Maybe some of you know of Dave Bull: the Caucasian Canadian that took a shine to Japanese woodblock carving (Ukiyo-e printmaking). I have pondered his "business model".
Apparently the master Japanese carvers were loathe to take this gangly gaijin seriously when he began his obsession decades ago.
And yet, Dave set for himself some insane goal of carving 100 wood blocks for prints over the space of a decade.
Now as a dabbling artist myself, I simply can't imagine laying out my artistic landscape for the next couple of years, let alone the next decade. That shows a serious dedication and vision. And so he proceeded.
Well, after the first year and 10 prints or so, he got a handful of customers that began to buy up his prints. And to be sure, by replicating some of the designs of the great masters of history, he was learning a lot about Japanese woodblock carving.
I don't recall if he said how much he money he made the first year, but I believe calling him a starving artist would not have been a stretch. But nonetheless he continued.
The second year and another 10 prints and more patrons. It turns out that people that buy these sort of things, fine art prints, often collect them and will become repeat customers. No doubt there comes to be a stable of customers that are effectively subscribers and will henceforth buy everything he creates.
Going into the third and fourth years he can start to predict a lower threshold for what he will make as an artist in the coming years since he can more or less assume his regular customers will buy everything he prints in those years (and his work is no doubt getting better with each block he carves and learns from).
And of course the collector-type customers keep arriving as he and his work become better known — and so his business snowballs with more subscribers.
By the time Dave finished his decade-long goal he could comfortably call himself a professional wood block carver, no longer a novice but had now taken the vows so to speak.
Dave seems to have figured out the way to make a career out of art. I applaud him for that — brilliant. 10 fans became 100 became 1000 and then more.
Dave Bull says that, begrudgingly perhaps, some of the Japanese carvers began to at least then acknowledge him after his ten year carving odyssey.
He started a YouTube channel since then and it has really caught on — perhaps surprisingly as the field of artisans practicing traditional Japanese wood block carving has apparently been in decline. Dave has said that privately a few carvers have reached out to him to tell him that Dave is doing what they should have been doing all along.