We recently connected with Nevenka Morozin and have shared our conversation below.

Nevenka, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I was able to start earning a full time income thanks to treating art as a business from the start. What a lot of people don’t tell you is that sure, art is a creative endeavor, but if you don’t focus 60-70% of your time in business development and growing your brand, then it’s going to be really hard to ever make a full time income with it.

When I started I was just doing this as a hobby, just for fun – slowly but surely people around me started being interested in my art and asking if it was up for sale. I remember the first piece I ever sold was 7′ long by 4′ tall and I sold it for only $300! At the time I felt bad for charging $300, I though it was too much. But when you think about the fact that it took me over 2 months to make that painting, then $300 feels like a steal.
The lesson I learned here in retrospect is to value your work as if you where already earning a full time income from it but also make sure you validate it with your market, for example I started pricing my art with a day rate that I came up with based on my current expenses and how much I needed to make to survive. Then from there I increased my prices by a little by little after every sale. Now I make more as an artist than I did back in the day as an engineer! But it takes time, so you have to be patient and persevere.

Now a huge milestone for me once I figured pricing was realizing that buyers are everywhere. Think about the following, nearly every coffee shop or bar in your area would be down to host a small art show if you give them say 10-20% commission on sales. For them you’re driving free traffic to their business, for you you are showing your work to hundreds of people who wouldn’t have seen it otherwise – not to mention you’re solidifying yourself as an artist and seeing how potential customers react to your work in real life. If you collect their emails while at the show, then now you have a growing customer base that you can warm up through various email automation systems and they can all eventually become paying customers of yours!

What I’m saying is you have to treat your art as a business and be on the lookout for win/win situations you can create with other business owners or friends to showcase what you make. And hey, don’t forget that because you’re in art, you are not only limited to your canvas and your paintbrush. You are in a unique position where your craft can extend to so many different industries. You can put your art on clothing, home goods, wallpapers, bags, posters, etc. You can get really creative with how your customers can consume your art, and this is how you can offer something to anyone at any price range!

At the end of the day, your art is the heart of the business. But building these structures around it, learning about marketing, online platforms you can leverage, and also your local network – those are the keys to get started on making a full time income.

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

My name is Nevenka Morožin Rades Lemoine, I’m originally from Chile. That’s where I grew up and went to school. At 23 I graduated from Universidad Adolfo Ibañez with an engineering degree and started my own engineering firm in Chile doing IoT (internet of things) Shortly after graduating I moved to the US and worked on my tech firm remotely. I learned a bunch from that first business. My main takeaway was: if you’re going to do something, you have to go all in. That was my main issue with that first company, I had always dream of moving to the US, so by moving here while trying to build a company back home I effectively “split the baby” I wasn’t fully here, but I wasn’t fully there either. It took me a long time to eventually close that business, because so much of my identity was now tied to it. I saw myself as an engineering business owner.
You see, being an entrepreneur is huge in my family. My grandparents immigrated from Germany and Croatia to come live in Chile after the wars and they both created really successful businesses there from scratch. Shutting down my business and recognizing its failure felt like I was disappointing them, disappointing my parents but also disappointing myself. Because again – I saw myself as a successful business owner, but in reality things where not working out as great as they could have.

It’s around this time I started painting, about a year after moving to the US. Without realizing it I saw that the paintings I was creating were a reflection of that internal struggle I was feeling – they kept having very similar symbology. For example I would create various pieces that used traditional symbology to depict life’s duality: mind and body/ the spiritual vs the physical. And how there has to be a constant conversation between both to live a full life. The relationship between them was severed inside me and no matter what I did I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

I think a lot of people find themselves in situations like that, where they chose their life in a reactionary manner based on what their environment is telling them, consciously or unconsciously. And yeah, it makes sense. It’s hard to imagine new things and to see what you could actually do with your life if you took the time to quiet the world around you and see deep inside what it is you want to focus on.

Ironically enough, it took others to tell me that I didn’t need to live life like that for me to actually stop and think about what it was that I wanted. And that is what my work is about.

My work explores different situations we go through in life, how we feel, what it’s all about, why we chose what we chose, how we do things, etc. It’s a look inside that part of our ourselves that for the longest time I didn’t pay attention to because. I was so focused on what I was supposed to be doing. It took a lot of pain and self reflection to get to a point where I could say “I’m closing this business because it doesn’t align with who I am” can you believe that? I went from thinking that this business was my identity to realizing that I was a completely different person and that my purpose was to serve others in a different way.

Now through my art I hope people get to sit and have that dialog with themselves that it took me so long to realize I needed to have. That, like I said before, I only had because others saw what I couldn’t see myself.

And so fast forward to now, I have shut down that business and opened up two more that align with who I am. One is the driver of my message, my art, the other is a facilitator for those who want to pursue a different career.

In this line of thought, I found James Jean. He is an American based artist whose art reflects on who we are and why we do what we do. His work talks a lot about the concept of home and identity and how his experience growing up in the US relates back to his Asian background. He is a huge inspiration for me and my work to this day.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

Alex Hormozi is key. He has helped me grow my businesses in a way I didn’t think possible. I suggest reading both of his books “$100M Offers” and “$100M Leads” Personally the most insightful thing I found from him that made me reshape the way I thought about approaching potential business deals and partnerships is: every transaction has to be a win/win for everyone involved.
We normally approach opportunities in a very self fulfilling way – which makes total sense starting out! after all you’re probably still in the survival mindset, so what little mental energy you have to focus on business growth, you probably focus on yourself. But this is where we get things wrong as creatives.
Instead, what we should be doing is approaching each opportunity in a “how can I make sure THEY win”
So for example say you are just starting out and have a new collection of pieces coming out. You could: A. announce it on your instagram and wait for someone to somehow find you and buy a piece of yours. or you could B. go out there and find a way to promote your art that makes others gain something from it – such as organizing an art pop up at your favorite coffee shop.
Now you went from announcing a collection on instagram and ASKING something from others, to taking the extra step, setting up an art pop up, giving that coffee shop say 10-20% commission on art sales at $0 cost for them, you brought them your audience, expanded their customer base, they exposed you to their audience and gave your collection much more attention than it would’ve otherwise received if you had announced it via a cold email or instagram post. All of a sudden your collection drop became a huge event that people got to interact with, it became a fun, engaging and profitable thing that both your audience, the coffee shop owners and the coffee shop’s audience associate your art with forever.

See what thinking of your collection drop in a win/win scenario did for you? this is what I meant. Honestly Alex Hormozi as way more nuggets of information you can apply to your business, this is just one of them I found very cool.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Definitely. To motivate other creatives to go out there and pursue that career they didn’t think they should’ve pursued because it would never lead to having a mortgage and flying first class to that 5 start hotel haha No but seriously, I see so many friends of mine stuck doing things that genuinely destroy them as people. We do not deserve to live like that. If there was more business and financial education out there I’m sure we would see more people doing what they love and what they truly feel a calling for.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.morozin.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morozin.art/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/89759784/admin/feed/posts/