"Paint to express, not to impress." -Flora Bowley

This simple quote contains so much wisdom.

When I started making my art again in 2012, I was focused almost entirely on impressing. I wanted to impress myself by making "good" paintings and I wanted to impress others. I loved it when my friends and family commented positively on my work. It gave me reassurance that I was on the right track and made me feel there might be some future in this art thing.

But the reassurance didn't last long. Soon I started to become dissatisfied with the representational work I was making. I knew I was hovering on the surface rather than going deeper. I wanted to make the kind of art I admired - expressive, personal, and powerful - and that just wasn't happening.

What I didn't know then - but have since learned - is that my desire for praise was holding me back. When I first started to dig deeper into my own artistic voice, the work became more abstract. And instantly, all that praise and reassurance fell away.

"Why are you putting drips in the sky?" my mum asked. "The sky doesn't drip."

"Which way up is it supposed to go," asked a friend.

And my very favourite quote of all time from my neighbour's little boy who was then eight years old:

"How come..." he asked, head tipped on one side "how come the more you paint, the worser you get?"

This reaction would have stopped me in my tracks had it not been for my online community. I had joined a group of fellow artists who were also pursuing their own artistic journeys and we kept each other afloat. Now there are thousands of such groups online but, back then, there were very few.

How lucky I was to find mine! Because those artists supported me and helped me and taught me that my local community wasn't the only audience for my work. They helped me to see that it might be possible to sell paintings in other parts of the country or even internationally. And they helped me to understand that with billions of people in the world, there would be at least a few who connected with my work.

And as I kept painting and kept journaling and kept digging into my own authentic voice, I came to see that the surest way to make art that others want to buy, is to make it from your heart and soul. When you do that, it becomes unique - and when something is unique it attracts attention. Not all at once, but slowly and gently over time you attract 'your' people. These are the people who resonate with your work as soon as they see it. And because they are drawn to you and your unique personal expression, they tend to stick with you as your work evolves and changes.

And so it turns out that the best way to build an art business is exactly what Flora says - it is to paint to express, not to impress.

For some people, this sounds impossible - they really want to connect with other people and they ask "but how can I forget about impressing - surely we all want to impress?"

And my answer is always the same:

The ONLY way to truly impress others with your work is to stop thinking about it. You simply can't make the kind of authentic and powerful art that connects with an audience without:

1) realising that most people still won't get it and thats OK. There are billions of people in the world and you can't make many paintings in a year, so you only need a handful of them to connect with you

2) forgetting all about impressing that handful of people and instead working from your heart and soul. Truthful art that comes from deep within will always connect with other people but - if you are like me - they won't be the people who surround you in daily life.

It's fabulously freeing to realise that all we ever have to do is to be ourselves. And that if we do that, the rest will take care of itself.