Earlier this summer, I was invited to speak to members of the Crafts Association of British Columbia about marketing artwork online. At this gathering of artists from the Vancouver area, I was reminded, once again, that artists must be multi-faceted business owners in today’s world. The Internet offers great opportunities to present one’s work to a larger audience, but also the challenge of yet another marketing channel that the individual artist must learn about.

The best artists I know approach their businesses with the same creativity that they do their art. In Vancouver, I was excited to enter into an exchange with a number of forward-thinking artists about this great adventure called the Internet. I am certain that the art world will make its mark on this medium, much as it has done on every other aspect of our daily lives.

Last month in our online newsletter, The Artful Home^®, I wrote about the power and pull of handmade furniture. Bonnie Brave, a reader from O’Fallon, IL, responded with some inspirational words of her own. With her permission, I’m reprinting them here for you to enjoy:

“I wholeheartedly agree about furniture being like poetry–the feel of the wood, the look of the grain, even the smell of a piece evokes a memory.

“I have inherited a piece of furniture from my grandparents that I truly cherish. It is approximately 175 years old and has remarkably withstood the test of time. It is a beautiful armoire that has been passed down in my family and that I painstakingly took two full days to refinish to reveal its natural original beauty.

“Every time I walk by this piece it speaks to me of childhood memories of all of the treasures that it once held as it sat upstairs in my grandparents’ home…All I have to do is open a drawer and I am taken back to their home by the scent that triggers my brain to remember those days. It is truly a quality piece of artfully carved furniture that I am proud to own and use each day.”

My parents loved to dance, and so I grew up in a home filled with the music of Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman. In high school, my interest in jazz moved from swing to the great musicians who were changing the music world at the time – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk. I was an impressionable teenager, and their music entered my heart and settled in my bones.

My love of, and interest in, jazz has only grown over time. For the past 20 years, I’ve had the good fortune to count as a friend the noted jazz pianist Ben Sidran. Ben is perhaps best known for the jazz series he created, Sidran on Record, for National Public Radio. This series, which featured interviews with the jazz masters of our time, ran on NPR from 1984 to 1990.

Those thoughtful interviews have been collected into a CD set titled, Talking Jazz: an Oral History. More than 40 conversations provide insight into life philosophies, influences, and playing styles. It is amazing and wonderful to hear the actual voices of the musicians I have worshipped from afar for so many years.

The conversations in Talking Jazz reveal that musicians, like their counterparts in the world of visual art, often use their chosen instruments to explore a set of experiences or focus on a particular attitude. Truly talented artists of any kind succeed in drawing others into their thinking and awakening a range of powerful ideas.