Hello, everyone, it has been a busy few weeks but I made it through my first art show! I attended the 10th annual Funky Finds Spring Fling this past weekend in Ft. Worth, TX. I meet a lot of kind faces and took a step closer to my goal. Thank you to everyone who came out and supported me and a big thanks to my ma and pa for helping me along the way! This has been a long dream come true and I’m looking ever forward.

Four months ago after completing a video series, researching, and learning how to take your first steps in becoming a working artist I set myself a goal to participate in an art show. From there I set myself other goals and tasks to make it a reality. I built up a collection of work to sell, opened my online shop, found and applied to art shows, designed and built my booth space, made frames, and countless little things all leading me to last weekend.

“To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the only essential thing’’ - Mark Twain

The night before I was going to sleep. I was trying to empty my mind from all thoughts, but my thoughts started swarming. My fears and doubts about the show, the void of all the unknowns, my lack of experience in shows, working, about success, and failing. All it was running through my head. I’m sure most of us have felt this way about something many times throughout our lives. Maybe it was one of your dreams or a big job interview or waiting on an acceptance letter for that school. We all have fears and doubts in our lives, but its how we handle and deal with those fears and changing our outlook on failing that matters. When all those thoughts came rushing through my mind I stopped and told myself whatever happened with the show I would be proud of myself. I am proud of the artwork I produced. I followed my dream of being an artist and I would take the experiences I learned and continue on to my next show. For me, failure is not doing badly at an art show or not selling any art. For me failing is giving up on being an artist or being too afraid of the “what if’s” and not trying. Whatever profits I gained or lost following my dream is all a success because I was brave enough to pursue it. I feel that we as a society have the wrong idea of failure. We tie so much on material things. You are only successful if you make a lot of money. Or if you have a million Instagram followers. You are a failure because your business idea didn’t work, or you didn’t become a famous singer. There is so much more to this life than riches and fame. All of us has successes in our lives, it is not one thing. Maybe your success is training and running that 5k in your neighborhood, your warm family to come to each night, or maybe you stuck to your new diet for a month. Failing to me is being too afraid to try and once you believe in yourself and try, you have already won!

So do you have a dream or goal? I encourage you to pursue it! Be brave believe in yourself and take that first step and remember whatever the outcome is you can look back and say “I tried” and isn’t that worth celebrating? It is for me.

Funky Finds was a success through and through I had a wonderful time and I’m looking forward to my next show. I’m also looking to keep expanding and finding more shows outside Texas for the summer. I’m hoping to get to go back to Colorado soon and I’ve been wanting to go Eastbound for several years now.

I have added some more prints to the shop you can check out and I am also excited to be working on my next blog post about Ansel Adams and my photography!

As always thank you all for reading! You can sign up for emails and follow me on Instagram below.

Bryan.