We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marc Dennis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Marc, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

When I was a full-time tenured college art professor lots of parents asked me what the keys to success are for their sons and/or daughters for their chosen career path towards being an artist. I said there is no key to success but conversely there is indeed a key to failure. The key to failure is trying to please everyone all the time. The key to success – however one may define it, is very simply essentially two things – perseverance and conviction.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m an artist; essentially I paint pictures that have a somewhat twisted take on beauty, a nod to art history and an underlying sense of tongue-in-cheek humor. I work a lot – pretty much every day unless I’m on a business trip, or on vacation with my kids or spending any time with my kids for that matter. I prioritize my time – and my kids always come first. Being a father inspires me and finds its way into my art. Maybe it’s the daddy jokes or my stories – they’re in my paintings somehow somewhere. Aside from being a father and artist, I’m also the director and head instructor of an emerging artist’s mentoring program at the art students league in New York city. I’m also a holocaust scholar and lecturer on the subject of artwork made by prisoners inside Nazi concentration camps; and last but not least I continue to offer both private and public art lessons.

How did you build your audience on social media?

It was daunting and challenging albeit enjoyable opening accounts on Facebook/Meta (what seems now looking back to be long ago) and then Instagram and most recently Threads and TikTok. I have a ton of friends and connections in real life and I simply trusted the ways of the online universe to help me connect the dots and grow followers/friends. I’m a natural storyteller and I tell short stories to accompany images of my work as well as my family, weird things, etc on my posts. People seem to enjoy getting to know me personally and from my very first posts of sharing stories, images and intimate moments and memories it sort of snowballed from there.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Resilience is never ever underrated. As an artist – from grade school onward, one needs to have tough skin to accept criticism and rejection. It’s the nature of the beast because as artists we make things to look at and with looking comes seeing and with seeing comes interpretation and judgement. It was very challenging for me to hear what I perceived to be negative and critical comments from other students, teachers and friends about my work. When I realized it was merely a matter of perception I had to let it go and chose to see it as constructive as opposed to critical. I grew from those experiences.

Contact Info:

• Website: Marcdennis.com
• Instagram: @darcmennis
• Facebook: Marc Dennis
• Linkedin: Marc Dennis
• Twitter: Marc Dennis

Image Credits
Credit for headshot: John Christopher Studio