Selling at Art Fairs as a New Artist – Is It Worth It?
Shifting from “art maker” to “art seller” can be a hand-wringing experience. Many new artists feel uncertain about where to start, or whether it’s even worth the anxiety and insecurity that poor sales might provoke. But even if you’re not looking to make serious money from your paintings, there are good reasons to participate in art fairs that can genuinely help you develop and refine your work. Feedback from friends and fellow artists is helpful, but there’s something different about the viscerally honest response that comes from a public assessing your work with their wallet. The trick is knowing what to pay attention to and how to interpret what you observe.
The Art Fair as Experiment
As a scientist I often work on tree-feeding insects, and one of the questions we regularly ask is “what is this insect’s preference among different tree species?”. To answer this experimentally, I might create an arena with various food types intermixed, drop the insect in, and observe what it chooses. This sets up the next step, which is to figure out why. Many group exhibits and art fairs (including the Capital Art Sale) function much the same way—artists’ paintings are intermixed throughout the venue and the public comes through over a handful of days, choosing what they like best. This makes these sales a perfect opportunity to put on your ‘scientist’ lab coat, identify what art people are choosing, and try to figure out why (or why not).
Stage One: Self-Assessment on Opening Night
Opening night of an Art Fair is an important window when everything is on the wall and traffic is generally at its highest. Start with a self-assessment of the overall collection. Clear your mind and look around with fresh eyes as if you were simply an observer. What captures your attention? What do you like about those pieces—is it the composition, the finishing, the framing? As you encounter your own paintings, compare them to those surrounding them. What do the neighbouring paintings have that you’d like to see in your own work? What are their price points relative to yours?
Take notes. Find the artists whose work you admire and ask them about their process—there’s nothing artists like better than talking about their work. The point isn’t to emulate others but to find and refine your own artistic voice, which is often reflected in how you respond to work you admire.
What you learn: A clinical view of where your work currently stands relative to others at a similar price point and style, and specific areas for improvement.
Stage Two: Observing the Public
As opening night progresses, wander and observe what people are responding to—what they’re carrying, what they’re admiring, where they linger. What sizes, styles, and mediums are being bought? Note whether people spend time with your paintings, and remember that admiring a piece and being able to afford it are different things. You’ll inevitably see people buying things that surprise you, things that hold no interest for you personally. That’s worth noting too—it’s a reminder that regardless of how refined your work becomes, it won’t be for everyone, and that’s fine.
What you learn: A clearer picture of how your work lands with a general audience, which subjects and styles generate interest, and a more realistic sense of the market you’re operating in.
Stage Three: Reading the Numbers
After the sale, two datapoints are particularly useful: how many paintings you sold on opening night versus how many sold over the remaining days (assuming it’s a multi-day sale). From talking with artists over the years, there’s a surprising variety of sales patterns. Some are “fast burn” with most sales on opening night, and almost nothing after (this is my pattern). Others have lacklustre opening nights but a late bloom toward the end. Some are steady throughout. And some, including me in my early sales, sell very little.
Each pattern tells you something different. Fast burn suggests your strongest pieces are competitive but your weaker ones aren’t carrying their weight. In this case, consider raising your standards for what you submit or assessing what in those unsold pieces appears to be missing or weak. A late bloom often indicates your work requires closer attention, but may not be grabbing people on first pass—a finishing or presentation issue worth considering. Poor sales overall is the clearest signal of all: something fundamental needs attention, whether that’s pricing, quality, or finish. In all cases, the explanation for your pattern is likely evident in your self-assessment in Stage One. And of course, in the event that you completely sell out – well, take a bow and keep doing what you’re doing!
What you learn: Not just whether your work sells, but which pieces sell and when—information that points directly toward what to prioritize in your studio before the next sale.
The Emotional Reframe
This experimental mindset is highly effective for making steady, iterative improvements in your art practice and hopefully improving your sales at future events as a result. It’s something you simply can’t do if you only ever observe your paintings in the isolation of your own studio. Just as importantly, it also gives you somewhere productive to direct the disappointment. Instead of the self-admonishment “my work isn’t good enough,” you shift to “these ten paintings weren’t strong enough yet.” This is a puzzle you can work on. Rather than “I’m not a real artist,” you shift to “I need to work on my finishing,” which is just homework and perhaps some extra care during preparation.
We artists are sensitive folk, and so it’s important to find more gentle ways of framing and leveraging our experiences rather than indulging in self-recrimination when we fall short of our expectations. With a more clinical mindset, there is much to be learned from art fairs, and the intermixed format of group exhibits or sales makes them particularly well-suited to this kind of observation.
Next post: Finish Matters—the craft details that affect sales more than most artists expect.
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