Squamish: Be a ‘starving artist’ no more, Best-selling author Chris Tyrell speaks at Quest

Artists: great at cre­at­ing, lousy at sell­ing. They often know very lit­tle about how to make aliv­ing off their work, espe­cially in Canada where the mar­ket for orig­i­nal art­work is small and often regional.

This is the mes­sage retired painter, lec­turer and author Chris Tyrell brought to 55 Sea to Sky artists at a talk at Quest Uni­ver­sity in Squamish on Sat­ur­day, March 3.

“The big prob­lem is that cre­ative careers are solip­sis­tic, they’re an exten­sion of the ego of an artist,” he told the audience.

“You have to learn about the cus­tomers and stop think­ing about yourself.”

Tyrell, a pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment instruc­tor at Emily Carr Uni­ver­sity in Van­cou­ver, was spon­sored by VISUALS, the Squamish Val­ley artists’ group, with a grant from the Squamish Arts Council.