect “day job” working with German documentary filmmaker, Michael Marton as a sound technician and production assistant. We filmed boxer Mike Tyson and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Brant, among others, for PBS and German television. I eventually collaborated with Brant on a piece called Inside Track for the Holland Festival, the Netherlands’ largest performing arts festival. Twelve years later, I completed a series of paintings about boxers, using a press pass from Tyson’s former trainer to take photos of fights ringside.

While working in film, I established my art studio on the fourth floor of a nineteenth century factory building in Cambridge, New York and began building a professional career over the next 46 years. By 1985 I was painting full-time, supporting myself entirely from the sales of my work through galleries and direct sales. Three galleries of my work span the entire floor of her Cambridge studio, featuring changing exhibitions throughout the year.

I am a recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Grant, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest grant as artist-in-residence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, and the George Sugarman Foundation Grant, among others. My exhibitions include the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Museum of the Southwest in Midland, Texas, the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, the Milwaukee Art Museum in Wisconsin, the Bennington Museum, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My work is in numerous museums and corporate collections and in galleries in Houston, Boston, Maine and California.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When Covid hit in the spring of 2020, I had paintings en route to an exhibition in Florida. They ended up being stored by the shipper for over a year. I spent the first weeks of Covid applying for an emergency grant through the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). They had jumped into action to help artists and were giving out grants in rounds. Artists could keep applying if they hadn’t received a grant yet. By round four, NYFA sent us a message that basically said that if you aren’t actually homeless, you should not continue to apply. Overall, I filled out 14 applications to various grants and I got nowhere so I switched my focus.

Like many small businesses I was able to apply for a small PPP loan and also for a Small Business Loan. With the SBL loan I borrowed enough money to get me through the year. The goal was to create peace of mind to be able to concentrate on my painting.

The Covid challenge was different than the market debacles I mentioned earlier. Going into it, we were afraid for our lives. In my case, I was cut off from my friends and family – living and working alone – amidst the daily death counts and the efforts to get protective gear. What do you do as an artist in the midst of that? I decided to concentrate on my newly constricted world. I started to paint large paintings of the frost on my studio window – not what you could see through the window, but what was ON the window. Over weeks and then months I slowly made my way across these large canvases, as though I were trekking over a vast frozen landscape.

My evenings were taken up by watching Scandinavian police procedurals on Netflix. I started taking photos of the frozen landscapes behind the main action. This, too, found its way into my paintings.

As all our lives moved more and more online, I decided to redo my website. I looked at many artist websites to see what drew me in the most. I settled on “Viewing Rooms.” This became an invaluable tool to give the viewer a way to immerse themselves in a body of work. A “Viewing Room” might represent a virtual exhibition, but it was more than that. I filled it with videos I narrated with information about what influenced and inspired the work. It was as though I was walking the viewer through my studio and explaining what was on my mind with each piece.

To accomplish this, I worked with a web developer (although Nina is much more than that) who was quarantined in London. We zoomed, sent files via WeTransfer, and hammered our way through a major redo of the site and the development of the “Viewing Room.”

She suggested that we call the “Covid” Viewing Room, “A Year Inside.” I mentioned to her that I had kept a journal, and we pulled quotes from the journal. This would serve as our “background noise.” It was in the midst of THIS, that these paintings were created.

I shared the process of my work on social media. After posting a 14-second video of the paintings on my wall, I received a request to buy one of the paintings. I was paid for it right away, but they didn’t take delivery on it until they were able to get back to their home in Florida, nearly a year later.

I entered “the year inside” as though it was an adventure, and that is very much how I experienced it. It was a great lesson for my business, for my painting, and for my life. It was also a period of incubation for the work that I am doing now.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

There are several books that I have discovered at each stage of my career. As an emerging artist, Allyson Stanfield’s “I’d Rather Be in the Studio” was quite useful. Also, “Art/Work: Everything You Need to Know (and Do) As You Pursue Your Art Career” by Heather Darcy Bhandari. “The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love” by Jackie Battenfield was helpful as a mid-career artist looking to further increase my sales potential.

As an established professional I recommend “Art-Write: The Writing Guide for Visual Artists” by Vicki Krohn Amorose. This book is invaluable when writing grants or for honing an artist’s statement.

There are also legal guides for artists. Some of them have sample contracts forms between artists and galleries. When a gallery sent me a contract that was absurd, I told them that I couldn’t sign it, and I sent them a copy of one of the contract templates in the book. It’s good to know there are common practices that actually work in your favor. Here is one such guide: “Legal Guide for the Visual Artist” by Tad Crawford.

The best tool that I would recommend to all artists starting out, or at any point in their career, is Artwork Archive. It is an on-line archive of an artist’s portfolio, developed by artists for artists. You can keep all pertinent information about your career in this archive: the inventory of your work, your galleries and dealers, contacts, expenses etc. It has everything an artist needs to keep their career on track. It has allowed me to respond to dealers with samples of my work within minutes in customized online “viewing rooms.” There are many other wonderful things this program does, and the founders are hugely responsive to requests and suggestions by the artists. If you get nothing else, get this!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.leslieparke.com
• Instagram: @leslieparkeart (just artwork) and @parkepaint. (artwork and behind the scenes)
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LeslieParkeStudio/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leslie-parke-1a62051/
• Youtube: @LeslieParkeStudio
• Other: https://vimeo.com/leslieparke Here is the link for the Viewing Room for A YEAR INSIDE (mentioned in article). It includes video and background information: https://www.leslieparke.com/viewing-room/ayearinside

Image Credits
1,2,3 -Nina Duncan 4-Serena Kovalosky 5-Leslie Parke 6-9 – Jon Barber