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

Sharyn, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I was raised in a family that valued art including two who made a livelihood creating it. I learned to think in images and, even in early childhood, remember trying to turn those thoughts into something beautiful. I simply assumed I could draw or paint, unlike the experience of so many others. In high school a dynamic art teacher asked me to help clean the studio and began mentoring me. By the time I was ready for college, the plan was to make a life as an artist. But life had surprises in store beginning with having to work fulltime to support myself and my education. Eventually a young, inexperienced instructor said that few of us would ever be good enough to make a living in art. This hit where I was most vulnerable and undermined my long-held confidence. But because I was a very good student, I had other options.

So I took the path of security through three graduate degrees and a thirty year career as professor and faculty dean in a university that valued excellent teaching. Most relevant to my return to art is one precious gift of university life, that faculty are encouraged to keep learning in any course that has space. So the detour gifted me with a fine art education through the backdoor of the faculty grant system. In addition to drawing, I practiced metalsmithing, hand-built ceramics, oil painting, and more. In all the years that passed, I never stopped making art and grew in my aesthetic tastes while developing the skills to become a happily productive, capable artist.

Sharyn, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m an early adopter of good ideas and technical skills. There’s never been a subject that didn’t interest me at some level and I know how to learn, Imagination should be my middle name. By the time my husband and I moved from Miami back to our family roots in the north, there was a large portfolio of art and a skill set that included significant digital abilities in several areas including photography. Then I began the long journey of learning to combine the digital with pastels, paint, ink and more into the multi-media work I do now. In the late 1990s I painted a grieving friend’s dog and the framer inquired who was the artist. That led to a long association with a gallery that showed my pet portraits and advertised the commission side of my work. Now I was painting not just pets and their owners, but children, family homes, exotic animals, landscapes including the Driftless region in southwestern Wisconsin and the vast landscapes of the American West,

I’m a licensed, instrument rated pilot with over a thousand hours of pilot in command time, so the beauty of planet patterns, seasonal color, and amazing textures filtered into my art. It also expanded my repertoire to paint particular airplanes with their owners in flight over places of significance to them. Occasionally, the gallery had an unusual image request and I was asked to combine my digital, painting and technical skills for photo restoration and repair. It was during this period that my art business expanded far beyond the gallery, so that I formally established Light Pixie Studio. LLC. Now more than twenty years later, I continue to find delightful image challenges and return customers.

I’ve always kept a garden of beautiful flowers. A bit of each morning is spent seeing what new things have blossomed, deadheading what’s spent, making plans to move or divide, and browsing the catalogues for what else might be grown. I am in love with flowers, paint them with a passionate heart, and enhance some of them with real gold. Flor Amore (for the Love of Flowers) is now the main gallery at my online store, filled with paintings of flowers and their pollinators. Each of them represents the joyous side of my art for the pleasure it gives me in creating them and for those who, like me, have fallen in love with the magic of flowers.

My originals may be found in galleries in Los Angeles and, nearer to home, in a gallery of regional artists two blocks from the Mississippi River in the historical district of LaCrosse. I’m proud of my perseverance and determination. Sometimes I wonder where I might be today if I hadn’t allowed insecurity and lack of confidence in my art abilities to distract from earliest goals. In the end I know that each of us is an experiment of one and that we choose what seems right at the time. I’ve had a very interesting life and appreciate all the twists and turns of experience to make it richer. So many people sought my skills in art and then remained as friends. Everyday I recommit to my art-filled vision and have the pleasure of being a working artist.

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

I was already established in art when I was given Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Recognizing that our own self-judgments can be the most destructive was liberating. I cannot change others, but I can change myself. I know that my college instructor had it wrong. We choose our path and how we’ll follow it. Success and happiness are more than a financial bottom line. Moreover, the book confirmed my suspicion that insecurity and lack of self-esteem are common in all professions and they’re a terribly unattractive pair of qualities because together they can breed miserly attitudes and jealous competition. The art community in general is warmly supportive. We share ideas, strategies, techniques because we know how hard it is to be an artist; we have more in common than not. There’s an audience of admirers for each of us and our differing artistic styles.

A while ago I joined an art marketing team to learn how to identify my audience and how to target them more accurately. Two years later, I see clearly just how much I didn’t know about the business side of art, things that were never mentioned in school and that artists don’t necessarily figure out from experience. No wonder so many artists can’t find a niche or an audience. Too many of us give up the thing we love most and that sustains us. If you will be a successful artist, you have to think of what you do as a business. If not, then you’re leaving your art to luck and potentially having to give it up in order to eat. That’s not a choice an artist should have to make, but you must do that work too alongside of the art you create.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

This is what’s worked for me to build an audience. Be authentic, whatever that means to you, because that’s more attractive than trying to figure out what’s popular. That changes all the time anyway and can appear phony. Your true audience will find you if you seem like a real person, so don’t be afraid to show yourself in the act of making a mistake. Learn how to use all the features of the site. I’m most active on Instagram, and it’s feature rich! Know what the algorithms do and work those angles. For instance, Reels are big at the moment. They’re fun to make, so imagine yourself making a short you’d want to see. Also learn to use a good video editor for your phone: I like InShot, CapCut, and Canva. Use room mockups to showcase your art on the wall: Canvy is my favorite app for this task.

Don’t use the same hashtags every time; vary them to see what works to attract followers. Post as often as you can, tell the story behind the art, use music and it’s good if you can match the music or lyrics in some way to the visual. Be present in your Feed; in other words, show your art but also speak to your audience directly when you have something to say, show yourself with your art, demonstrate process.

This is important . . . it takes time to build an audience, so be realistic in your expectations. Start by following those accounts you enjoy, imitate freely what seems to work, respond to all those who leave comments, reciprocate to others as you can. Don’t fall for those who claim to get you followers. It’s hard work but satisfying, and the followers you earn by your authentic presence are far more likely to continue following you to become fans and eventually collectors.

From a business perspective, the most important thing to remember is that social media is an entertainment resource first. To build an art business you have to sell art. Social media is a way to have your art be seen and valued, but you do not own your followers and you cannot easily recover them if your account is disabled. That can happen and you may not get it back, this I know from hard experience. So consider some of the ways you can move some of those followers to something you do control like an Instagram store, your website, or a newsletter. Good luck and have fun!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.LightPixieStudio.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sharyn.richardson_lightpixie/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightPixieStudio
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharynrichardson/
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/LightPixie