Selling Paintings

So this week I've been unloading a ton of my stuff prepping for a move (Europe?). Furniture, clothes, DVDs I haven't moved since 2014, and all of my paintings that have been in the attic of my garage for 3 years. I've sold a lot of my paintings on Etsy in the past but recently they just haven't been selling so I moved them to my own website. I haven't sold a single one online since probably March 2023 so I figured it was time to toss them in the bin. Went and posted on Instagram "hey I'm going to toss these paintings if you want some let me know" and the result was dozens of people not only asking for the paintings but also offering to pay for them.

What did I learn from this? Well, you see before this I literally never advertised that I sold my paintings. I put them up on facebook/instagram and that was it. I never posted on my website, never ran ads, never did anything. I just assumed people would find them and buy them. I was wrong. I was very wrong. I learned that if you want to sell something you have to actually tell people you're selling it. I know, it's a crazy concept. I'm not sure why I never did it before but it really makes sense in hindsight. I guess maybe I didn't want the selling of my paintings to be the focus, it was more about the learning and the process of painting. But really if I want my goal to be painting full time part of that will invole selling them.

I'm still tossing most of my paintings but it was nice that out of the 600+ that were in my garage to go to the dump, maybe 200 of them will go to folks' homes instead.