Being an artist, painter, author, sculptor, or composer brings with it the difficulty of sustaining your life, while you produce your art. The patronage system, which fueled some of the greatest cultural developments for mankind, was a model where those who benefited from the production of the art sewed into the life needs support of the artists.

Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and even folks in later times like Mozart and Beethoven benefited from this particular model. For the past hundred years though, things have turned to a more commercial model, for better or worse. People generally just sell stuff. But it remains, that the difficulty for us who work on larger scale projects, is how to survive the long periods between release.

There have been several models, in recent years, which have changed the game for entrepreneurs and inventors. Kickstarter, GoFundMe, financial peer-to-peer lending services, and other crowdfunding models are paving the way back towards older ways, where the ‘investor’ so to speak, is more directly involved in the actual creation process and life of the artist. Not only that, but the patron is rewarded with specialized things not available to the general public.

These are basically peer-to-peer relational models, which are a far cry from the past scenario of, ‘Put your product in a store, set your price. Then the customer, unseen to the creator, agrees and pays the set price to purchase, and gets to take home the product.’

I am grateful that there is a place like Patreon, where not only can my story be told, but I can ‘reward’ those who participate with me, with some quite incredible things, that are totally impossible for me to give on a product-by-product basis. And those who know me, know I love relational stuff. So hop on over to my Patreon page and see how we might develop our relationship and produce great work.

~david