Learn How to Make Money From Your Vulnerability with Art

Lately, the term vulnerability has been coming up everywhere for me. For the last week, almost all of my motivational emails from fellow bloggers were on the topic, almost to the point where I felt as though a higher being was trying to get my attention and talk to me directly. The term vulnerable is one that if we were here in this same place a year or two ago, I would never even engage in the subject at all. Back in the day, during my younger years, being vulnerable was a fear for me. I never wanted anyone to feel as though I was ‘crazy’ or ‘wild’ for making myself transparent for others to see and grow from. Along with that, I also feared everyone else being in my business not realizing a closed mouth never gets fed, basically being very prideful. I was having problems after problems simply from not opening up and giving others an insight into my life. This one fear led me to being more transparent and open with readers when it came to how I am as a person, which soon led me a bigger art market as well.

A wise young man once told me, “Ke, paint and design what you feel”.

That quote and words of advice still stick with me to this day, three years later. I believe that using art, whether painting or designing, to display and show what you feel is the ultimate method of being vulnerable with your audience behind writing about what you feel. Since then, all of my artwork have began to take a turn and become very personal. Painting became a go to for me when things in life were not going right for me, or when I was dealing with pain from failed relationships whether it be romantic or just simple friendships that ended, lose of jobs, insecurities within myself, basically everything I would feel turned into a new painting. One prime example of this would be my article on our fellow blogger, Life In A Pile, website where I spoke on How My Failed Relationship Made Me A Better Artist.

Click below to read How My Failed Relationship Made Me a Better Artist with Life In A Pile

I’m not going to go into great detail about what was spoken in the article for a second time around this year, as you can click the link above to read everything, but I do want to speak on the good things that came after this article was written and the goodness that has come for me since then. By channeling that particular negative in my life into new paintings, I was able to begin a new art series of paintings called, Bag Lady. For this series, I focused on healing myself by myself. During that bad moment in my life I became insecure about myself and a lot of other things dealing with myself, so this new series allowed me to open my eyes to those negative things and begin to replace them with something good. That particular series of three paintings were finished by March of this year. Another painting titled, Secure, was created later on that month towards the beginning of April. This is the painting below that shows were I began to heal from that heartache and get back to the things that truly always mattered to me.

Now, how these paintings tie in with vulnerable is simple: all of them tell my story. Putting my story into these paintings are how I began to become extremely vulnerable with myself for others who were either fans of my work or readers on my blog site. They shown a part of me that no one knew about. This ultimately led me to more money opportunities as an artist. Insecure is still at The SAND Gallery in Baltimore, MD apart of their Grand Opening Exhibition Collection. Secure was featured during A.Bevy’s Impress Yourself Scholarship Mixer Exhibition Show in Columbia, SC earlier this summer, and is due for another show out of state at the end of this year.

Art Challenge
Create a new art piece about a bad time during your life. It could range from a tragedy, to the lose of property, etc. Whatever it is that makes you uncomfortable when you speak about it openly with others, re-create it through art. Show us your creations on how you channel that negative energy into a new painting, drawing, or design by following @deluxds on Instagram and tagging us in a post featuring your art creation from this art challenge, along with adding our hashtag #DE in the caption!