Brands have known this since the 70s, governments since, well, more or less forever. You don’t get your message across by stating facts, but by evoking emotions. And the best way to do so is by telling stories that captivate the audience. But why do we tend to forget this when talking to collectors about our art?

An interesting example is an experiment I conducted with a friend of mine who had some issues with selling his work directly to interested collectors. He never knew what to say, so he would usually go on about how the painting techniques he used were extremely hard to master, how all the colours were mixed by hand from only the best pigments, but he never really had any luck with his presentations.

Why? Because pigments and brushstrokes, like horsepower, megapixels and teraflops, aren’t for everyone. While I do like my car, my camera and my computer, I wouldn’t use any of these technical terms to describe my relation to my belongings.

And while there are many who do, they usually aren’t the casual consumers and my friend was selling his work to a lot of casual art lovers, not rigorous art critics, so his words and the emotions they were aiming to evoke were completely off.

I told him to stop talking about how he did his work and to focus completely on why. So instead of talking about materials he told them what made him create his art in the first place, what he felt towards his work and by doing so, opened his pieces up to his public to be understood as the beautiful and sincere paintings that they were.

Of course this isn’t a one-fits-all scenario that anyone can just replicate and expect the same results. My intentions are to show the importance of using the right means of communication, so the next time you find yourself confronted by anyone interested in your art, you don’t try to give them a list of dry information, but rather a key to access the depths of how your work makes them feel.