Self Promotion, Do's and Don'ts!
By: Rossana Villaflor
Issue date: 2/22/07 Section: Art
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by Mrs. Ella Rue-Eyet of the Publications
and Special Projects Department, spoke to NJCU art students on Self-promotion, last month at the Visual Arts Gallery.
We all face the pressures, in every field of art, of earning a living in a competitive and progressive business world.
Mr.Walsh, also a world renowned graphic designer, shared with students some insights and methods on pursuing one's professional artistic goals by using the proper methods of self promotion.
Mr. Walsh initiated his lecture with a slideshow of various faces of random people, whom he later revealed were results of a search he conducted of his name on the Google. His point? It goes to show that there can be more than one of you (name-wise) out there in the world, how
do you separate yourself as an individual.
Staring as a Fine Arts major, Mr. Walsh
paid his way through school and then decided to become a graphic designer. Succinctly sharing with us some of his random and most memorable encounters,
Mr. Walsh revealed: he took a business summer program at Harvard to please his father, traveled Europe when he was in art school to learn from art masters, studied with the late African American Artist Romare Bearden, drank ten shots of tequila with an astronaut, painted a portrait of English painter David Hockney which he afterwards gave to him as gift, worked as a design director at the Washington Post, did freelance photographs and graphic design for various magazines like National Geographic, … and now currently serves as Art Director at the School of Visual Arts. "My hope is to have a speaker come at least once a year specifically for the NJCU art community," said Ms. Rue-Eyet.
Confessing that he has never been a very
good self-promoter, Mr. Walsh stated that
the opportunities he encountered were a
result of his hard work and the people he
came to know.
Therefore, rule #1: Work
very hard; rule #2: Network with people
of similar interests.
With his gregarious and charismatic personality, Mr. Walsh entertained and immersed his listeners into a didactic and
motivating discourse: Why do we promote?
How do we see ourselves as artists? What are our strengths? Where do we want to go? What do we want to be? Who would we want to work for? And how do we go about getting there?
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