Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This week’s topics:
Extending My Lease with Art Storefronts
After a Week Off at DISCO
FX at Pond5
I Like Going to the Grocery Store
All Comes Down to This
Extending My Lease with Art Storefronts
This past week I’ve been on “staycation” from the day job, and spent most of my time working on my music and sound catalog. However, I have some late-breaking news from the visual art side:
I thought the Mark Rushton Gallery was ending it’s lease at Art Storefronts, but this week they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. My gallery has been renewed with them until at least late 2026, although I have an option to keep it going way into the future.
I’ve been with “ASF” for almost three years and have been offering prints of my artwork on metal, t-shirts, magnet art, and tote bags through their partners - as well paper originals and book paintings fulfilled by me. I’ve been very happy with ASF’s product partner quality and customer service. All the metal prints, magnet art, and tote bags I’ve bought have been excellent. I’ve even bought t-shirts through other ASF artists and they look great.
Visual art is a difficult product to market when it’s not shown in-person. I don’t have a physical storefront. I’ll never do the tent circuit. And I’m not willing to play the social media game anymore, or waste everything on online advertising.
It helps that I have uses for the art, such as album and single covers for my music. I have also done background images for book covers for clients who are writers. I’m also branching off into licensing, which I’ll talk about in a little bit.
I’m always going to “make stuff”, but the visual art will never be “full throttle” like I thought it once was going to be. And that’s OK.
I did create an eBay Store this week (the $4.95 a month one) - and I plan to put more of my original artworks out there.
Before ASF, I used eBay for marketing my original artworks. If you employ eBay’s “Promotional Ad” option, it does get your items seen by a wider audience, and with no expense unless somebody buys because they saw the ad. I think that’s a clever, non-exploiting method of “advertising” for artists.
By the way, here’s a link to the above 48” x 60” metal print. Can you imagine walking into a conference room and seeing that on the wall? I think that looks great.
After a Week Off at DISCO
Here’s a link to my ambient track “After a Week Off”, which can be freely streamed on my DISCO site.
Wear good headphones. I like Grado headphones.
From there, you can take a deep dive into my catalog - which is fast approaching 250 tracks. I’d like to get it over 500 in the next year. Maybe even 1000. We’ll see.
The point of the DISCO site is to interest my music for licensing purposes. I already have some music in libraries and I’d like to continue in that direction. I think my music is more fitting for use in creative things like film and TV rather than playing the streaming service game.
But I also want to keep the DISCO site open to all of you who read this weekly post and want to have a listen.
FX at Pond5
This week, I had to spend a lot of time dealing with my “non-musical works”, also known as Sound FX. My main location for offering FX is Pond5.
At Pond5, I have a lot of recordings of rain and thunder, beeping elevators, trains, birds, and totally annoying mufflers. They’re for visual creatives to use in projects. I’m also working on getting sounds into other libraries besides Pond5. When I’m not working on music, I’m editing and remastering all the weird sounds I’ve recorded over the years. I have thousands to get out there.
Another thing Pond5 does is offer “illustrations” for licensing. So I’ve submitted artworks like the above (“Fifth Floor”) for consideration. We’ll see if Pond5 or other licensing libraries want to offer such things. Maybe there are better uses of this kind of imagery than as $1300 metal prints.
I Like Going to the Grocery Store
I’m not much of a traveler. I haven’t been in a big ol’ jet airliner in a long time. I kinda like to stay home, or go for drives. My thing is going to different grocery stores, or exploring the local unknown.
I certainly hope you all don't think this motorcycle is mine. Heh heh... It was in the parking lot of a local grocery store. I rarely see anything this original-looking with two wheels today, but it was refreshing to see. Maybe I need to get out more.
Could I handle having a motorcycle? I thought about it. But I think I’m too old. This looks like a “bruisin’, shattering ride”, as Julian Cope put it in his song East Easy Rider.
I prefer cars. I can lock all my doors. It’s the only way to live.
Back to the day job on Monday. I’m looking forward to it.
I got a lot done this past week with my music and sound catalog. There’s a lot of boring work I had to do. Database stuff. Excel crap. Editing files. Process things. They’re important.
I do feel like I’ve turned my creative ship in a new direction. It’s been a good 6 months of planning and getting it done.
I think I’m finally arriving at a place where I can focus more on the “creative” and less on the “promotion”.
Both are important, but I kinda favor the “creative” over the “promotion”.
All Comes Down to This
I should probably offer a music recommendation in each post from now on, so here is this week’s:
The early 80s UK band A Certain Ratio keeps re-entering my orbit, and I’m kinda digging their 2024 track “All Comes Down to This”. You might, too.
I use the streaming service Qobuz now. That’s where the link goes. High quality stuff. Better-sounding than Botify and the others.