Surviving in a rural area as an artist

As an artist I find it hard to survive in a rural area where I live now. When I lived in Omaha I had shows just about every month. Now that I live in the small town of Hugo, Oklahoma I find it very difficult to get shows. When I am able to get shows, they are far away and are very few & far inbetween. I now find my best outlet to be the internet. It is not as much fun as it does not get me the reviews like when an artist deals straight with the public. I have also noticed that my art is not selling as good on the net as it had in person. In fact I find most of my sales are going thru EBay & the art is not bringing as much as it had from shows.
As far as getting gallery representation when you live in a rural area as I do now it is next to impossible. Most galleries only want you if you are close to them. When I was in Omaha I had 2 galleries represent me. But when I moved away from Omaha, they no longer wanted to represent me because I was going to be to faraway. Most galleries that claim to be looking for new artists usually wont take artists that are not in their area. But if you talk to their employees you will find they always claim that, but in reality they have not taken any new artist in several years. Why they do this is beyond me! I have found when checking out a new gallery they are friendly until they find out you are an artist out of their area, then they seem to put on another face.

It seems it is harder for artist to sell their art, get gallery representation, or even get articles written about them nowadays than in the past. In the past art was something that was considered newsworthy and most newspapers were glad to print the articles and give reviews about shows. These days that is not so, it is very hard to get local newspapers to print much about art or artists. They claim that there is not a public interest no matter how good the story may be. National newspapers and newspapers from New York, Chicago, Atlanta and big cities as such usually still give reviews of art and artists.

To put it mildly, as an artist living in rural areas, promoting your art is difficult. It takes innovation and intestinal fortitude in order to be able to get recognition as an artist and to sell and promote it. But with the high cost of fuel and the high cost of shipping art it may now be that the only way to survive as an artist is the use of the internet with all its many connections and downfalls

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